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But how can you tell whether a rating is fake? As a player, you can't even see them, as a dev, you just get given a number. 

Depends on the cause of the fakeness. If the rating is for the wrong reason, it is indistinguishable and it is debateable, if the rating is even wrong. Just because I do not like puzzles makes my 1 star rating not invalid. But why would I bother to rate or play a puzzle at all. At worst the algorithm now thinks, I like puzzles in general and populates my suggestions with other puzzles.

But fake ratings are usually made with fake accounts. A dev sees who rates. If the devs looks at several incoming ratings and they are from new accounts with 0-1 follows, it is quite clear. One just does not get a buch of 1 star ratings out of nowhere without reason. Either people think your latest update sucked, or you are targetted by fake ratings.

A single fake rating is of course not noticeable. But a single fake rating is not what will cause problems.

Also, if a dev can see the pattern, the itch system can do so as well. And this goes for fake positive ratings as well. There are extensive ratings discussions in and about jams. I think itch knows how the rating system works, and where the flaws are and how to tackle them.

You seem to think that people write comments in their ratings. They do not. Look at https://itch.io/feed?filter=ratings I scrolled quite long to see some comments. Maybe 1 in 50 or less writes a review.

Also, any player has all the right to vote on every game. Otherwise you can forget the rating system completely. If your alt right choses to rate a lgtb game, all the bad for him. He now will have lgbt content in his suggestions. I know, because something similar happened to me. I voted on a game that had a certain tag and suddendly games with that tag were suggested to me, only I do not like that tag. I sat it out and rated different games. Others might chose to 1 star those games. It is not very fair, but you cannot implement any qualification test, if someone is eligble to vote on certain content. Chosing to voice an opinion is a big hurdle, and the proof is the many games that have 0 ratings.

If you suspect a hater, you can report the account. Abusing the rating system is very likely against the tos. So if that person did vote on dozens or hundreds of games, just to deal out 1 stars, they will take action. But if anyone chose to 1 star your game specifically, even if they just did not like your username, that is their right in the current system. And if that person was the only one that could be bothered to vote on your game, maybe your game deserves that 1 star. But if your game is good or even mediocre, that 1 star will not matter. 10 ratings with an average of 5.0 look equally suspicious.

And to add to it, the target audience usually is smart enough to know, that certain content will get hate votes. It is almost expected. I would be suspicous to see a game with AI content, that has 5.0 average, for example.

I think that developers should have the option to enforce "review required" when leaving ratings, if they choose. This isn't gonna be a full solution, but it's at least something.

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111eleven booo stupid stupid.

To paraphrase it, this will happen if you do naive requirements like that. A public review system might be a good idea, but never force the general audience to do things. It will get bad. At the very least, even less people would rate the game. And others might rate it down out of spite for forcing to write something in the rating.

With public reviews you then could do things like Steam or Amazon and show a veryfied purchase. But you do not even need an account to buy on Itch. Or play the free stuff.

They could also do silent stuff in the background and count verified purchases and verified downloads differently. But in the end, why bother. There are just not enough ratings for most games to justify it. And for the games with many votes, it does not matter. And for people abusing the system, those can get cought by the system (and hopefully this is done and they just do not talk about it.)

Currently you could get a 1 star review and never know why.

Well. You also do not know why you would get a 5 star rating. To stay with the lgbt example, maybe someone interested in the topic gave you a sympathy vote and not because your game is any good. That there are haters is known, so someone might have felt obligated "to even the odds". This happens all the time in real world. Virtue signalling is one form of the phenomenon. Rating certain games up another. Rating up indie games for that matter, just because they are indie. It is discrimination. A rating not because of the merit of the game, but because of other stuff.

but given how the review system is at the moment can you actually guarantee that it doesn't happen

My opinion is, that a guarantee is not necessary. If someone abuses the system, that can be dealt with. All other cases are just people being people. And since most do not bother to rate anyways, each vote is in itself a positive thing. Singular outliers are to be expected in any statistical thing. It evens out. Your 1 star rating will be canceled by a sympathy 5 star rating. And the 3 star rating for your run of the mill game that would be accurate is ignored. (That was just for the sake of argument, I have of course no idea if the game would be any good, but chances are, it is an indie game that is not popular/professional enough to be released on Steam, while on the scale of indie hobby games it might be 6/5)

On the rare occasion that I get words in my ratings, they're often written for an audience of some sort, so I get the feeling the few people who do actually leave words in their reviews do actually think someone other than the developer might read them.

People do get confused by this a lot. But actually, there are public ratings and reviews. You just cannot see them from the game page. Visit the global feed and click ratings. Users have to have that enabled (or not disabled) in their settings. Just as the little comment box says, it is for your followers and for the developer. Only most regular users do not have followers ;-)

That requirement for rating power is a nice idea on paper. But you talk about abuse of the system and you can bet, if someone wants to give you a bad rating or someone wants to fake good ratings, they will find a way. It would only work a little bit for paid games and negative ratings.

In the meantime you make the hurdle to give ratings bigger for all and players give very few ratings as it is.

A better implementation of systematic rating abuse detection would be more benefitial, I think.

Any rating system has its flaws. The biggest complaint people on Steam seem to have, is the inability to give a neutral rating. They only have negative or positive. The rating system on Amazon is flawed because they do not fight bought ratings enough. The rating system on eBay is flawed (or was, been some time since I used that site), because big sellers have ways to remove bad ratings.

So my guess is, no matter what would be changed to make it better on Itch, it would open another way for it to be worse.