Why Yelp can’t be trusted

Epicurious reported recently on a growing problem with Yelp, the consumer rating site. As they reported,

“a small minority of Yelp reviewers have been abusing the system, threatening places with bad reviews unless they get freebies and assorted perks (or, though it’s not mentioned in the article, that restaurateurs are flooding Yelp with positive reviews they or their friends write under false IDs)…

…Anyway, that unethical Yelpers have been basically extorting restaurateurs is no big surprise. And neither is the fact that Yelp’s filtering process is far from foolproof. What is somewhat surprising, and a little depressing, is that no one seems to have devised a better way to tackle the issue head-on.”

And until the issue has been tackled, (and certainly we hope so for fairness and to appropriately reward good businesses), it looks like using Yelp and similar sites should be approached with caution.