[arcturus17]

The way to solve this would be to have an overlay everywhere, such as the one that tha browser extensions afford where you can see a layer of reviews that are truly independent.

Maybe AR will open a new door there... I know it would be an extremely hard problem to solve - it might involve cutting-edge techniques in AR, AI, computer vision and so on - but I think there might be a billion dollar market there.

The pain certainly exists as reviews could be useful, but they're trash almost everywhere (Uber, AirBnB, Google, Amazon, Deliveroo, etc.) due to platform-owner incentives.

[RangerScience]

Interesting. I wouldn't try to do this with "true" AR (magic leap / hololens) - not enough benefit - but just a location aware layer would do it.

Seems like you'd want to pair it with a browser extension (want to avoid making that booking in the first place), and the back-end engineering is very similar to what (IMO/AFAIK) you'd need to support similar reality overlays in "true" AR.

[arcturus17]

I mention AR because browser extensions would work well on the web, but you'd only be able to do the same on mobile with a system that cooperates, and there's a slim chance that Apple and Google - esp. the latter - would allow something of the sort to materialize. Plus of course with AR you could take it to the streets!

As for the business model of this independent platform, one could still make a ton of money out of it as long as its revenue-generating incentives were disaligned from the review scores, and I really think that's not such a hard problem to solve.

[RangerScience]

Ohhh. Phone as browser in physical space, AR as extendible medium.... I like.

For the AR-ish part... Oh, widgets! Right? Like clock, or weather, or the news thing. Constantly (modulo performance) update what you're showing on the widget based on location. Or dynamic notifications; "this is how many reviewed locations we know of at this location".