Online reviews stopped being a signal and became a battlefield
The star rating was genuinely a good invention. For a while it did the thing it promised — you could learn something real about a stranger's business before you walked in or handed over money.
Then it became worth money, so it became worth faking. Any rating now is a blend of real experiences, five-stars the owner only asked their happy customers to leave, a few paid ones, and one-stars from competitors or people who never actually bought the thing. The number on its own barely says anything. So you stop reading it and start reading around it — skip the 4.7, go straight to the three-star reviews, because those are the only ones that sound like an actual person describing a specific problem.
The funny part is we've basically reverse-engineered our way back to word of mouth. "Does anyone actually know a good plumber" in a group chat beats any aggregate score now. And the platforms clearly know the raw signal is broken — that's what all the "verified purchase" badges and AI review summaries are: an admission the star count alone can't be trusted.
It starts to feel like a rule. Any number that begins routing money eventually stops measuring the thing it was supposed to measure, because now it's worth gaming. Reviews were always going to end up here.
Is there any review system that actually resists this? Or does every public trust signal decay the second it's worth faking?
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