The point: Angi reviews don't mean much, as they allow providers to "solicit offline reviews" which can come from literally anywhere, include the providers themselves!
Angi and Reviews
After I opened a dispute with Angi, they attempted to get Isaiah Armstrong to respond but were not successful. I received this email a short time later:
Thank you for utilizing the Angi complaint resolution service. We have attempted to contact Armstrong Painting & Construction about your complaint.
Unfortunately, we have not been able to elicit any response from this company regarding your complaint. Because the company did not respond to us in writing, they will be placed into our Penalty Box where they will remain in the Penalty Box status indefinitely until they respond to your complaint. While in the Penalty Box, companies are no longer available to our members in a category search. Your review will remain on the company's profile to warn other members about your experience.
But then, a curious thing happened.
On one day, 7/22/2021, Armstrong Painting & Construction received six five-star reviews, with another following shortly thereafter. And all of the reviews looked very similar. Most don’t mention what service Isaiah Armstrong actually provided for them and in general look pretty suspicious. But one specifically caught my eye:
What caught my eye? The 03. at the beginning. I am a software engineer, and I
am used to looking for patterns in data and things that just don’t “look right.”
And the 03. there is a big clue to something weird going on. A normal human
being filling out that form wouldn’t put 03. there because there is no
reason to. That data looks like it was copied from another document or some
other source.
At first I thought that it was a bot issue or an issue with Isaiah Armstrong buying reviews. As anyone who’s been online for long enough knows, reviews can be trivially bought. But what actually happens is so much worse than run-of-the-mill overseas bot review stuffing. It appears that Angi not only allow, but encourages review stuffing.
I raised the curious review issue with the rep I was working with on a phone call, and the representative let slip that Angi allows contractors to “solicit offline reviews” and, by some unknown means, get them on their contractor page. This means that, functionally, no review on Angi can be trusted, because you have no idea whether the review came from an actual Angi user, a “contractor solicited review” that the contractor provided, or even (as I believe is likely the case here) a review Isaiah Armstrong either just made up or had a friend or associate do for him. Contractors are, more or less, given complete control over their pages on Angi, and that the entire page should be viewed as nothing more than an advertisement, not a user-driven page providing actual, unbiased user reviews.
This is, at the very least, extremely problematic. Angi’s website gives the impression that reviews are unbiased and provided by Angi’s own users. If what I was told by the representative is true, by allowing this “offline review” process, that means that provider reviews are not unbiased and not provided by Angi’s own users.
At this point, Angi certainly appears to be nothing more than a contractor marketplace, an advertising company collecting user data and selling that data to contractors. They are essentially nothing more than lead generation for contractors. How do I know this?