the point is that (1) the reviews are biased. even if the reviewer tries to be truthful, the fact that they received the item for free may impact their rating.

the point is that (1) the reviews are biased. even if the reviewer tries to be truthful, the fact that they received the item for free may impact their rating. the fact that at the few samples i checked, every rating was 5 stars, suggests as much to me. this is uncontroversial (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias). this is separate from the issue that the reviewers themselves are "selected" (is this algorithm totally transparent? is it purely based on their helpfulness rating?) creating a biased pool of reviews as well (2) the reviews, despite having a subtitle indicating that they are part of the vine program, look and read in every other way like a normal review. it was not until i had read several reviews before i noticed the vine program disclaimer. also the star rating includes these vine reviews, which generally serve as an at-a-glance rating for an item. no doubt the intent is to make the origin of these reviews non-obvious to the casual observer. in other words, it is misleading. it may not be a new phenomenon, and surely it happens in other domains as well, but it is discouraging. it would be nice to see amazon set higher standards, perhaps separating paid from unpaid reviews more clearly. im glad at least that some people are benefiting from the free stuff ;)