I think I agree that incentivized reviews aren’t necessarily bad (assuming the incentive isn’t tied to a certain star level). Amazon has a real opportunity to

I think I agree that incentivized reviews aren’t necessarily bad (assuming the incentive isn’t tied to a certain star level). Amazon has a real opportunity to legitimize and enable sellers to offer incentivized reviews on their platform. I’m not sure how Amazon Vine ever worked, but I envision an interface almost similar to AdWords, where sellers can try and narrow down their target audience and offer a select sample an incentive to review, inline with search listings. Since amazon would know about serial reviewers as well as how critical they are based on prior reviews, they could finely tune who is offered the incentive. I can easily imagine a world where these Amazon ordained incentivized reviews become far more trustworthy than ordinary ones. After all, if a product is good why wouldn’t the seller get a few incentivized reviews through Amazon?