Yep, review system in our society is fucked up.
Four stars= zero stars to a host. It makes the rating scale almost meaningless. If you leave four star reviews, the host can lose valuable status, and other hosts will reject your reservations.
Amazon reviews are basically 4.4 to 4.7. Outside of that range stuff gets delisted or is full of fake reviews.
BTW y'all probably know you can just go online and purchase reviews for Amazon, Yelp, whatever. Buy Google accounts and write multiple reviews for your own or competitor's business. Buy a pack of 100 Reddit accounts and go Sybil shill your shitcoins.
AI only makes it worse.
Yeah I have some experience with a book on Amazon. It was a great book and sold well, and often competitors would come up. The competitors were (this is pre-AI times) mostly a bunch of junk text scraped from wikipedia and the like, compiled by very low wage people out of India. From looking at the book (using the "look inside") feature on Amazon, I would often be able to spot multiple egregious errors just in the pages I was able to see, the book would often be complete and utter useless trash.
And then you'd see multiple 5 star reviews, talking about how the book changed their life. Yes, reviews are broken. Not so much on a place like Walmart, but on Amazon, you can put very little trust in reviews.
Some ways that I try to find the honest reviews is by ordering by "recent", instead of "popular". That way you're a little more likely to get real reviews, instead of paid.
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