> No one trusts these review companies actually.

Most people do trust them, but shouldn't.

Actually you are right, sorry. I was exaggerating but it is true that it is mostly the naive/average users of internet that do place any significant credibility in online reviews

I'd say, like most online stuff, I put some weight into them in the absence of other information, but would not really rely on them for a high impact decision. When we're talking about a restaurant or something, there's only so much effort you can put in to confirming past performance before you're better off just trying it. Which is guess is what some places are banking on, e.g. those that rely on reviews to drive customers in, as opposed to catering to community or regulars

Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?

Only if it was driven by a non-profit org I guess

Consumer Reports has entered the chat

Consumer Reports has well known biases though, which colors their reviews. For example, they tend to rank American car companies unfairly low. Their vehicle issue score isn't weighted - trouble linking phone to infotainment is the same as engine exploding. Cars with more tech -> lower scores, even if they're mechanically flawless.

Honda has moved down their rankings due to reliability problems with their infotainment systems. Lumping transmission failure at 50,000 miles with some audio system breaking is too coarse.

Perhaps a site that included both reviews of companies and (paid) job postings from reviewed companies could survive.

Of course misbehaving companies would probably stop spending there, but that might not be a bad thing.

Wouldn't that set up a conflict of interest for the review site? I'd trust such a site even less than normal (and normal is pretty close to not at all).

Sure, in kind of the same way that steam has a conflict of interest with reviews for games. But I tend to trust steam reviews at least generally, in fact more than I do most reviews on products I am looking at.

It is possible to exist in this space with a potential conflict, as long as you position yourself appropriately. If your interest is to serve "decent" companies by providing them with interested candidates, it can work.

It'll work fine until the site decides chasing profit is more important than integrity of the system, so probably right around the time they're looking for more funding.

At the same time, unfortunately we will have a hard time finding companies that will actually thrive on that website, since a staggering majority of them are just ridden with crooks in the management layer and above.

True, though this should increase the value of the listings that remain. Companies that can hold their own here gain the value of being respected in the community.

Not a review site, but networks of people I trust directly is about the only thing that works. As soon as this grows beyond the trust I have in the network, the proxy trust tapers off quickly. That's the problem with something like glassdoor.

That’s why the most lucrative thing is to get people to ‘connect’ their networks digitally on social media and manipulate them. I hope we see a return to irl networks

I’m designing a worker cooperative owned and self hosted distributed solution

https://www.productreview.com.au/ is the only site I've ever seen that does a good job at user reviews. Each review has to be accompanied by a verifiable receipt.

Here's their operating model, which sounds like a mix of paid brand manager subscriptions and advertising: https://support.productreview.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/36000...

> verifiable receipt

lol. the current amazon scam is to purchase the product (ship to a random address to defeat “common address” detection) then leave the fake review

Interesting but not relevant here - they require a photo of a physical receipt, and they're hand reviewed. Anything is scammable given enough effort though, no doubt.

that’s exactly the amazon scam, executed with a verified receipt and “hand reviewed”. or did you mean, manually moderated? that’s no obstacle.

for amazon the receipt is guaranteed authentic as the product will have been verifiably purchased on amazon. for a 3p site receipts can be trivially fabricated

Btw how do they detect fake receipts, if at all?

I'm wondering as there are quite a handful of fake receipt generators on the internet

Yes. With a paid subscriber base and no advertising their interests would be aligned with the reader's. If you're not paying for the review they will ultimately build loyalty toward their funders.

Clearly the solution is a review company for review companies.

Ah yes, the Coast Guard will police the police!

Talking to some friends who are job-seeking, I do know they check them.

Not so much positive reviews, but negative reviews are believed.

> No one trusts these review companies

It's not so much that I'd read the reviews, but ranking of results is fatally flawed thanks to these practices.

For many queries (restaurant in town X, book in genre Y) there are simply so many candidate results that ranking is the one and only thing to determine a (much, MUCH) smaller candidate set that the customer might actually engage with. How often do you click through to page 2 of your search results?