// reputation systems

Source: Eater

After two decades of cat-and-mouse games, restaurants have largely abandoned fake review schemes because detection algorithms now work reliably enough that the reputational damage outweighs any short-term traffic gains. Yelp's investment in machine learning and human moderation has made review manipulation economically irrational, shifting restaurant competition back toward actual service quality. The lesson applies across platforms: once detection becomes sufficiently asymmetric, cheating stops making business sense, which is why the fake review industry has contracted rather than evolved.