This reminds me of a similar incident with the Apple App Store, there were so many negative reviews that rather than Apple forcing the developer to fix the issue, they just deleted all the negative reviews.
I agree with the author, this makes the entire Valve review system pointless.
To play devils advocate, I'm sure the far more common case at Apple when thousands of negative reviews roll in very quickly is that some unscrupulous competitor paid a bot farm to knee cap them. Normally the anomaly detection goes off and the fake reviews are filtered.
On very rare occasion, someone somewhere will get a message from a Nigerian prince which they dismiss as spam because it looked just like all those other cases which were in fact spam. oops.
I look at the one star ones. If their complaints look reasonable and consistent then I know it is crap.
The only reviews to trust are from consumer reports and which? Who buy things retail and not free from the manufactures and they have been doing this for 60 years. Even then Read the reviews carefully and the user comments.
That’s a good point. I’m extraordinarily lazy about security. Maybe you could make one browser profile to look up products, and your usual one to buy them.
It's about the process. Amazon did not incomparable a versioning for the goods they sell. It's also not feasible to have a versioning for goods, as there are old versions still in the selling.
So, what solution do you propose for Amazon, the sellers and the producers?
Having the bad history visible is not a solution, as that product won't be sold anymore after..
I agree with the author, this makes the entire Valve review system pointless.