This couldn't happen with dislikes. You could give only one dislike with one account.
This may seem bad, considering the bots, but if you compare it to the ability to inflict what is essenctially 20 dislikes with one account where rating scale is involved, that's still a lesser evil.
While I can agree that this is generally true, the effort to spin up 1 vs 20 accounts is a matter of a few minutes on google + SH. Sure, the effort might be higher, but malicious intent happens regardless.
Reviews don't even have to be left, they can simply be ratings that are added, to further obfuscate the problem.
... the negative reviews are encouraged, and conflict is necessary.
I bomb your story, then you bomb mine, then you create a second account to double down, then I create a new account to double down ...
This happens rarely, but it does happen. Reporting and moving on is the best thing to do. If you're advocating for breaking the rules to harm other people, I can't stand with that. Retaliation is also just breaking the rules and is wrong. I thought someone who hated royalroad for the exact reason of coordinated attacks would also feel that way, but I guess not, and you're just a hypocrite.
Ideally, there is a system in place to weight reviews based on prior review accuracy and number of prior reviews. This not only solves fresh account botting, but also helps to lower the influence of accounts that only give 5 stars or 1 stars, or have little to no reviews other than one story (After all, how can we know how good that person is at reviewing without other reviews to compare to?)
In an ideal world, honest actors are the only reviews that matter, and malicious actors reviews mean nothing. While it's not possible to reach that ideal, it's possible to approximate it. With algorithmic attention weighting, it'd be very costly to review bomb a single story with a bot network, and could cost years of work if the review bomb was found out. You'd have to coordinate dozen of bot accounts of hundreds of other stories in order to build up their reputation and accuracy rating, and if the review bomb was spotted, the whole network and all that work would get taken down.
That said, every review system stems it's own cultural problems around it. Amazon's system encourages sellers to incentivize buyers to leave positive reviews with monetary incentives. Steam's system is easy to fool for small number of reviewed games; there are numerous accounts of 'high rated' games that sell for hundreds as scams, that after two or three purchases get deleted, but they've already made their money back.
Even the system I've prescribed would likely result in authors needing to actively reach out to 'High rated reviewers' in order to get a settled rating early. Basically, review threads would become much more common, where a select number of people's opinions would be worth much more than random users (even if their opinion is proven to be more accurate on average, that still puts undue power in random people's hands). Basically, it'd create a reviewer aristocracy, but I'd argue that's probably better than either of the other systems.
In lieu of that, the up/down rating is probably better than 1-5 stars, but steam has also had review bombs happen, so the system isn't immune to malicious actors, it just helps limit the harm to mediocre creators in some contexts.
