I'm not too concerned about the fakes. The whole internet information system is full of fakes, but in the tailings is gold and its just a matter of using your own internet savy to tell one from the other - we would all be doing this on our daily internet travels I'm quite sure and barely thinking about it. Not a lot different to taking a straw poll at work about the merits of a local pub - you will be exposed to subjective opinion and, on the odd occasion, just outright lies, but one learns to tune the BS filter hehe.
I will base my travel/stays to unfamiliar places on TA reports and I'm not at all embaressed about that. I start with no knowledge at all, so even subjective opinion is valuable, so long as enough recent reports have been written to have half a statistical chance of getting an overall impression.
Like has been said in this thread, the obvious fakes are easy to spot. Posters with photos are very often high quality. Reading the reports, rather than just flipping through on the ratings (which I find less useful) gives a great insight.
tbh, I've not been disappointed yet, in all these years. I've missed some places that sounded great on the vendors own website yet got canned on TA (so won't know what they were really like), but am comforted by overall great experiences after filting available choices with a combination of vendor sell + TA reports.
After many years of doing this using the service I find that you can usually follow management change via TA. A place opens, does well, management changes, things slide and reports go bad, management changes again and reports start to pick up. but you need numbers of reports to make this service at all useful. Any hotel who's most recent reports are 2 years old and there are only 3 of them may be really really great, but its not worth my trouble finding that out ... I'll go where the outcome is more likely to be a known quantity/quality.
