Interesting, since the public perception of Yelp seems to be that they're an extremely unethical organized crime-style racket intentionally destroying small and medium sized businesses if they don't receive protection money after demanding it.
Maybe that's no longer the case or maybe it's solely isolated to Yelp's sales and marketing departments, but either way it doesn't seem to mesh well with having a good culture.
I'm surprised this is down-voted. Isn't this in fact the public perception? Last time I remember Yelp getting significant mainstream media attention, it was in relation to allegations of racket-like tactics [1].
I don't work for yelp or any company related to yelp. Two reasons it could be downvoted.
1) The external facing business image may be totally different to their internal workplace culture (this can go both ways).
2) for all the accusations I've seen of yelp, I've never seen anything more than a he said she said. None of the cases have ever gone to court in any country that I've seen.
Anecdote incoming: I worked in a mom and pop shop. We constantly had issues with people threatening bad/false reviews on different websites (Facebook/Google usually). There was also some amount of 1 star reviews that came in from Google accounts with no visible profile info and no description. These things happen obline, and I'm sure yelp is no exception. Do they sell more visible placement to businesses? Yes as do Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor,booking.com, uber eats etc. Is there any proof of them artificially posting reviews to tank small businesses and then removing them when the businessess pay for sponsored listings? Not that I've seen at least.
