I just got off the phone with ‘Sam’ from Yelp. He comes across as pushy but I know he is probably a young guy that is just passionate about the Yelp website. Unfortunately he wanted to sit and debate with me over why I think Yelp is no longer worth visiting. He did not want to listen to the end user telling him how I felt. He wanted to talk about how great Yelp is and where it’s heading and how they are better than CitySearch, etc. I had to practically yell over him to get him to stop. Enough of the madness. Yelp believes that it is doing its community a favor by removing many reviews (based on what Sam told me). Their so called filter will automatically detect which ones to keep up and which reviews to take down.
I no longer contribute to Yelp, and I would suggest you don’t either.
I tried to communicate to Sam that I felt like I was wasting my time if Yelp did not want to consider my voice just as important as everyone else’s when I wrote reviews. Have written several reviews and not having them show up made me feel like I was not important. I wanted to know where those reviews went. After all I spent my time and energy writing them.
Yelp is not an open community like you might think. It is not social like you may think. If Yelp is going to police their reviews and services they should do a better job at making sure more people’s voices are heard. The users who spend time and energy writing and being a part of Yelp (therefor making Yelp what it is) deserve to have their 2 cents heard. I don’t think abusive language needs to be showcased on the website and do think that hateful or abusive language should be removed, but I don’t think the current policy Yelp has in place is going to work.
When Yelp decides to make the Yelp community a truly social and open community and have most of its reviews involved in the conversation I will participate once again. But as long as reviews are not being given their due credit, Yelp has found 1 less customer and with the ability to communicate that and my reasoning behind it across the internet they should take notice of what the end users think more closely.
More Yelp Contraversy can be found here.