[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.