A common observation of platforms where virtually anyone can write a review (Google places, Yelp, Amazon etc.) is; given reviews can and are being faked, their usefulness decreases. This decrease in usefulness in some cases can be enough for the reviews to be as useful as not having any reviews at all. If all products in a category achieve 4 or 5 star average review ratings what is the point of having them.
Taking the above to its natural conclusion results in the increased importance of trusted experts in a particular field for consumers to ascertain the best product. It is a reversion to the pre everyone review era and companies like Which are cheering / playing on this development.
Assuming that those platforms want people to trust the reviews there, they need to somehow root out the fake reviews from the real which is very tricky. Another solution might be trying to integrate expert opinions into their platform.
A company doing badly at the above I would argue is Deliveroo. Looking today at range of cuisine categories I saw very few restaurants averaging below 4 stars (they have a 5 star scale).
As an example looking at Thai restaurants only there 26 that deliver to me. The range of average star ratings is from 3.7 to 4.8. 15 out of 26 have ratings between 4.5 and 4.8. 9 have ratings between 4 and 4.4 and 2 have ratings less than 4. Given these stats I would suggest most people would avoid restaurants with less than 4 stars - therefore it becomes an imperative for restaurants on the app to achieve greater than 4 stars. This creates a strong incentive for reviews to be faked, from a restaurant's point of view, to bring their average rating up to an 4 star level. As more restaurants do this fewer restaurants exist in the 4 star or less category and a feedback mechanism is created - it becomes more important not to be in the 4 star or less category and so more reviews are faked until there are no restaurants at this level. At some point the cut off for what will be percieved as a weak restaurant average rating might be 4.5 at which point the game starts again...
It is a difficult problem to solve, rooting out fake reviews for Deliveroo is tricky / impossible given that a review may just be a star level without any written text where fakes can be easier to spot. My personal view is that if Deliveroo would like people to trust the reviews on their site they need to integrate expert opinion. This isn't without problems as you can see the potential for this to cause issues with your restaurant partners.
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