This could be easily answered by asking on Blind for an anonymous confirmation of whether or not there is any biasing factor built into the codebase. My opinio

This could be easily answered by asking on Blind for an anonymous confirmation of whether or not there is any biasing factor built into the codebase. My opinion is not, the algorithm has been examined by 3rd parties and if there are bad actors it’s probably overeager salespeople who will say anything to make their quota. I also tend to believe that fraud detection is also playing a big part in the form of false positives in identifying untrustworthy 5-star reviews. I’m a Yelper myself and my SO is Yelp Elite and it’s not very commmon that good reviewers write reviews on the spot (using cafe wifi) for restaurants. I’m sure some store owners prod their customers to create Yelp accounts to rate them or have a sign up with “Rate us 5-stars on Yelp” which is fine but would make these reviews from new members more suspicious.