I do agree that a lot of valid reviews are being thrown out with the bathwater. There should be a better mechanism to show all unfiltered reviews.
The thing that Yelp that makes it stand above other review sites is that they incentive positive reviews. Like Yelp or not, the idea of "Yelp Elite" is actually a great idea, because it is able to draw out a lot of medium to great reviews, stuff you would rarely see on other sites. When you incentive reviews, either good or bad, then you do tend to eliminate this "one-and-done" bias that tends to focus on the negative.
That being said, my wife is/was a Yelp Elite for several years with over 800 reviews, but quit this year because she thinks that Yelp as a whole has started to go downhill, and doesn't like the pretentiousness of most people on there now.
That's absurd. Google's not going to see the filtered reviews unless they start doing a lot more JavaScript execution than they've been doing, and why would Yelp care if a browser extension or spammers see filtered reviews?
Google's not going to see them because they have purposefully made them difficult to scrape...
I'd imagine Yelp would rather not have a "Yelp Unfiltered" extension made and their filtering becomes less important. Same for helping spammers automate their processes by checking up on their reviews.
It's a race to the bottom though, the spammers will eventually win.
The thing that Yelp that makes it stand above other review sites is that they incentive positive reviews. Like Yelp or not, the idea of "Yelp Elite" is actually a great idea, because it is able to draw out a lot of medium to great reviews, stuff you would rarely see on other sites. When you incentive reviews, either good or bad, then you do tend to eliminate this "one-and-done" bias that tends to focus on the negative.
That being said, my wife is/was a Yelp Elite for several years with over 800 reviews, but quit this year because she thinks that Yelp as a whole has started to go downhill, and doesn't like the pretentiousness of most people on there now.