A massive portion of Amazon’s value in the early years were product reviews. To this day they are proud of pioneering this aspect of e-commerce. I remember us

A massive portion of Amazon’s value in the early years were product reviews. To this day they are proud of pioneering this aspect of e-commerce. I remember using Amazon reviews in the 90s and 2000s even to weigh what I bought at bricks and mortar stores. It’s the same reason that sites like Yelp exist. Perhaps most of the reason they were honest early on was Amazon’s product selection early on was only books and media, and secondly there was a community where you could look at other people’s review history to determine if they were a shill and report it. That “community helpfulness” was common in early online communities. I’d say the majority of reviews were real through the mid-aughts. It was only after the Amazon marketplace became indistinguishable from the main site that the scale of sellers flipped the incentive structure towards cheating.