If the site becomes influential, brands will be motivated to pollute the source data, ruining both the usefulness of Reddit for reviews and Reddit communities as a whole.

There is also the fact that as you become more influential the value of your influence increases proportionately. The offers for "selling out" just keep growing bigger as you grow more popular. It also becomes easier to convince yourself that you're not really "selling out" if you just take money for this or that. And, like any business, of course you do need to monetize somewhere.

It's just an unfortunate alignment that goes against the core thesis of the (great!) idea.

Aren't reddit reviews already influential, isn't that why the site exists in the first place? If you're right, then it follows that this is already probably happening :)

that was the first thing I thought of. I know the owner means well but if reddit becomes a bigger target that it already is for mass marketers then the value of the reviews there become even less important as marketers dilute the reviews and it becomes a spiral into uselessness. Maybe it could be mitigated by adding things like "commenter history" and give commenters that have been around for a while with more comments a heavier weight that news accounts that seem to only post in one or two subreddits a couple of times and then disappear. Maybe somethings like

weight ~= max(num_months_existencenum_commentscomment_score, 0 account not active in the past year) or somesuch, obviously adjusted.

Looria's ranking algorithm has no effect on what happens to the actual quality of content for Reddit users. Volunteer moderators cannot be expected to keep up with paid bot programmers. Paying objective moderators is essentially impossible, and the whole business model is built on harvesting review data for free anyway

Maybe you can join a niche subreddit that does the same exact thing. It needs more users: https://www.reddit.com/r/shouldibuythisproduct/