I'm missing how this story reflects poorly on Yelp. You did exactly what they want Yelpers to do: Review a series of places so they can (after a few months, apparently) calibrate your ratings and have some algorithmic confidence you're not a drive-by or paid reviewer.
I think he's saying that Yelp is bad because he should not have been trusted. The whole point of the exercise was for his girlfriend to write a review for her father's business. But it seems nearly impossible to stop people who are determined to write fake reviews. Yelp obviously isn't perfect, but what's the alternative?
Live a post-online-review existence. That's where I'm at. The future is here just unevenly distributed.
Take all the arguments people have against IQ as a measure of a person's meaning or value, turn them around and apply them to the number of online stars a company has purchased, err, uh, obtained via reviews from real customers LOL as if anyone believes that's really how it works. Or if you work for a big corporation you likely have extensive experience with people freaking out about utterly meaningless metrics... like number of online stars.
Sucks to be an online review company, but if the providers hate the implied, rumored, or actual extortion racket, and the users find the data to be useless, when they go away, nothing of value will be lost.
