8 ms·

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a r

by seren 8y ago

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com and once translated on a local amazon site. This is slightly infuriating.

mherrmann 8y ago
Same for me. I wrote a 1-star review about Shelly Walling's book "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together". It simply disappeared.
SamuelAdams 8y ago
Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a review for Batch A, but the product being sold is now Batch C, should the review still be displayed?
- modzu 8y ago
  i think the point is that had the review been 5 stars it would still be there...
- iKevinShah 8y ago
  Sure they can, but what about some of the products on Amazon which are mostly immutable like for example: Books. A bad book is a bad book. Batch B of the said book is mostly a new "product" listing on Amazon with its own set of reviews and ratings. Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something
  - Splines 8y ago
    This is OT but books can vary in quality too - specifically the paper used and the print quality. I was looking at "Physically Based Rendering" (http://a.co/bL8bjUw http://a.co/bL8bjUw) after seeing the post here about rendering a scene from Moana and was disappointed to see comments about bad print quality. Hopefully this is fixed in a later print run.
  - SamuelAdams 8y ago
    >Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something That is a good idea, but that still does not fix the aggregate data. When someone searches for "Coffee", the aggregate number of reviews is still considering that low-star review. So the "Seattle Coffee Beans" overall rating for Batch C could be a 4.5 / 5, but for all batches is a 2.5 / 5. The easiest way to fix this is to remove old, out-of-date reviews. This should apply to positive reviews too, but I have no idea if Amazon is doing this. Another approach is what Steam did - have a long-term rating and a "recent" rating. See "No Man's Sky" as an example [1] - a product that started poor, but improved over time. This helps prevent product brigading and gives vendors an opportunity to bounce back from negative reviews. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/
  - malnourish 8y ago
    Not necessarily. The album Pinkerton by Weezer was critically panned at release but now regarded as perhaps their best album. Tastes change. That said, you can still find those old reviews. Not so in all cases on Amazon...
- Splines 8y ago
  I don't know if Amazon has this feature, but I've seen sites that let the seller answer back to reviews - for cases where the seller has addressed a reviewer's feedback, they could reply and say that this has been fixed. Or make a new listing, and in the description mention what has been fixed.
  - chaostheory 8y ago
    Amazon has that feature.
- zhonwang 8y ago
  Its a serious issue if Amazon does not have this feature and still deletes reviews.
- mk89 8y ago
  I think they could do like ebay does: reviews in the last 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, ...etc. Or a similar mechanism. Sometimes I am not interested to old reviews, esp. technical books, as they become very quickly outdated. Deleting them implies deleted forever, though. Such information will be always lost, while it might still apply. I would simply give it a different weight.
  - culot 8y ago
    Aren't those time limits on reviews only for reviews of sellers, though? Does Ebay also time-limit products reviews, reviews that are divorced from a seller? Do they even host those kind of reviews?
    - mk89 8y ago
      Uh maybe you are right. It's been a long time since I've stopped using ebay. However, I am quite sure I have seen elsewhere this feature. It's not bad. It allows to have more recent opinions about the item.
- kharms 8y ago
  If a batch is different enough to warrant new reviews, it's a different product and should be sold as such. Consider beer and wine. Industrially manufactured beer doesn't vary much from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand. Wine varies a lot from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand and year.
- seren 8y ago
  Even if there are some charitable explanations possible, the least courtesy would be to warn you that your comment had been removed and why. You could mark the comment as "outdated", it won't bother me (assuming something has really changed). Here, it creates the impression that my comment was swept under the rug for some dubious reasons. And this is probably the last time I ever comment on Amazon. That does not really create a great trust in the system.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    To others' point it could be in Amazons interest to have completely fake but real-looking reviews to promote their preferred products so this would then feed into that dark pattern.
  - taylorlunt 8y ago
    Steam does this to an extent with game reviews. Old reviews aren't removed, but they show separate ratings of "Recent Reviews" and "All Reviews", effectively reducing the potency of old reviews. That said, video games these days can change a lot from one year to another, whereas almost all of the products on Amazon will not do so.
    - detaro 8y ago
      They actually have quite powerful tools, with a graph of reviews over time, the ability to select a custom time range from that, ..., I quite like their system. I believe that got added to help people recognize and filter out review-bombing.
- satsuma 8y ago
  the google play store does this -- reviews left on older versions of applications will be denoted as such. the developer response to comments is also made public, so a bad review on a 1.0 release could have the dev apologizing and saying it's fixed for 1.1, with the current version being 1.1.5, and one could infer (with enough faith in the developer) that the issue is resolved.
- dalore 8y ago
  You can pick a cut off date. Like only reviews in the last 18 months used to calculate score and are shown.
  - briandear 8y ago
    Only verified purchases should count as well. A lot of people review stuff just out of spite or PR reasons.
- briandear 8y ago
  The App Store does a good job with this, showing reviews for a new version while maintaining old reviews. Of course products aren’t often “versioned” so this might requiring revisiting how products are posted/managed.
- delecti 8y ago
  If Batch C is different enough from Batch A that the reviews don't apply, then should it even be the same product?
  - gtyras2mrs 8y ago
    In some cases, yes. Books for example. Some print runs are terrible. So even if the content is great, terrible print quality or construction can lead to bad reviews. Some books have numbered editions. But if the content is unchanged, should they be different products?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
  Steam handles this by displaying the average from strictly recent reviews and the average over all. For example, No Man's Sky was one of the biggest letdowns in recent gaming releases. It was later patched to be much better. Check out the reviews here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/
- 48snickers 8y ago
  Deleting older reviews isn't the only mechanism for handling stale reviews. They could add a decay function to the weighting in average review rating and leave the contents of the original review in place, for example. New versions of products could be treated as unique products, and thus reviews could be forked.
- Paul-ish 8y ago
  This happened to a Firefox extension I wote. I wrote the extension and published it to the FF extension store and got valid criticism in reviews pretty quickly. I addressed the issues and uploaded a new version of the extension. There was nothing I could do other than reply to the reviews to show I had addressed the issue. This doesn't get reflected in the overall rating. After the reviews nobody seemed to want to try the extension. Maybe it was because of the bad reviews, maybe not. I was doing this for free, so I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on. I'm not gonna fight the system, but there is money involved I could see how someone would.
- trallalla 8y ago
  Amazon already accounts for the date of the review to some extent. If you hover over the overall rating for a product you can read: "Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases."
- digitalpacman 8y ago
  Yes. Because it represents how you've chosen to run your business. You are allowed to judge the business based on their previous behavior.
beauzero 8y ago
As someone who worked for a third party used bookseller, this was 8 months ago, we would always and I mean always dispute anything below a 3 star review. Many get thrown out. It was generally in the 40-50% range that we could get removed. Not much rhyme or reason...just dispute all of them.
- lghh 8y ago
  Why? Isn't that a little dishonest?
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    More than a little, but I think the "why" is obvious.
    - jdo20bbx 8y ago
      Cause people have to sell to eat in our culture of step on the next guy to have a life. And it encourages and even facilitates shady shit.
      - EpicEng 8y ago
        >Cause people have to sell to eat in our culture of step on the next guy to have a life. A bit hyperbolic, but also applies to pretty much every culture which has ever existed.
        test6554 8y ago
        Wait... living organisms have to get food in order to eat? Next you are going to tell me that they are in competition for finite resources.
        paulddraper 8y ago
        Not only that, but if they don't eat, they starve.
pry86 8y ago
Not only Amazon does that. Few times I wrote a review of a restaurant on TripAdvisor, and all of them are removed :( Good ones are still there. If they can't do that, what is the point of having user reviews.
- kowdermeister 8y ago
  > what is the point of having user reviews Selling a marketing tool for businesses and products.
digitalpacman 8y ago
This happened to me directly on Logitech's website. It's why I'll never buy their products again. I received a wireless headset that didn't keep a full day charge longer than 30 minutes. I had to use it plugged in (powering) 24/7. I submitted a 1 star review stating my problem and they removed my feedback without even telling me. It was just gone a few weeks later when I checked it, hoping they hadn't removed it.

by seren 8y ago

mherrmann 8y ago

Same for me. I wrote a 1-star review about Shelly Walling's book "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together". It simply disappeared.

SamuelAdams 8y ago

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a review for Batch A, but the product being sold is now Batch C, should the review still be displayed?

modzu 8y ago
i think the point is that had the review been 5 stars it would still be there...
iKevinShah 8y ago
Sure they can, but what about some of the products on Amazon which are mostly immutable like for example: Books. A bad book is a bad book. Batch B of the said book is mostly a new "product" listing on Amazon with its own set of reviews and ratings. Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something
- Splines 8y ago
  This is OT but books can vary in quality too - specifically the paper used and the print quality. I was looking at "Physically Based Rendering" (http://a.co/bL8bjUw http://a.co/bL8bjUw) after seeing the post here about rendering a scene from Moana and was disappointed to see comments about bad print quality. Hopefully this is fixed in a later print run.
- SamuelAdams 8y ago
  >Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something That is a good idea, but that still does not fix the aggregate data. When someone searches for "Coffee", the aggregate number of reviews is still considering that low-star review. So the "Seattle Coffee Beans" overall rating for Batch C could be a 4.5 / 5, but for all batches is a 2.5 / 5. The easiest way to fix this is to remove old, out-of-date reviews. This should apply to positive reviews too, but I have no idea if Amazon is doing this. Another approach is what Steam did - have a long-term rating and a "recent" rating. See "No Man's Sky" as an example [1] - a product that started poor, but improved over time. This helps prevent product brigading and gives vendors an opportunity to bounce back from negative reviews. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/
- malnourish 8y ago
  Not necessarily. The album Pinkerton by Weezer was critically panned at release but now regarded as perhaps their best album. Tastes change. That said, you can still find those old reviews. Not so in all cases on Amazon...
Splines 8y ago
I don't know if Amazon has this feature, but I've seen sites that let the seller answer back to reviews - for cases where the seller has addressed a reviewer's feedback, they could reply and say that this has been fixed. Or make a new listing, and in the description mention what has been fixed.
- chaostheory 8y ago
  Amazon has that feature.
zhonwang 8y ago
Its a serious issue if Amazon does not have this feature and still deletes reviews.
mk89 8y ago
I think they could do like ebay does: reviews in the last 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, ...etc. Or a similar mechanism. Sometimes I am not interested to old reviews, esp. technical books, as they become very quickly outdated. Deleting them implies deleted forever, though. Such information will be always lost, while it might still apply. I would simply give it a different weight.
- culot 8y ago
  Aren't those time limits on reviews only for reviews of sellers, though? Does Ebay also time-limit products reviews, reviews that are divorced from a seller? Do they even host those kind of reviews?
  - mk89 8y ago
    Uh maybe you are right. It's been a long time since I've stopped using ebay. However, I am quite sure I have seen elsewhere this feature. It's not bad. It allows to have more recent opinions about the item.
kharms 8y ago
If a batch is different enough to warrant new reviews, it's a different product and should be sold as such. Consider beer and wine. Industrially manufactured beer doesn't vary much from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand. Wine varies a lot from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand and year.
seren 8y ago
Even if there are some charitable explanations possible, the least courtesy would be to warn you that your comment had been removed and why. You could mark the comment as "outdated", it won't bother me (assuming something has really changed). Here, it creates the impression that my comment was swept under the rug for some dubious reasons. And this is probably the last time I ever comment on Amazon. That does not really create a great trust in the system.
- r00fus 8y ago
  To others' point it could be in Amazons interest to have completely fake but real-looking reviews to promote their preferred products so this would then feed into that dark pattern.
- taylorlunt 8y ago
  Steam does this to an extent with game reviews. Old reviews aren't removed, but they show separate ratings of "Recent Reviews" and "All Reviews", effectively reducing the potency of old reviews. That said, video games these days can change a lot from one year to another, whereas almost all of the products on Amazon will not do so.
  - detaro 8y ago
    They actually have quite powerful tools, with a graph of reviews over time, the ability to select a custom time range from that, ..., I quite like their system. I believe that got added to help people recognize and filter out review-bombing.
satsuma 8y ago
the google play store does this -- reviews left on older versions of applications will be denoted as such. the developer response to comments is also made public, so a bad review on a 1.0 release could have the dev apologizing and saying it's fixed for 1.1, with the current version being 1.1.5, and one could infer (with enough faith in the developer) that the issue is resolved.
dalore 8y ago
You can pick a cut off date. Like only reviews in the last 18 months used to calculate score and are shown.
- briandear 8y ago
  Only verified purchases should count as well. A lot of people review stuff just out of spite or PR reasons.
briandear 8y ago
The App Store does a good job with this, showing reviews for a new version while maintaining old reviews. Of course products aren’t often “versioned” so this might requiring revisiting how products are posted/managed.
delecti 8y ago
If Batch C is different enough from Batch A that the reviews don't apply, then should it even be the same product?
- gtyras2mrs 8y ago
  In some cases, yes. Books for example. Some print runs are terrible. So even if the content is great, terrible print quality or construction can lead to bad reviews. Some books have numbered editions. But if the content is unchanged, should they be different products?
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
Steam handles this by displaying the average from strictly recent reviews and the average over all. For example, No Man's Sky was one of the biggest letdowns in recent gaming releases. It was later patched to be much better. Check out the reviews here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/
48snickers 8y ago
Deleting older reviews isn't the only mechanism for handling stale reviews. They could add a decay function to the weighting in average review rating and leave the contents of the original review in place, for example. New versions of products could be treated as unique products, and thus reviews could be forked.
Paul-ish 8y ago
This happened to a Firefox extension I wote. I wrote the extension and published it to the FF extension store and got valid criticism in reviews pretty quickly. I addressed the issues and uploaded a new version of the extension. There was nothing I could do other than reply to the reviews to show I had addressed the issue. This doesn't get reflected in the overall rating. After the reviews nobody seemed to want to try the extension. Maybe it was because of the bad reviews, maybe not. I was doing this for free, so I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on. I'm not gonna fight the system, but there is money involved I could see how someone would.
trallalla 8y ago
Amazon already accounts for the date of the review to some extent. If you hover over the overall rating for a product you can read: "Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases."
digitalpacman 8y ago
Yes. Because it represents how you've chosen to run your business. You are allowed to judge the business based on their previous behavior.

beauzero 8y ago

As someone who worked for a third party used bookseller, this was 8 months ago, we would always and I mean always dispute anything below a 3 star review. Many get thrown out. It was generally in the 40-50% range that we could get removed. Not much rhyme or reason...just dispute all of them.

lghh 8y ago
Why? Isn't that a little dishonest?
- EpicEng 8y ago
  More than a little, but I think the "why" is obvious.
  - jdo20bbx 8y ago
    Cause people have to sell to eat in our culture of step on the next guy to have a life. And it encourages and even facilitates shady shit.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      >Cause people have to sell to eat in our culture of step on the next guy to have a life. A bit hyperbolic, but also applies to pretty much every culture which has ever existed.
      - test6554 8y ago
        Wait... living organisms have to get food in order to eat? Next you are going to tell me that they are in competition for finite resources.
        paulddraper 8y ago
        Not only that, but if they don't eat, they starve.

pry86 8y ago

Not only Amazon does that. Few times I wrote a review of a restaurant on TripAdvisor, and all of them are removed :( Good ones are still there. If they can't do that, what is the point of having user reviews.

kowdermeister 8y ago
> what is the point of having user reviews Selling a marketing tool for businesses and products.

digitalpacman 8y ago

This happened to me directly on Logitech's website. It's why I'll never buy their products again. I received a wireless headset that didn't keep a full day charge longer than 30 minutes. I had to use it plugged in (powering) 24/7. I submitted a 1 star review stating my problem and they removed my feedback without even telling me. It was just gone a few weeks later when I checked it, hoping they hadn't removed it.