I can't speak to whether the business in question is real or not, or whether it's bad or good, etc. What I can speak to is that I think there's a fundamental fl

I can't speak to whether the business in question is real or not, or whether it's bad or good, etc. What I can speak to is that I think there's a fundamental flaw with Yelp and similar sites, and indeed even with Amazon reviews: you don't know who to trust. "On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog!" Any given post could be made by a shill or astroturfer, it could be made by a competitor, it could be made by a child or teenager with no perspective, it could be made by a prankster, an idiot, a mentally disturbed person, by a spidering script/bot, or could even be fake data planted by the site's owner in order to make the site look like it has a bigger base of real users. You just don't know, in most cases, on most sites. Therefore, it's mostly noise. You can't trust it! Crap. Some of it is not, of course. There is some signal out there. But this fundamental problem of having trusted signal buried by untrustable noise is the weakness to all these web-based systems. Even a stars-based system is useless. It's irrelevant if a particular app or entity has a lot of five-star reviews or one-star reviews if it's crowd-sourced, because you can't trust the crowd. ("I gave it five stars because I'm shagging the creator." "I found a button that had a color blue that displeased me: ZERO STARS!") At least not when commercial interests are at stake. I trust crowd-sourcing a little more when the entities being reviewed are (a) for hobbyists, and (b) niche, and (c) with a highly filtered review demographic (not just anybody and their sister can fire off a review -- there has to be some filtering process or bias that weeds out most folks.) Even then, it's hit or miss. At the end of the day, reviews have signal only if the reader already has some explicit trust relationship with the reviewer, based on past performance. If the reviewer is some faceless random stranger, it's noise and cannot be trusted in general. Someone else in this thread made a comment about mob mentality. I agree. I think that's another flaw to these crowd-sourced systems. Humans are prone to mob thinking. They take things out of context and blow something all out of perspective, often in proportion to how ignorant they are.