The most frustrating thing now is seeing a product >4.5 stars, but going to the reviews and all the most recent ones are 1/2.

Often I'll find that all the five star reviews describe a completely different product.

That's the trick where the seller replaces a good product's name, description and picture, which effectively transfers all existing(positive) reviews to a different product. Which only shows how many people don't look at a single review if the score is good enough.

The other trick that Amazon doesn't give a damn about is using the mechanism meant for different product colors and sizes to combine multiple products into a shared entry, which mixes all the reviews together and makes it basically impossible for the customer to see the score for each individual item.

As far as I can tell Amazon's only reaction was to start banning customers who returned too many products. I wonder why.

Steam has done something smart here by displaying both the total score and a recent trend score, so you can see if recent changes has made the game better or worse.

The problem is that a lot of people don't bother sending back stuff because it's too much of a hazzle, and it's unlikely that any of the other products on Amazon are any better. You already know that you aren't really going to get some high quality product for 19.99€. You still check the reviews to try to get the best quality product, but in reality you already know the product is going to be crap.

I deal with this by explicitly seeking sub-5 reviews. I read them to see if criticisms mentioned bother me. I used to think I was a little paranoid, but now I'm going to double down on this.

Unironically good advice I got a few years ago was to only ever read the 3-star reviews, because they're the most informative and balanced.

It's true. Often reviews are split between excited and outraged people. Those who write 'yellow' (as opposed to green or red) reviews on Metacritic are often those who can see nuance, weigh pros and cons.

They are mostly just passing all the return costs off to the 3rd party sellers that sell most of their products these days. So it's no sweat off their back as long as they can be good enough to keep you coming back.

Returns are paid by third party sellers not by Amazon (unless it's one of the ~20% of products actually sold directly by Amazon.

The people actually gaming the reviews? Fantastic!

Not my experience with books at least which is about all I buy on Amazon. I've come across plenty of negative reviews. A book's probably worth buying if it appears to meet the buyer's expectations culled from something like half a dozen reviews or more from disparate sources.