Star ratings and written reviews were meant to let strangers trust each other. They worked until they became worth gaming, and now they are gamed at scale.
How it broke
Paid reviews, bulk purchased. Review exchanges. Competitors leaving negative reviews. Businesses removing negative reviews through legal threats. And now machine-generated reviews at zero cost.
The result is that a rating of four and a half stars carries almost no information, because nearly everything has a rating of four and a half stars.
What platforms are trying
Verified purchase, which confirms the reviewer bought the thing and says nothing about whether they were paid. Photo and video requirements, which raise the cost of fakes. Weighting by reviewer history, which penalises new accounts and helps established ones.
Aggregating across platforms to detect coordinated patterns. And increasingly, quietly de-emphasising reviews in ranking altogether.
Where trust actually comes from now
People you know. Recommendations from an identifiable person carry weight that anonymous reviews have lost.
Professional evaluation. Publications and individuals who test things and stake their name on the result.
Return policies and guarantees, which shift the trust question from before the purchase to after it.
What is coming
Verified identity on review systems, which raises the cost of fakes and reduces participation. Reputation portable across platforms, which is being built and has privacy implications. And the recognition that some categories simply cannot be reviewed usefully by strangers.
The lesson
Any signal worth having becomes worth faking. Trust systems need to be more expensive to game than the value gaming them captures, and most were not.