Reviews should not be written for pay, or for other rewards or compensation unless both positive and negative reviews are rewarded
Well, nobody observes this rule when it comes to bad reviews. Therefore I advice to ignore this what they call rating system completely because its too easy to game.
Couple of months ago I purchased a product where the seller said in the description that you will get a few money back when you leave a review. I gave a 3 star review because the product was not as advertised and it had a lot of texture flickering. In a word, it looked like a piece of crap and since it was not possible to see it inworld before buying it, i had to contact the seller afterwards and asked if its possible to fix at least all the flickering. He just said the item is modifiable so i can fix it myself.
And this made me give 3 stars.Well this kind of customer service usually deserves 1 star. But im always trying to be fair. And 3stars is not that bad. But after that i contacted this seller again and asked for the cash back because i left a review. I got Nothing!
This is my experience with bribes for reviews and im sure most of them act the same way. The product got flagged by me because i knew about this rule in the tos. But nothing happened!
Instead, Two days later my review was gone. Seems it was flagged by the seller and the dense LL trainee deleted the review finally. I feel ripped off all along. From the seller and from the LINDEN LAB !!
To sum up i can say, everybody is ignoring everything here and the LL lost the control. So the question is not if its unethical or ethical, its rather the question if this rating system makes sense at all. Im a customer and when i see that someone offers rewards for reviews , i would never trust the given reviews cause the reason for these reviews is mostly the reward and rarely the satisfaction.