I, like many others here, have come to the realization that YELP is not TRUTH.
Anytime a company can pay to have honest bad reviews removed, that speaks to the integrity of YELP.

Have you considered giving them a 1-Star review?

Brooke, you can write a review on Yelp. It has a 2-star avg.

Her life is a living hell right now.

Deleted

Brooke, I sense a disturbance in your post. I believe you need some comfort food. I suggest frozen yogurt from Yumi Yogurt in Santa Clara, CA. Go at night and enjoy the glow of the neon lights.

But they did not delete all the bad reviews you wrote....

They also hide 5-star reviews of newbie accounts

^^ Look up "Ruco's Kitchen " in Oakland.  Yelp hid all those newbie 5-star reviews until I posted mine. Ruco's is a ghost kitchen in East Oakland,  and it's legit. Suddenly all those reviews got posted up.

Yelp has never been the truth. Overall, its just simply a bad idea for anyone in public to review a place of business on a public platform. The cons far outweigh the pros. The very idea of a Yelp is bad for society overall (despite many instances of positive utility).

I beg to differ with Jude's opinion. It is important to share experiences about businesses, both good and bad.

Some reviews are hidden because there is not enough creditability behind the review. Sometimes people just outwardly want to promote or hurt businesses, but those are the few bad apples. Yelp's platform is no different than the others that allow you to review businesses.

Rollo, you could say the same thing about free speech. You got to take the good with the bad.

But Yelp could do better with their rating systems. They should assign weights based on recency of the review, as well as

... as well as the reviewer's reviewing reputation which could range from, say, their rating tends, and median.

* trend

They could weigh reviews in the past 12 months with a 1, then scale the weights down to 0.75, 0.5, 0.25 for reviews that are 1, 2, and 3+ years old

And throttle "FUC" of reviews to only 1 review per minute for every user.

That should take care of the "FUC fest threads"

Yeah,  they should have a "last 12 months" set of reviews. Consider chg of recent mgmt.

"You gotta take the good with the bad"

Yeah? So? Yes, like free speech...like marriage, like...I dunno, cough syrup. Taking the good with the bad applies to almost everything in life.

Seems like some are arguing for Yelp to screen for more reputable reviewers. Yes, so not everyone and everybody. Proper reviewers. Some with more knowledge maybe? Or expertise in that field/genre? Actually professional reviewers like before the internet. Genious idea.

Why does anybody on here write a review? Because you really want to help out the "community"? No, I'm guessing its to feed your ego under the guise of helping others. You don't wanna save someone else from a bad experience. You were aggrieved and that hurt you and you want that place to suffer somehow so you have to tell the world about it. I'm not above that either. I felt that way sometimes. But part of the battle is understanding where these motivations come from. You dont think my posts that are walls of text have something to do with my ego?

I obviously dont want to ban a Yelp (or social media in general). As I've conceded before, there's certainly plenty of instances of positive utility and I generally don't like banning things. But I wish as a society we'd voluntarily dismantle social media. And go back to leaving positive and negative reviews like we did before - telling your friends, neighbors, colleagues. Reading pro/vetted reviewers.