Yeah this is cool, but if it gets any traction I'd expect the fake reviews to quickly make the site useless without a ton of investment into spam detection. Given that Amazon sucks at this as a trillion dollar company with purchase data, I don't have much hope for a new startup or personal project (not sure which it is), but I'd really love to be proven wrong.
To be honest I was hoping it was even more like RottenTomatoes, focused on aggregating credible professional reviews of products (like RT focuses on professional critics, though they do also have user reviews).
How does having a "professional critic" only prevent you from getting fake reviews? It could easily be manipulated by companies paying reviewers for biased reviews. Same as sponsored YouTube reviewers.
I think there might be some value in keeping it a niche community with known usernames and maybe moderators. Amazon reviews are not a community, and I think Amazon might not want to fix the issue as bad as we think. In Amazon all the reviews are anonymous and it's not clear at a glance what kind of buyer is giving a review.
> How does having a "professional critic" only prevent you from getting fake reviews? It could easily be manipulated by companies paying reviewers for biased reviews. Same as sponsored YouTube reviewers.
It doesn't of course, but (going back to the RT comparison) it would be a major scandal if it were ever discovered that a well-known professional movie critic were being paid off by a studio for biased reviews. A website that focused on this could keep track of and remove the special status of reviewers caught doing that. Given that obtaining the "professional reviewer" status is quite expensive (relative to making an RT account) and such people have much more to lose than a random user, I tend to trust the RT critic score much more than the user score.
If it's possible to establish a similarly robust reputation system for user reviews with no external source of validation (e.g. a newspaper/journal hiring someone as a reviewer) I'm definitely all for that! That seems much more difficult to me though. But maybe if it continues as a niche community as you say, it could work. I hope it does.
To be honest I was hoping it was even more like RottenTomatoes, focused on aggregating credible professional reviews of products (like RT focuses on professional critics, though they do also have user reviews).