No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive reviews.
Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.
Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.
Most people do trust them, but shouldn't.
Here's their operating model, which sounds like a mix of paid brand manager subscriptions and advertising: https://support.productreview.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/36000...
lol. the current amazon scam is to purchase the product (ship to a random address to defeat “common address” detection) then leave the fake review
for amazon the receipt is guaranteed authentic as the product will have been verifiably purchased on amazon. for a 3p site receipts can be trivially fabricated
I'm wondering as there are quite a handful of fake receipt generators on the internet
Of course misbehaving companies would probably stop spending there, but that might not be a bad thing.
It is possible to exist in this space with a potential conflict, as long as you position yourself appropriately. If your interest is to serve "decent" companies by providing them with interested candidates, it can work.
It'll work fine until the site decides chasing profit is more important than integrity of the system, so probably right around the time they're looking for more funding.
It's not so much that I'd read the reviews, but ranking of results is fatally flawed thanks to these practices.
For many queries (restaurant in town X, book in genre Y) there are simply so many candidate results that ranking is the one and only thing to determine a (much, MUCH) smaller candidate set that the customer might actually engage with. How often do you click through to page 2 of your search results?
Not so much positive reviews, but negative reviews are believed.