It doesn't matter, any crowdsourced review system can and will be gamed, just as any communications service can and will be spammed.
What is unsaid is that it's not just unscrupulous companies (including Amazon) that are involved. There are also ordinary consumers who deliberately post the fake 5-star reviews in exchange for compensation. I've seen people make excuses for them, but I can't see how any of them can be under the impression they are not doing wrong.
Now if Amazon were forced to disclose statistics about return rates or complaints on products, that would in fact be valuable information. It could still be gamed due to other shoddy Amazon practices like allowing a merchant to start a listing for a cheap but genuinely good product, collect good reviews, then switch the product description to something completely unrelated.
I guess they'll never go for this but they could do something like select 1% of buyers at random and pay them (or refund product cost) to write a meaningful review with pictures with updates at fixed intervals so the product is evaluated throughout its intended lifespan. Perhaps with some pre-filtering to improve the likelihood that reviews will be useful and accurate (eg "spent more than $10k on amazon", "billing address is shipping address", "previous reviews were voted as useful" etc)
The gaming will be different though. It's easy to adulterate a numerical average of a low-effort star rating, and harder to fake a review written in English with pictures and details.
> harder to fake a review written in English with pictures and details.
It's also a lot harder to get a legitimate review like that. Instead of 100 reviews where 80 were fake, there will be 3 reviews where 2 are fake and the other was disputed by the seller (or paid off by the seller) and deleted.
Amazon is under no obligation to delete negative reviews that are "disputed," and I for one have written reviews of horrible products that I would never change nor delete, even for money.
There is a weird defeatist mentality in this thread of "why try anything because sellers are just going to game it," but that's the wrong way to think when you're designing a human system. It's like writing a Constitution, insofar as you have to predict and hedge against the gamesmanship beforehand. If the review mills are in China or other non-Anglophone places, then removing stars and forcing them to be substantive makes it much harder because they would literally have to actually review the product. A reader can't differentiate between five fake stars and five real stars, but would probably be able to differentiate between an empty positive review and a well-presented negative review.
What is unsaid is that it's not just unscrupulous companies (including Amazon) that are involved. There are also ordinary consumers who deliberately post the fake 5-star reviews in exchange for compensation. I've seen people make excuses for them, but I can't see how any of them can be under the impression they are not doing wrong.
Now if Amazon were forced to disclose statistics about return rates or complaints on products, that would in fact be valuable information. It could still be gamed due to other shoddy Amazon practices like allowing a merchant to start a listing for a cheap but genuinely good product, collect good reviews, then switch the product description to something completely unrelated.