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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2102 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 8, 2026

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Anyone else feel like Google maps reviews (and most other online review systems) have become totally worthless the last few years? It seems like every single place has overwhelmingly 5 star reviews, no matter how bad it is. I can't tell if it's bots, paid reviewers, or just a weird culture where people think they're "being nice" by leaving a 5 star review. Either way, i no longer trust them at all.

Reviews in general have that problem, but if you focus on the text instead of the score you can usually get some useful information. Ignore the Karens complaining about rude employees or the manager not taking their problems seriously, or the 5 star reviews probably prompted by employees or bots and focus on unique information. A Google Maps review recently warned me off an automated carwash that was malfunctioning on one side, with the reviewer having pictures of his car half washed as proof.

It mostly comes up when I'm trying to find a place in a city i haven't been before. So I'm skimming through hundreds of reviews accross dozens of different places, and they all seem to be people who have never eaten at a restaurant before so they're just dazzled by the concept of having someone bring food to them in exchange for money.

An acquaintance of mine was bilked out of a five-figure some by a shady contractor a few years ago. After fighting with him in court for two years, she finally agreed to settle. He returned a tenth of what he stole, and in exchange, he demanded that she change her one-star Google review to a five-star. I mentioned this story to a friend of mine who works in a related field, and he said he’s seen that same scenario play out several times before. There’s unfortunately just not much anyone can do to prevent such behavior.

A tenth of a five-figure sum? So a few thousand dollars? Surely she spent more on 2 years of legal action than that.

Should have told him to suck a fat one, and leave the 1-star review.

My understanding is that the sum he returned pretty much paid her legal fees, and that was it. Her family was pissed that she settled for basically nothing, but she felt she “just had to move on.”

Yeah that’s less than nothing, unless she values her time and sanity at zero.

If the story is accurate as you say, I’d have been going to every local news station, calling up his competitors to let them know how to market against him, maybe buy a billboard or two myself…

They are still useful. However you must sort by "new" and not the default recommendation! This is a much more random sample. As always, the 2-4 star reviews are also very useful. The main thing I wish they would include is whether or not the place solicits reviews. This is doubly true for non-restaurant reviews, which are by far the lowest reliability.

Also, it's more useful to think of the reviews in "bands", or relative to others, rather than a point estimate. A 4.6 restaurant is going to be meaningfully better than a 4.1 restaurant nearly 100% of the time. But a 4.4 vs a 4.2? I wouldn't ever make a decision based mostly on that.

Reviews as a whole have become fairly useless due to bots and paid shills. Even forums like Buy it For Life have been seeing hints of bots posting to fluff a product.

The best way to wade through the grey sludge I've found is to focus on 4-star reviews, but we'll see how long that lasts.

The details in the 1-star reviews' text can sometimes be helpful; just ignore the ones where the reviewer's an idiot and see what legitimate complaints are left. But yeah, uncalibrated numeric ratings are worthless.

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