Online reviews are terrible, and here’s why

Online reviews sound good in theory. In practice, however, they don’t work so well.Reviews were initially important as proxies of trust for e-commerce businesses, but they have now well and truly spilled over to bricks-and-mortar businesses, where the weakness of the review system is being amplified as some consumers have figured out how to weaponise it.The general idea is that users provide their personal and honest feedback and other users are able to make more informed choices (like avoiding scammers). Even the business owner can use “learnings” to improve the business. Amazon is plagued by fake reviews and trolls. In the book space, for instance, small groups and even bots target specific authors over spurious disagreements the trolls may have, and downvote their books accordingly so that they never appear in algorithmically-driven searches.