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What’s amazing is that it’s 2019 and there are still people who trust online reviews written by people they don’t know! Show me one online review system out there that is not gamed in some way by the entities that stand to gain or lose money due to the content in the reviews.

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> it’s 2019 and there are still people who trust online reviews written by people they don’t know!

I feel it's an extension of the old "innocent until proven guilty" thing. In the Western world, especially in the United States, we have this belief of trusting unless we are given a very high confidence level reason not to. It's this belief that is being taken advantage of via online review systems. We do not doubt them by default because it would be mean or rude to doubt the entity behind the review (entity meaning person or bot).

But what happens with your "innocent until proven guilty" when you read a negative review about a company and believe it without any proof?

I think ratemyprofessors is a fairly decent online review system. Even without the scoring, just hearing peoples descriptions of how the prof teaches is quite beneficial

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