The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing. I’ve found that the only reviews worth reading are the ones that are from verified purchasers.
That might make sense for electronics and other items, though even here sellers have found ways to get around it by offering to reimburse their shills who bought the product just for a 5-star shill review.
However, Amazon's introduction of the Verified Purchase tag on reviews and recent changes that make non-VP reviews difficult to view, has had a deleterious effect on reviews for books, films and music. There were a lot of great well-written and insightful reviews written by people who got the media in question from the library (or a filesharing community). For books and films, that reviewing culture lives on at Goodreads and IMDB, but both are now owned by Amazon and who knows how long those reviews might last. There is however no analogue for reviews of music (Allmusic has strict character count limits and few ever go there, Discogs reviews seem mainly meant for vinyl enthusiasts).
Yes, in retrospect it was silly for fans of music, books and films to create a rather non-commercial community of enthusiasts on the basis of a site whose sole aim is to make lots of money, but I still regret what has been lost.
Nothing silly about it at all. I've written many such reviews and I'm well aware that I'm giving my work for free to a profit making entity. The thing is, I also benefit a lot from reviews on Amazon, even for things I'd never buy. Amazon is my go-to site for reviews on books and music. (Not so for films, I use IMDB for that.) I enjoy writing and posting the reviews, and enjoy getting "likes" on them from others that find them useful.
Keep it in 3 places: review site, your blog, local storage (and backups).
I am still pissed about the IMDB Forums.
There was a music recommendation thread there that I forgot to read before it was nuked by Amazon.
That few kilobytes of knowledge are gone from the history forever... like tears in...
One point in Goodreads's favor: they make it easy to export your entire library to a CSV which you can reprocess. (For example, I have a Haskell script which reads my Goodreads export and turns it into a Markdown table.) So even if they go down or start to disappear, people can get their reviews out.
Surely Amazon could control this on a category-by-category level...
give buyers history similar to how ebay does, once you pass a number of unrelated purchases your rating actually affects the items score. another method is that before the score is counted your account has to be XXX days old.
I think the first step would be not accepting reviews, or downranking them, similarly to unverified purchases, if the purchase was discounted with a promo code given by the seller.
Losing the useful reviews in the noise is a definite problem. Even if you filter those from fake accounts, you end up with some reviews like this one, which is of basically no use to anyone (yet 3 people marked it as helpful...):
> Delivery status is still pending. This laptop has decent specs but a lack of SsD really makes me sad. I will update this review when i receive the product