yelp - real people, removing your reviews?

Ok, first off, Yelp is a cool idea and I used to think it was a cool site, but… wtf is up with censoring negative posts? And while I’m at it, wtf is up with celebrating people who write hundreds of one sentence posts? How is that helpful or useful except in stroking that author’s ego? It seems like a lot of people just doing reciprocal clicking on “cool” or “useful”. You click my ego, I’ll click yours.

So let me go back to the censorship part for a second. Let’s go back about a year… I was really getting into reviewing all types of businesses, both good and bad. Mind you, these weren’t one or two sentence posts, but full on five paragraph essays. So one weekend I had a really awful experience at a T-Mobile store (surprise, surprise) and decided to write it up. I made sure to follow their guidelines, referring to them several times as I wrote yet another masterpiece. Well, I logged back in two weeks later to check a restaurant review and to my dismay the post was gone… vanished… it had ceased to be. WTF yelp?

Needless to say, that was the last time I wasted any time on  yelp. If they are removing well crafted reviews and celebrating one sentence gibberish, I will find honest reviews elsewhere.