[noonespecial]

You are exactly the intended use case. If you write a bad review every time the system will soon ignore you. If you seldom write a review but bad is the only kind you ever write, each will carry some weight after a significant "cool-down period".

In other words, we successfully encode the difference between "wow, juhzy only complains when its really bad" vs "ignore juhzy, they complain about everything." This vs. the more naive and destructive "5 bad reviews and you're out" we seem to do too much of now.

I suppose it should work the other way too. Someone who always "5-stars" everything should be ignored as well.

The point is that the system right now seems to have a negative bias and is able to do so because of a glut of providers which it burns through like an expendable, renewable resource. (Which morally sucks because they are real people with real lives.)

[gowld]

What is the difference between "every time" and "seldom" ?

Yelp has no idea how often I eat out at restaurants.*

* just kidding; of course they do; they subscribe to a feed of my location data published by some game on my phone.

[noonespecial]

Your * is very insightful. Implicit in my suggestion is the fact that the service is able to count how often you use it vs your +ve and -ve reviews.

When I say "seldom" I of course mean "uses the service often, but seldom complains". The unit of time in this exponential weighting is not chronological, but uses of the service.

This of course is harder with yelp than uber.