How to manage ratings system of my web app?

Question

I am making a website where in users would rate posts by other users, according to how useful they are. The posts will be about products - mobiles, tablets, and other personal consumer electronics only.

I want to make sure no trolling or slandering goes on, so I'll need a system that will make sure the good ratings of posts are genuine, and not just from people hired by those products' companies, or the bad ratings aren't from that product's company's competitors.

I like the StackOverflow system of upvotes and downvotes. But that requires a lot of moderation, and frankly, I don't have the resources for that. I mean, the SO community has a lot of trusted mods, and admins, but in my site, in the beginning only me and my friend who are making this site would be the ones to trust, in order to keep only legit posts and legit ratings in our database, for the public to value from.

EDIT 1: One solution I have in mind is, to include Facebook Like button as the only way to "upvote" a post. That way, leveraging the authenticity of users offered by Facebook (atleast to some extent), would benefit me. I'd count the number of likes and store them as upvotes for a particular post. There would be though, no downvotes. I'm thinking storing a ratio of "X users found it useful" as Viewers that liked this post/Total number of viewers of that post

Answer 1

There is a saying in Persian that says:

You will be fed, only as much as you pay.

Can you bring forward examples of great successe with little work? I don't see examples. Yeah, Facebook might start by one guy, but soon it had to hire like hundreds of employees. Google too. Instagram, Pinterest, event StackExchange hires almost two or three times a year as much as I see their job ads.

So, what I'm trying to say is that while even at the beginning you might try to find a rapid, cheap solution, you soon should replace it with something decent in case of any scale and sale. So, first suggestions is:

Have a plan for great success. Be proactive instead of reactive

But for now, I think your solution should be enough for you to start. And for the case that it doesn't have negative votes (negative likes), you can think of a zero-based reputation system.