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I have a friend who is a restaurant owner. From what i've heard, their business model is to display the worst reviews and then try to extort the business owner in order to display better ones. They wanted something to the tune of several thousand dollars. He called them 'The Yelp Mafia.'

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Debunked many many times. Michael Luca at HBS is one such study. Sales at Yelp has no ability to influence reviews, and Yelp employees are not allowed to even write reviews anymore.

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-y...

The most plausible explanation is that their content filtering system is just badly written and obviously can't discern between spam and real-life input, despite all usage patterns, history, and content pointing to a human. Whatever the reason, who wants to create content for a site that will then just censor it?

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