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When buying something online, I make a habit of reading a couple of the negative reviews. Sometimes they're, "I meant to buy a toaster, and misclicked on this t
by semiel 11y ago
When buying something online, I make a habit of reading a couple of the negative reviews. Sometimes they're, "I meant to buy a toaster, and misclicked on this television instead. Makes poor toast. 2/5." But sometimes they're more like, "It worked great for two years, and then became sentient and strangled my pet fish. 2/5" Rating distributions only tell you part of the story.
- asddubs 11y agoanother really common thing is people rating the shipping instead of the product in their negative reviews
- atourgates 11y agoThough with some products this is helpful. I was just looking at air compressors on Amazon, and there were a few models that seemed to arrive damaged in the vast majority of reviews. Given that feedback, I might pay a bit of a premium to buy one locally.
- aninhumer 11y agoPerhaps, but it would still be far more helpful to tie that information to the distributor instead of the product. For all you know, those reviews were all due to a different distributor, and the one your were looking at would have been fine.
- sk5t 11y agoVery interesting--I noticed the same thing when shopping Amazon for air compressors specifically. Decided to roll the dice and received an undamaged Makita... and did not circle back to write a review.
- bduerst 11y agoSomeone did an article a while back about where you can use the reading comprehension level of reviewers to weight the Amazon star system.
- sevensor 11y agoInteresting --- I can pretty much look at a review from across the room and discriminate good from bad based on paragraph structure and the distribution of capital letters. If it looks like paragraphs you would see on the page of a book, it's probably well-reasoned enough to agree or disagree with. If it's ragged, with irregular capitalization, it rarely contains meaningful content. There's nothing there to evaluate.
- bduerst 11y agoDefinitely, it was something I looked into trying a while back. A chrome extension that would give different weighted amazon reviews based on a couple models, in line on Amazon's site, could be useful. I was also trying to figure out a way to do text mining of book samples for better book recommendations, based on my preferences, but getting the samples out of Amazon was a pain.
- vidarh 11y ago> "It worked great for two years, and then became sentient and strangled my pet fish. 2/5" Of course, for some that would be a 5/5.... Which is another reason to read the negative reviews: Sometimes they confirm that the only downsides to a product is stuff you don't care about or don't see as a negative.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoNegative reviews are the first thing I always read.
- tracker1 11y agoI usually go through a few of the reviews, more depending on the price and relative number of reviews... Of course with technical goods, you see a lot of reviews from people who don't know/understand what they were buying... (1/5 stars, this network adapter [PCI Ethernet] wouldn't work in my laptop) Other negative reviews are about dealing with amazon for returns, or wrong product shipment, which really shouldn't be under the product review. Though it's worth seeing some of that.