They are certainly flaws with tripadvisor, but I find it -- hands down -- the most useful way to find out information about hotels. I trust flyertalk comments more, but these tend to be limited to the chain hotels.

Before the web came along, you had to rely on guidebooks, which typically review only a small number of properties and are usually out-of-date. Tripadvisor gives you "real time" reviews from lots of travellers. It is far more reliable.

What I typically do is use a search engine like Kayak to find the lowest prices on hotels for my city for my dates. Not surprisingly, the cheapest hotels by star quality are cheap for a reason, and tend to get bad tripadvisor reviews! But I look for the outliers, the hotels with good rates AND good tripadvisor reviews. It's almost always a winning strategy. Generally, I won't consider a hotel that is not ranked in the top 20% to 25% in a city unless the price is phenomenal (and then I will read the reviews carefully to see why they aren't ranked higher). I have never had a bad experience at a tripadvisor hotel ranked in the top 10%, and very, very rarely one ranked in the top 20%. If EVERYBODY likes a place, it's almost certainly decent.

Overall, the only time I'm ever fooled by the reviews is with some small mid-priced "boutique" lodgings, especially b&b's, and especially overseas. I find that the people who review such properties have modest expectations and experiences, and tend to lavish praise on properties than a more experienced traveller would find ordinary. It's not that these places tend to be bad, but the reviews raise your expectations too high and you can therefore wind up being disappointed.