In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, David Lazarus looked into how Yelp works, and the story wasn’t pretty. Turns out restaurants feel pressured to pay from $150 to $400 a month for “sponsorship,” so their best review is moved to the top; some restaurateurs believe they’ll get more negative reviews if they don’t pay the fee. The whole point of Yelp is to have unvarnished posts from the great wide world, so modifying them in any way, even to move them around, seems ethically sketchy. Yelp is a great site, and we spend as much time scouring it as anyone else, but it makes a person wonder….

Read the story here.