YELP is hiding things from you!

I love what social media has done for connecting people, and allowing them an open forum to speak their minds (like this). I am finding it very difficult to accept that sites like Yelp! The customer advocate site, that allows anyone to leave comments about a business, good or bad, and provides that data to anyone interested in finding out about customers experiences. That is great in concept. With the creation of any ranking system, there are always ways around it, and in some cases an easy way to kink it.

Yelp decided a while back (and posted the information on their site) to begin filtering out fake or non relevant reviews.

The problem I have with the filter is that they are flagging and removing mainly good reviews. I currently left a review on Yelp for a dealership that I purchased several cars from, and recently got serviced one of the vehicles and my POSITIVE review was up for 2 days, then flagged as “not factored in the business’s overall star rating”. When I researched the business, they had 19 reviews filtered and one of the 19 was a negative review, 16 of the 19 scored a 5 star experience. The overall rating for this dealership is 2.0 Stars with credit given to 5 reviews. SO UNDERSTAND THIS: 24 total reviews have been submitted, and only 5 were deemed “acceptable” and of those 5 only 1 of those was a rating above a 2 star.

I am not hiding anything from you the reader. I have linked the images to the actual site.

As you can see above, I can go in and edit my review, but why? A customer posted this review just to prove a point for the same dealership (this is how my rant started)

At what point are we going to be allowed to speak our minds, and not have it filtered for others to hear?

I would appreciate anyone who is upset about this as I am, to write a note to the admin of yelp you can email reviewfilter@yelp.com. It has been 5 days and I have not received a response to my inquiry.