There is a recognized bias against positive reviews. And a bias in favor of negative reviews.
This means that honest people who post legitimate reviews could be falsely accused of being shills. How often does it happen? 3 time out of 10? 5 times out of 10? I don't know.
While a falsely accused member might not enjoy the negative attention, it's actually a good thing for the forum as a whole because it's done with the purpose of arriving at the truth. Members view the positive reviewer with suspicion - as they should - and then proceed to poke holes in their review as well as the reviewer, and then watch how the reviewer responds. Putting someone who's being deceitful on the defensive tends to knock them off their game, and that makes it much more difficult to hide the truth. The more members involved in the inquisition, the better it works.
Do the ends justify the means? If we arrive at the truth, how could it not? If there's a less belligerent means of doing this, I'm all ears. But so far, no one has been able to provide an alternative.
By the same token, dishonest people who post bogus negative reviews may not be called out at all. How often does this occur? 3/10 times? 5/10? I don't know either.
It happens. The system is not perfect. It is still arguably much better than the alternative.
Bogus negative reviews are a more difficult problem to deal with because the negative reviewer is given far more leeway. Fortunately, malevolent bogus negative reviews aren't common on Meso because it's so difficult to hide an association with a competing source.
Benevolent bogus reviews - where a member erroneously believe his gear is bunk - are more common but those reviews aren't unique to an uncensored forum.
So yes, the system not perfect but it is much better than the alternatives and I don't think that's arguable at all. There is nothing more objective than the truth, and its pursuit is always good no matter how messy the road one must follow to find it. Like Churchill's famous line about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others, permitting people to hear all the evidence and then decide for themselves is always better than the alternative of having a nanny decide for them.