Convince me it's extortion and I might agree with you, but I've read many filtered and unfiltered reviews and it seems that Yelp does a fine job filtering. The filtered reviews sound like morons or shills; the unfiltered reviews sound like customers sharing an experience. Paying Yelp to advertise doesn't seem to be a factor.
I'm just not feeling the hate. My main problem with Yelp is that the star ratings are useless because everyone else's standards are different from mine. I don't care if something is expensive; I'm happy to pay money for good food and good service. But for other people, that's an automatic negative eight billion star rating. So Yelp becomes essentially useless unless I read every review. (I understand Zagat has controls for this, but I've never actually used it.)
And now for the statement that's going to get me in trouble: whenever I see an ad like a Yelp ad or an Adsense ad, it implies a certain amount of shadiness to me. The businesses that are good don't need to buy ads, leaving most ads to be from businesses with some problem.
Same here. I've read filtered and unfiltered reviews and my conclusion is that Yelp does a good job with its filtering. It's not perfect but does a pretty decent job.
WRT your problem: Have you tried filtering by price ($, $$, $$$)? Perhaps if you did this, you would find good restaurants that aren't just rated highly because they are cheap.
On your last point, I disagree. I used to think that only bad restaurants would need to advertise. But then I ended up going to a restaurant that I saw had advertised heavily in the past on Yelp. I went there because they were in my neighborhood. The restaurant and food were absolutely fantastic (which matched their overall rating). So advertising is good for 1) new restaurants and 2) residents who don't know all the restaurants in their neighborhood.
I'm just not feeling the hate. My main problem with Yelp is that the star ratings are useless because everyone else's standards are different from mine. I don't care if something is expensive; I'm happy to pay money for good food and good service. But for other people, that's an automatic negative eight billion star rating. So Yelp becomes essentially useless unless I read every review. (I understand Zagat has controls for this, but I've never actually used it.)
And now for the statement that's going to get me in trouble: whenever I see an ad like a Yelp ad or an Adsense ad, it implies a certain amount of shadiness to me. The businesses that are good don't need to buy ads, leaving most ads to be from businesses with some problem.