Unless I misread, the point isn’t leaving bad reviews, it’s making fake good reviews for a chain restaurant.
The way it’s being done is intended to stymie outsiders from crowding out locals.
Now, I agree that it is going to make competition harder for the non-chain restaurants the fake reviews are supposed to be isolating from tourist and traveller customers. It’s still a shitty move that hurts the local businesses. But it isn’t the same thing as actively trying to tank them. It’s a quibble about wording though, not a disagreement with your actual point.
Well, it’s one of those things where you either learn to compartmentalize, or you quit fast.
I moderated forums back in the early days of the internet. It was rough some days, to the point I had someone show up at my house because I wouldn’t let them abuse other users.
I moderated on reddit, and it was both easier and worse. People like to complain, but automod being able to filter out so much of the worst without having to see it at all made the job bearable. If I’d had to wade through the bigotry, the worst slurs, and similar stuff that a well crafted automod rule could magic away, I wouldn’t have done it at all.
But the fact that you have to constantly adjust the automod to catch up with the most persistent assholes is draining.
And that’s not getting into the stuff that isn’t hate speech, misogyny, bigotry, and that kind of infection. People think they can say anything they want, any way they want, and you stopping them means you’re the asshole, even after that went on a rant about fucking someone’s wife and kids (seriously, that’s a ban I had to make) because someone didn’t agree with their opinion of a flashlight. Seriously, that fucking happened.
Point being that while there are mods that go too far, the internet, and places like reddit or lemmy, would be unbearable without it. There has to be someone making those calls, keeping things from turning into the non stop scroll of venom and porn that used to be way too common back in the day.