Yelp.com Review

http://www.yelp.com

Overall 3.08 of 5 view all 12 reviews

SFfoodie
Berkeley, CA

Fake Reviews, Fake People

a believer in truth

Cons

Fake People, Fake Reviews

MAR

2009

Yelp started as an interesting concept, but was executed so poorly that it has become one of the internet's worst disasters. Yelp relies on small business owners for advertising revenue, but instead decided to focus solely on its community of reviewers (free food, free booze, all donated by the same small businesses yelp so desperately needs to survive). Yelp intentionally prevents small business owners or other reviewers from commenting on any review, and will only allow you to vote on them as funny, useful or cool. The master plan here is to take a mass of amateur reviewers and use their comments, no matter how inaccurate or malicous they may be, and force small business owners to pay for the ability to defend the business they worked so hard to build. Despite all the negative press surrounding Yelp and the accusations of extortion, many Yelpers have rallied around Yelp and are quick to dismiss the large volume of small business owners who report the same problems with Yelp. I guess that if I had committed a large volume of my time to writing reviews that are ultimately suppressed, deleted, manipulated, or otherwise used to extort small business owners, I would feel pretty foolish too.