I hate to be dismissive, but this is kind of a "Water Is Wet" article. Does anyone really think online reviews are anything but totally gamed, bought, and paid for? It's kind of a Universal Law Of Spam: Any place on the Internet where users can add content and where content might be profitable to someone, will eventually end up full of spam and paid-for content.
Of course some reviews are real, and there's an art to deciphering the wheat from the chaff. The problem is that there's the constant pressure you describe to drown out legitimate reviews or otherwise game the system, so that 'art' becomes more and more tricky and less reliable. I gave up on reading the Yelp tea leaves a long time ago, and other prominent ones like Google Maps and Tripadvisor have been getting worse over time. I can still usually intuit my way through Amazon and and Steam reviews, if there's enough reviews and I take my time.
There's huge money to be made pretending spam isn't a real problem. It used to be that spam was universally despised, fought and even prosecuted in some jurisdictions. But it turns out that it's cheaper (and actually profitable) to join the spammers than to fight them, especially if you have an endless supply of marks that will guzzle the spam without second thoughts.
Funny to find your post at the bottom of the thread.
I tried to use a few apps for finding restaurants, compared their rating with the experience I had and concluded it's a waste of time and money.
There's not even a need to know or understand anything about it. No insider info from Yelp, not experiencing it as a business owner. Just try and see for yourself.
