I don’t trust reviews at all at this point, from any service like those mentioned.
I will say that it’s diabolical that trust pilot closed the reviews. Meaning people can’t express there disappointment with the app, and that people might still trust it.
Trustpilot tries to weed out fake reviews. A huge influx of reviews all at once looks like fake reviews. And, to be fair, I imagine a chunk of those reviews are "fake" in that the reviewers never used the app. It's easier for Trustpilot to cut off new reviews for the time being than to deal with evaluating all these new reviews.
I don’t think they would know about the issue until the news broke. The average user would assume it is doing what it said, and the content creators were non the wiser either.
Aggregate scores on all sites have become untrustworthy, they're just poor first indicators now, but reading user reviews is still very much worth it imo. It just takes way longer to figure out whether a product is good/bad than it did 10 years ago. Once ai llm catch up with writing credible texts, then that method will be toast as well and then we'll be really screwed when choosing a product.
And I kinda understand why they're blocking new reviews. Trustpilot doesn't have a way to verify if the reviewers are actual product users, so their system is very vulnerable to review bombing. It's a catch 22 for them: damned if they suppress review bombs and damned if they don't.
Trustpilot's method could be better (Fe: they could allow reviewbombs to happen and show 2 scores, with and without), but what Google is doing is probably the worst possible way to go about it: On the chrome webstore page there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss. Atleast Trustpilot tells visitors to go check the news.
I actually can't believe that I've been defending Trustpilot, they've always had a repuation of selectively removing reviews, but well, Google is now worse than them.