Oddbean

The problem is that for an informed opinion, your social graph should at least rate a few of these things and assuming Dunbar's Number as the number of relevant follows you might reasonably have, if you reduce that by shared interests you quickly fail to find any relevant opinions. What are the chances that any of them has been to that other country, to that other town and visited any of those 10% of still available hotel rooms you can find for your travel dates? Or even more generic items like headphones ... how many of them have tested headphones that are still on the market in your town ... and taken the time to write reviews? Google has the social graph and uses it on the few occasions there is a match but it's few and far between.

It's a very good point. Those billions of reviews globally, if you exclude fakes and then divide by the numbers of products out there you get maybe 100 reviews per popular product (median number of reviews for all products is definitely zero). How many of those 100 reviews would be in my wot circle? If the 100 people I follow posted 100 reviews each, I would only be considering maybe 0.01% of all popular products. That doesn't seem good. The solution could be a wider wot circle, and start from niche, and more reviews. If I knew my reviews wouldn't be lost in some corporate database, I might have posted more of them. Also it will probably vary based on physical proximity to my contract list members. They would probably review a lot of local products, but not much in Dubai or on Alibaba. So maybe travel is not the best place to start.

Also wrt 'headphones' example. Instead of looking through my wot circle for reviews, I could post 'please help me choose headphones' message that could propagate through my wot circle until some experts see it. They could reply with 'here is a one liner big advice, and here are a couple links for you to read, and if you want to hop on a call - schedule here and it will be 5000 sats'. This might turn out as a better solution to 'help me buy headphones' problem than trying to fix fake reviews or increase the review density in my wot.