![]() ![]() But if your goal is to be the sand in a small business’ gears, you probably don’t want to have a dialogue about the news-your goal is to to carpet-bomb a page with one-star reviews, make it harder for that business to get new customers, and in cases like Memories Pizza, shut it down altogether. On that support page, Yelp tries to encourage people to use the Yelp Talk forums for Discourse instead of the businesses’ own pages. Our user support team ultimately removes reviews that violate these guidelines.” According to a support page specifically for news-related reviews, removals kick in “over the course of the week after the issue is brought to our attention.” “Yelp reviews are required to describe a firsthand consumer experience, not what someone read in the news. “Media-fueled reviews typically violate our Content Guidelines, one of which deals with relevance,” a Yelp spokesperson told me in an email. I asked Yelp how it responds when angry mobs descend on businesses like the Red Hen. ![]() Since its launch in 2004, people have written 155 million reviews-many of which are not interested in sharing a good faith review as much as they are in settling a personal score. The platform has 30 million average monthly users on mobile alone. Read more: Yelp Reviews Are Like Psychological Selfiesīut even without a media-blitz egging reviewers on, Yelp’s rating system stopped being useful long ago. Masterpiece Cakeshop’s page also displays a review-in-progress notice from Yelp. Masterpiece Cakeshop, a Colorado bake shop that said it wouldn’t cater to gay weddings, was slammed with negative reviews after its owner won a Supreme Court case defending its First Amendment right to refuse service for religious reasons. In 2015, Memories Pizza in Indiana closed down after Yelpers descended on the restaurant’s page following the owner’s refusal to serve gay people. Obama critics flooded the page with negative reviews. One of the first notable instances Yelpers used the platform for protest en masse was in September 2012, after the owner of Big Apple Pizza bearhugged Obama in the restaurant. Vindictive Yelping is not new, and neither is the review-as-protest. It’s exactly the kind of thing people use Yelp for now, anyway: Firing off baseless reviews out of their asses. A statement attacking a small business is gross and absurd when it’s coming from the virtual maw of the president of the United States, but on Yelp, it would fit in just fine.
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