I don't think anyone is making these stories up, but with tens of thousands of businesses on Yelp, the chances of these two events randomly happening sequentially is high enough to have a steady stream of people who think it happened to them intentionally.

Also, I've been reading these anecdotes on HN and other sites for years, and have never seen anyone tell this story and provide enough data for anyone to take a look themselves. Never a link to the business page on Yelp, never any links to the supposed negative reviews. Has a news organization ever asked Yelp to explain the specifics of any of these occurrences? Has any explanation ever turned up in the discovery phase of a case against Yelp?

The video posted below has pretty good evidence of what's going on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY

He shows how he talked to a sales person at Yelp, received a bad review, which he proves is fake by showing a search from his CRM, than digs into the social media accounts of the Yelp sales person, and finds the yelp reviewer who left the bad review (but didn't have an invoice) was a friend of the sales person.

even if this is just a rouge yelp sales person, there is clearly something systematically wrong here.

I suspect that is because they're afraid that their 'two star reviews' become 'zero star reviews'. Just like you don't complain about Mafia customer service in public.

It's possible, but it's also possible that the owner doesn't really know if Yelp is actually guilty of anything, and they're afraid that an investigation would find that the reviews are legitimate, making the owner look bad.

Or maybe it really is a made up story. Or embellished. Or mis-remembered.

Other than really wanting to believe, why do you assume that some random internet guy telling a second-hand story is "hard evidence" of anything?

In this litigious society, I'd imagine a plucky suit-sponsoring hedge fund would be excited to hear of all these instances of fraud. Yet I haven't heard of any class action.

It doesn't have to be that people are making stuff up. Yelp is a big site, and there will always be some people who have really bad luck, even if everyone's being honest. If popular opinion focuses on those stories, and no one really tells the stories of people who have good experiences (because why would you tell a boring story :p), it can sound like Yelp is making it happen deliberately.

It also doesn't require a coordinated conspiracy. Yelp salespeople are like anyone else...there are some a-holes in the bunch. They could, individually, make this sort of thing happen. Even without any admin access. A few fake accounts, or friends and family, etc.

I don't know, but there's no link to anything. Don't even know the name of the establishment. I can't change my consumer habits on the word of "that guy's friend"

A subset of restaurant owners will get negative reviews after cancellations, it doesn't necessarily mean that those two things are correlated. Neither the Reddit post, nor the comment you link to actually bother to link to these negative reviews. It would go a long way to show even the slightest bit of evidence.

It's possible that the friend made it up or exaggerated. Kind of like when you send your drunk friend home in an Uber and you get a bill for cleaning up vomit. Your friend insists they didn't, but it's plausible that they simply don't remember.

Yes? No? Who knows? That's literally worthless as evidence of anything other than someone's ability to post an internet comment.