Originally Posted by darthbimmer

I use Yelp frequently. I have not seen a problem with their filtered reviews. I do check them occasionally when I'm curious about a particular business. What I invariably find is that the filtered-out reviews are all 1 or 2 sentences long, full of superlatives (best or worst ever), and written by people who've contributed only a few reviews total.

Basically the filtering is designed to address two problems with crowd sourcing: the business operators who create throwaway identities to post rave reviews of their own businesses, and the angry crusaders who feel wronged by a business and pan it on every reviews site they can think of. As a reviews site user I am glad to see these types of reviews filtered out. Does this filtering approach also catch some legitimate reviews by infrequent users? I'm sure it does. But you can write more or better reviews to get out of the filter.