I don't think I'm addicted, I just don't know what else to do. How would you recommend I evaluate a product or service before buying it, if I don't personally know someone who can give a recommendation?
I do try to look at trusted professional review sites where possible (The Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc), but that only works for certain types of popular products.
Reviews are the worst way of figuring out where to eat without prior knowledge, except for all the other ways we have tried.
In a totally uniform space, even the smallest thing to help you stand out is enough to make first-order decision making latch on to the small thing. I suppose more advanced decision making would do some intentional exploration of the uniform space.
Example results include a letter grade, and a few fortune cookies of content like:
Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 58.7% of the reviews are reliable.
This product had a total of 511 reviews as of our last analysis date on Jul 19 2020.