Do you remember how people used to ship blocks of ice a century ago? It was a massive industry.
Thousands of pounds shipped over thousands of miles of water. A miracle for its time. The improvements in food storage that came afterward were nothing short of a marvel. The ability to preserve food, to hold it in statis; it bought people time to ship and eat food (a very precious commodity indeed).
Looking back now and it seems strange. So much effort for so little gain, relative to what we're capable of doing now. Plug in a refrigerator and you're done. Ice cold for a lifetime.
There's still a lot of effort going on, but much of it is hidden—a landscape of electrical grids, mathematics, steel and gold mined from the Earth to create the technology in our kitchens.
Most people probably didn't even know things could be much better; that's all they ever knew. The leap to refrigeration was by no means an easy or obvious one. And it seemed to happened slowly as the infrastructure was slowly built up bit by bit over the course of a few decades.
Review systems remind me of the ice shipping industry: A marvel for its time, but only for its time. The ability to filter information about locations and products; to make informed choices by aggregating a large set of human opinions is remarkable. You can make choices about things you've never experienced, across a wide variety of domains: Amazon, Airbnb, the App Store, Shopify, Google Play.
But it's slow. It's tedious and subject to error. It's easy to miss great insights. It's the lowest common denominator for gaining information about a product, subject to manipulation and noise.
Nowadays, whenever I go to a 5-star review website, I'm thankful for the information when I can get it, but I always wonder when my refrigerator is going to arrive.