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I've decided and tried to remember that you pretty much can't trust ANY online reviews of ANYTHING. The dream of the internet is over.

https://www.recode.net/2018/3/18/16581030/mattress-reviews-n...

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To be able to trust random Internet users was never a good dream because cheap identity is the Internet's default. (Not necessarily a bad one.) More surprising than reviews regressing to the mean is that it took them so long. Why?

Agreeing with you, I guess the weird thing is that it WORKED for 20 years or so!

I'm sure people have written a lot on this. I think some of it is because most people actually _are_ interested in treating each other respectfully, and the internet was smaller, with less opportunities for making money (at one point enforced anti-commercial in fact), and more homogenous (for better or worse).

If your dream of the internet was centered around reliable product reviews I feel bad for you

Nah, more like based on decentralized horizontal communication between real people forming 'virtual communities', right? For a couple decades it seemed like that. Are you old enough to remember the internet utopianism? Not on product reviews specifically, but on finding strangers you strangely could trust.

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