This is why Yelp should kill two birds with one stone and just open source both their filtering algorithm and their rating algorithm. This would cause more engineers to want to work at Yelp and stop this PR fiasco where people think Yelp is gaming the system.
With the algo's out in the open we all can finally move on from this "extortion" rumor.
So sick of hearing this - what actual evidence do you have?
People's reviews get filtered because the user doesn't have human-identifiable data - multiple reviews, friends who use yelp, a picture, recent logins, etc.
Find me any business that complains about this extortion, their filtered reviews are 99% from people who've used yelp once and never logged in again.
On the other hand, here's a Harvard Business School study debunking this myth:
Thanks. But as skeptical as I am of the extortion claims, I don't see how this study debunks anything. All it does is show that there's no evidence of a systematic bias in the filter, but it doesn't disprove at all that Yelp manually tweaked results in isolated cases, which is what they were accused of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
The common analogue being, "Have you stopped beating your wife?"