It’s because the system is gamed, we all know it, and you would be hard pressed to be able trust anything – even your own grandmother – when it comes to the internet. It’s nearly all psychological and sociological warfare.
If we see 5 stars, we just assume the bad reviews have been hidden or discarded, or simply never existed (since all the reviews good or bad are fake anyway). Because way too often, that’s exactly the case.
And when we see thousands of reviews we tend to ignore the fact that it’s computationally trivial to generate millions upon millions of reviews that are just believable enough to avoid automated detection and/or are easily influenced or corrupted by a variety of means (ex: social engineering, backdoor deals, etc). Psychologically we just close our eyes and ears, yell la-la-la-la-la mentally, and hope that the truth is buried in the myriad of faked/gamed reviews somewhere.
It’s because the system is gamed, we all know it, and you would be hard pressed to be able trust anything – even your own grandmother – when it comes to the internet. It’s nearly all psychological and sociological warfare.
If we see 5 stars, we just assume the bad reviews have been hidden or discarded, or simply never existed (since all the reviews good or bad are fake anyway). Because way too often, that’s exactly the case.
And when we see thousands of reviews we tend to ignore the fact that it’s computationally trivial to generate millions upon millions of reviews that are just believable enough to avoid automated detection and/or are easily influenced or corrupted by a variety of means (ex: social engineering, backdoor deals, etc). Psychologically we just close our eyes and ears, yell la-la-la-la-la mentally, and hope that the truth is buried in the myriad of faked/gamed reviews somewhere.