Book reviews have become useless too since they are mostly all gushing 4 or 5 star reviews that, oddly, all seem to be composed by professional writers.
Aren’t the book reviews just farmed from Goodreads and splatted onto the book’s store page? Goodreads is kinda trash with all the “ARC provided by SomeWebsite.com” reviews. I’ve noticed that a ton of ARC reviews tend to be by people who don’t even care about the genre the book is in. This is especially true of Sci-Fi. Almost every ARC review for sci-fi books on Goodreads boils down to “I hate sci-fi but this book was free so I tried to read it and I still hate sci-fi.”
Often it's the author themselves using sock-puppet accounts. One of my claims to semi-fame is that I was one of the first to identify a particularly now-notorious YA author as a barely-literate review cheat. (I won't name him because he has spent almost twenty years since then trying to retaliate e.g. with fake legal threats and doxxing combined with some libel of his own, and I'm not interested in fighting another round when his frequent searches for his own name lead him here.) There's at least one Hall of Shame I know of for authors caught doing this, and it has many entries.
For books and many other things you have to simply ignore five-star reviews because the few that aren't fake are kind of clueless ("product arrived quickly"). Often you need to ignore one-star reviews as well because they're packed by competitors and people who couldn't read the directions. There's far more actual information to be found in the middle/mixed ratings.
This might not be comparible but on webfiction platforms review swaps are so common that reviews should not be trusted in any form anymore honestly. "I'll review your stuff if you review mine"
Or pseudo-writers who get paid a pittance for stringing the same short, flattering phrases together, again and again. With a little practice, it gets easy to spot the repetitive cadence of the shills.
