It looks like the tech industry will gradually make these problems go away, as the 5 star rating systems with all their bias and calibration problems are replaced with the simpler thumbs up and thumbs down systems, and even the thumbs downs are replaced with "not interested, please stop showing me things like this". The rating systems don't really help anything go viral, which is more critical to the goal of building more effective recommendation mills. Why bother giving a letter grade when making a sale is a pass/fail proposition?
Ultimately this should encourage more variety in the ecosystem, since the algorithms can better recommend things "for readers like you" rather than feed you the same list of 5-star top sellers that were easily gamed in all the ways you described above.
It looks like the tech industry will gradually make these problems go away, as the 5 star rating systems with all their bias and calibration problems are replaced with the simpler thumbs up and thumbs down systems, and even the thumbs downs are replaced with "not interested, please stop showing me things like this". The rating systems don't really help anything go viral, which is more critical to the goal of building more effective recommendation mills. Why bother giving a letter grade when making a sale is a pass/fail proposition?
Ultimately this should encourage more variety in the ecosystem, since the algorithms can better recommend things "for readers like you" rather than feed you the same list of 5-star top sellers that were easily gamed in all the ways you described above.