[JohnFen]

Yes, these ratings problems aren't new, but they are more pervasive and less useful than ever before. For my part, I just refuse to give ratings or pay attention to them.

The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the people providing good and services.

[AlexandrB]

Agreed. And because ratings are so broken, there are multiple ways to game them. In addition to rarely leaving ratings, I rarely trust the damn things either.

In my opinion, ratings need to decay over time. For service workers like Uber drivers any rating >1 year old (or maybe less) should decay to 0 significance. For online retail like Amazon, maybe 2 years but not much longer than that. This not only allows people to "clean up their act" after bad ratings, but makes botting a recurring cost instead of a one-time investment.

[20after4]

Notably steam ratings on games are divided into "all time" and "recent" categories.

[supertrope]

App store ratings are gamed through bugging users to rate the app, cozying up to the app store maintainer who can delete reviews, or even Sybil attacks on competing apps.