I mostly like and use Yelp, and I get the negativity. What your saying about knowing how to use Yelp is right on, but it leads to some dissatisfaction, because

I mostly like and use Yelp, and I get the negativity. What your saying about knowing how to use Yelp is right on, but it leads to some dissatisfaction, because a 4 star restaurant should be a 4 star restaurant. More importantly, they manipulate ratings. They pressure businesses to pay them to fix ratings Yelp broke. They let businesses improve ratings when they shouldn't, analogous to Glassdoor and Amazon users getting ratings they don't like kicked off or hidden. There are plenty of fake and misleading reviews. And they have lots of dark patterns e.g. pushing you to their mobile app from the web, requiring you to create an account, etc. Some of these are observable by everyone, others there are many anecdotes. They're not going away. They provide value to people, me included. But some negativity directed their way makes sense to me.