I don’t think there is a technological solution to this.

It is not even the real problem, it is just a simptom.

The root cause is that people still have to compete for their livelihood, and cheating is always a viable way for some.

Our thinking and the world will have to evolve past the current state of scarcity.

Then nobody will be incentivized to waste their intellect on covertly conning people for financial gain.

Scarcity is a necessary outcome of hedonic adaptation in a finite world, and thus an immutable fact of human existence.

Given that, culture is really the solution to problems of cheating. Which, of course, is not a technical solution either.

I usually check the rating. If its 4-5 stars, then I will proceed to reading a few 5 stars, and a few 1 stars. You can usually tell if the reviews are real and this also helps you decide if the negatives matter to you.

I bought a vaccuum recently and did this process. One of the 1 star reviews was something to the effect of, "this vacuum sucks too hard. Its a workout to use". I have 2 huskies and a sea of fur to contend with, so this 1 star was a 5 star to me.

It's an impossible problem to solve completely. The most trusted of reviewers can still be bought out, for a price.

I think the best way to improve things is via increased transparency - If I can read a reviewer's past reviews, I can make a better-informed judgement of their reviewing integrity.

One thought I had was to show reviews from people you know. It should carry more weight of you know them personally. Then if someone gives a 5-star review to a scam product then you can personally contact them and say "What the hell?" and block their reviews.

The reputation of a reviewer needs to be on the line to get proper reviews, and also the ones reading the reviews need to have a way to gauge the reviewer's reputation.

Knowing someone in real life helps, but so could something where we can review the reviewer.

I think there is a set of problems to solve first before you can "solve reviews".

The first and biggest one (in my opinion) is global unique item identifiers for the products. This reduces the sheer ridiculous volume of reviews you have to contend with. The other problem this solves is that the "review" is now reasonably guaranteed to be attached to a product and not "seller plus product". This leaves very little wiggle room and incentive for dollar-store / drop-shipper / chinese knockoff sellers to fake reviews.

The answer is to stop trying to scale trust and reputation. Those things are valuable because they're hard to come by. Online reviews and scoring systems try to look trustworthy and reputable, but they're counterproductive when literally anyone can write them and there are too many to properly vet.

ReviewMeta is a Chrome extension that does a good job