Yelp accusations cause nightmare for business

I was thinking of Amazon now verifying the reviewers as purchasers of their products and facebook where people mostly use their real names. It cuts down on the drive by vindictive slams on products/businesses if people use their real names.

vindictive reviews by anonymous people on yelp is terrible. yelp also restricts business owners in how many replies they can do daily. WTF? They cannot even answer their accuser on a timely basis.

In order to better verify things, Yelp could do much to at least verify their reviewers identity. They could also put in a GPS tracking in their app to at least show the reviewer was in close vicinity of the business they are reviewing. They could also build in their app, a photo scan upload of the receipt showing the reviewer actually bought a product or service from the business on a particular date. Yelp then would have tons of value from actual purchase data mining.

It could be used internally for verification and not published details, they could then highlight and give those reviews more weight who have used their real names and provided some proof of purchase.

You know, the basic gist is using todays technology to provide better, more relevant, reliable information. That would add value to the whole process. But I think yelp is arrogant and is strong-arming businesses, instead of thinking of ways to provide them real value.

Of course there's alternatives to yelp... What I was saying that it's too big for it's own good. It has an obvious monopoly in the market and you're right, it will take years to build up that kind of momentum in the industry. But it can be done. I know for a fact that there's people on this forum that could build a better platform & tons of marketers that could promote it.