"It didn’t try to pay for reviews, as some sites have."

It certainly did, as someone points out in the comments at the Times. Craigslist was littered with ads for Yelp reviewers a few years ago when I was last looking for a job.

Everytime I look something up on Yelp, if it has more than, say, 5 reviews, the rating always seems to be between 3.5 and 4.5.

That's not useful, other than to find the address of a place that I already know about. A vote of 4 seems to be the safe vote on Yelp.

I wonder if a Reddit-style upvote/downvote system might be a better voting system for Yelp. You are forced to choose whether you are recommending a place or not. No wishy-washy in-between score like 3 is available.

The reviews themselves are what is useful... usually I can tell what to expect and that is definitely good enough.

One thing not mentioned: if you write funny reviews, Yelp is a much better dating site than actual dating sites.

Interesting that as of the time I'm writing this, there are 25 votes but no comments. Neat quote from the article about fostering community:

'Responding to criticism from business owners that some user reviews are unfair, Yelp also recently introduced a way for the business owner to send a message back to a reviewer. If the reviewer doesn’t choose to write back, the business owner can’t send a second message.

But Mr. Stoppelman said that the site deliberately tilts its rules to support the reviewers. “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third,” he said.'