The Fake Review Crisis

For businesses around the world, online reviews are critical for attracting customers, maintaining reputation, and making operational decisions driven by user feedback. However, the current landscape of review platforms and aggregators is fundamentally flawed:

• Lack of transparency: Centralized databases obscure how reviews are vetted, validated, and displayed - enabling manipulation through opaque ranking algorithms, fake reviews, selective censorship, and pay-to-play schemes.

• Fragmented insights: With reviews scattered across siloed platforms like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, and more, businesses lack unified cross-platform data to derive holistic customer intelligence. This fragmentation creates information asymmetries.

• Credibility crisis: Fake reviews run rampant due to low economic costs/barriers to entry, as well as misaligned incentives that fail to deter abuse by bad actors looking to artificially inflate or suppress ratings.

This trajectory has eroded consumer trust in reviews while exposing businesses to tremendous risks like reputation damage, suboptimal pricing/operations, customer churn, legal issues, and inflated costs from fake review farms. A new review paradigm built on decentralized principles is desperately needed.