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The Anna Karenina principle [0] of reviews. "All 5-star reviews are alike; each 1-star review is unhappy in its own way." I love it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

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But a business can just as easily pay for fake negative reviews of competitors.

While this is true, being so specific about something negative that someone calls them out is much more risky than the useless 1 star rating with comment "product did not work as expected". Low quality comments are almost never considered valid by those that pour over the comments.

But that could only ever be worthwhile in markets with very few competitors. But when there is only a low number of competitors, customers usually have better ways to form an opinion than internet reviews.

The only exceptions are cases where customers are faced with a wide range of vendors, but only tiny, well-delineated subsets are in actual competition. Restaurants serving travelers in a small town would be an example.

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