They are what they are. I think the mistake is imagining people care about the Yelp rating. Do folks look at the number, or read the reviews? Most of us can spot a rankled-reviewer-rant and ignore it. Sensitive restaurant owners are getting upset over very little.
I was in Boston a few weeks ago visiting a famous bar by Fenway called the "Cask n Flagon." This place is a gigantic sports bar and one of probably only five or six bars that sits around the stadium.
I got to talking with the bartender and he told me a story about a customer who became irate that the bar was closing early and that they were scared that she would go on Yelp and write a bad review. I laughed because I thought he was joking, thinking that nobody would ever base the decision to visit this place on a Yelp review. However he told me that the reviews matter a lot. I still doubt that he is correct about that, but it does show you the perception and fear restaurants large and small have about Yelp.
I don't know about Yelp, but I've met people working in hotels who live in genuine fear of bad Trip Advisor reviews.
And I can understand that - if I'm going somewhere I don't know and have little time for research you just go somewhere like Trip Advisor and skim read. A couple of very negative reviews might make a real difference for smaller places which only have a couple of dozen reviews in total.
... But sometimes a bad review works in the company's favour. Someone can have a bad experience and not be happy with efforts the business takes to sort things out. I might think the company did everything reasonably possible and so that "bad" review become evidence good practice.
The degree to which hotels seem to rely on tripadvisor reviews for feedback is pretty crazy. Every hotel manager i've worked with has been completely glued to tripadvisor, and the most important factor in every decision they make seems to be how it affects tripadvisor reviews.
People generally use the numbers to help build a shortlist of contenders and then read the reviews of the dozen or so restaurants on that shortlist. If your base score is too low to even get on peoples shortlist then it doesn't matter what people have written
