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by ravenstine
845 days ago
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It's because online reviews are a done deal. A reviews site is one of the easiest thing a novice programmer can build. However, there's little money in the endeavor unless it's rigged in one way or another. The profit is in taking money from companies begging you to ban "trolls", outright manipulating aggregate ratings and how reviews are sorted, or waiting for some relevant company with a conflict of interest to buy you out (Rotten Tomatoes itself being an example of this). There is of course the issue of deterring bots. |
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Building review sites is the easy part of it, that isn't preventing anything due to competition (like a programmer creating blog software to compete with Wordpress, building it is the easiest part; or creating an online store / shopping cart service to compete with Shopify). Building it does nothing of consequence. Acquiring hundreds of thousands of high quality product reviews is extraordinarily difficult, and then you have to keep them coming in forever at that high quality.
That these things are easy to build at a basic level, poses absolutely zero challenge to Wordpress or Shopify et al. I'm not exaggerating, it threatens them not in the least, because it's meaningless. It doesn't matter if someone can build an Uber clone in N months, they won't be able to do the actual hard part of competing with Uber.