This is also why I think the idea of combating fake reviews is not really viable. I sell a widget for $20 with real costs of $8. I expect positive reviews will

This is also why I think the idea of combating fake reviews is not really viable. I sell a widget for $20 with real costs of $8. I expect positive reviews will increase my ranking as well as purchase rate the order of let's say $5million+. I give my widget to 10,000 people on the condition that they agree to write a positive review for it. I just spent $80,000 (and then some change to get in contact with those 10,000 however) to make $5 million+. And those reviews are "real". The whole point is that as we enter into an ever more connected world popularity of views start to mean less and less because "popularity" can be so easily faked. Imagine once there are bots that can compellingly market products (or ideas/politicians/etc) in language to the standard of a Tweet, which isn't exactly a high bar. Suddenly now you could have literally millions of "people" advocating for something that perhaps only a handful actually want or believe in. It's also perhaps presumptuous to imply that this technological milestone has not already been reached. Even draconian ideas like trying to remove anonymity would likely do little to nothing since, as in the reviews example, people can simply be incentivized to play ball for what amounts to peanuts compared to the stakes for those doing the incentivizing.