I remember when Google started requiring reviewers to publish their real names, 10 or 12 years ago (slightly before the concerted push behind Google+). I’m pret

I remember when Google started requiring reviewers to publish their real names, 10 or 12 years ago (slightly before the concerted push behind Google+). I’m pretty sure the review quality was better back then, though probably only because the scammers and spammers hadn’t yet flooded the system. You might think non-pseudonymous reviews would at least offer some protection against fake reviews, but it doesn’t seem to have helped in the slightest. The other thing that annoys me is that nobody seems to be doing any kind of normalisation or calibration of ratings -- we just get simple average ratings, maybe with outliers filtered out. Whatever happened to all the ratings algorithms that were developed for the Netflix Prize? That seemed like important work at the time, but it seems to have almost completely ignored.