... then i would use other, less centralized and organized sources, as i did before yelp existed. what's your point?

i'm certainly not saying that yelp is stealing money from me, but trusted (yes, only to a certain extent) information is trusted information. if misleading, there are consequences to the consumer.

What I'm saying is that review sites are misleading even when reviews aren't being paid for. Paying people to write reviews makes the data no worse than it already was, because it was already pretty bad.

but that's not what's happening - they're not paying people to write reviews, they're (allegedly) collecting money for removing unfavorable reviews. i think that's more damaging.

that would be incredibly damaging. luckily we don't actually do that.