Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

i'm sort of surprised by this headline. i consider serious eats to be pretty balanced, but it seems like you took two complaints - from business owners who don't have great reviews of their businesses - and created a very inflammatory headline.

if these allegations (that yelp claimed they would remove negative reviews in exchange for advertisting revenue) were true, then every business that advertised would have stellar reviews. this isn't the case. the complaint of these business owners seems to be that they *believed* that by advertising, they would be able to get rid of negative reviews, which simply wasn't the case. it seems they also tried to game the system by soliciting fake positive reviews. so exactly how is the problem yelp?

i personally found yelp useful well before i became a member over a year and a half ago and i continue to do so. sure, sometimes i find that a business others find appealing isn't to my liking, but that's the case with reviews of any product or service. (just because rotten tomatoes gives a good rating to a movie doesn't mean i'll like it.)

i will add that yelp is an online and offline community and being a part of it increases my ability to filter reviews that are by people i know, trust, and who have similar likes/dislikes, making it more useful for me. yelp may not be for everyone, but real reviews by real people are an important resource and the site that seems to be working well for milllions of people and thousands of businesses. in my view, if bad reviews upset business owners who can't satisfy their customers, then perhaps they should be rethinking their business management skills rather than blaming yelp.