> c. You cannot rely on reviews anymore. The problem with reviews on these sites in general is that they're not written like editorial reviews. You've got to t

> c. You cannot rely on reviews anymore. The problem with reviews on these sites in general is that they're not written like editorial reviews. You've got to take them with a grain of salt whether they're incentivized or not. The negative reviews can be useful only if they identify specific problems, but I see a lot of negative reviews by people who just didn't spend time reading the manual. In terms of the "purge", some people on the reddit product testing forums have noted that many of their incentivized 3 star reviews were deleted while their 5 star reviews were not. The new rules also don't ban reviews on products that were received for free. The catch is that there must be no obligation to write a review at all, and that the sample provider does not try to influence positive votes by making future samples conditional on those reviews. You'll notice that the "I received a sample/discount in exchange for an honest review" has been replaced by "I received a test sample with no obligation to provide a review here. I am doing it on my own, bla bla". There are a lot of honest incentivized reviewers out there. They may slant toward positive reviews, but if you read the text of their reviews, you can tell if the product is good or not. Full disclosure, I've done my share of incentivized reviews. Having said that, I spent way a lot of time writing those reviews (and doing photos/videos for them) than I did for my verified purchases. Mainly because I wanted to dispel any notion that my reviews were complete BS. I actually look at other incentivized reviews for the products I've written, and about half are honest, and the other half are hyperbolic BS. I always do disclosures, but the #1 ranked reviewer in Amazon in my country does not disclose his incentivized reviews (he has gotten the same samples as me around the same time) and does not appear to have been penalized for that. I'm sure I get downvotes on reviews just because of my disclosures in my reviews, but I'm not going to leave out the disclosures just to boost my rank either. In terms of "positive" reviews. I accept only stuff I want that doesn't look like it's crap in the first place. That already tilts me towards a positive review. Next, I always ask myself "is this good for the price". Most of the stuff I get is very low priced compared to their competition. Am I supposed to treat a $20 set of Bluetooth earbuds with the same critical ear as a $150 pair? I don't think so. So yeah, my bsr to hit 5 stars is pretty low. As long as it's well made and performs well for the price, I'm not going to be particularly harsh. Finally, I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and have a Prime subscription. How do I evaluate products I want to buy? I look at all the reviews, including the incentivized ones. I read them carefully to determine if the reviewer knows what he/she is talking about and whether they bring up any insights that the other reviewers don't mention.