And as Yelp, eBay, and other reputation sites have shown us, it turns out that reputation economies are useless once everyone rates every transaction/buyer/seller 5 stars.
You've never filtered for the bad reviews? Also, is it possible that you're only seeing the uninteresting storm of 5-stars because the "interesting" merchants don't survive? (I honestly have no idea if this is the case.)
Exactly. Now that we can make informed decision, we can excise the social/financial cost of regulation and its administration, in exchange for accepting the risk (of making our own informed decision).
I'm a progressive liberal fwiw, not a libertarian.
But "reputation economy" means someone gets to be the guinea pig.