A long time ago, in this galaxy (though it hardly feels like it), there was Myspace. Remember Myspace? It came before Yelp and TripAdvisor, before blogging was a thing and before Facebook took over the online market. Now try to remember before Myspace if you can — those were the wild and prehistoric days of RateItAll.com, Deja.com and Epinions.com

And what was unique about these platforms when they appeared in the late 90s? An important social trend was established, known as “online reviews.” This was the beginning of the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, in which traditional publication practices gave way to websites principally powered by user-generated content.

By January of 2000, these pioneering sites had accumulated over 1 million reviews on everything from products to movies and sports teams.

Before sites like these (now we’re really diving into the dark ages), product reviews had been almost exclusively written by professionals — like you would see in a newspaper, magazine or in the back of a book. There was a lot of disagreement about whether consumer-authored reviews could be trusted. Many people were skeptical that they would be useful and credible.

It turns out that the skeptics had a point.

Sites like Epinions met their fate at the hands e-commerce giants like Amazon and social media megaliths like Facebook, but we now know that consumer reviews are a vital part of the information ecosystem. A quick look at Alexa’s top U.S. websites by traffic proves this point. All of them depend either substantially or exclusively on third-party or user-generated content.

Now let’s fast-forward to the present day. While user review platforms have established their importance online, they have also demonstrated one of their greatest flaws that the skeptics warned us about: they can’t necessarily be trusted. Many reviews are real and honest, but some are fake or have been manipulated in some other way by businesses that want to look good and make their competitors look bad. The problem is that there’s no way of knowing what’s real and what’s not. So today’s reviews should be taken with a grain of salt.

Now there’s a new innovator in town called YINC. YINC is providing the next evolutionary stepping stone for the online service sector by making reviews 100% real, accurate and trustworthy in two main ways: First, YINC uses blockchain technology to ensure that each review and attached to a completed transaction and makes them unalterable. Second, YINC doesn’t allow service providers to hire themselves, making it impossible for them to post fake reviews about themselves.

After two decades of development, user review platforms have finally matured and been perfected, culminating in YINC, where you can feel at ease searching for a provider for whatever service you need completed.