59 ms·

Have Online Reviews Lost All Value?

235 points by ytNumbers 7y ago

goatinaboat 7y ago
I was looking for something on Amazon the other day, my searches revealed dozens of odd-sounding brands that I had never heard of before, all of which had lots of 5-star reviews, all of which seemed to be for a different product than the one listed.
- notacoward 7y ago
  You're looking at a confluence of two problems. One is that drop-shipping directly from Chinese manufacturers has become so cheap and easy (because of an international-postal-rule exemption that has been discussed here before) that everyone's doing it. Including the manufacturers themselves, some of whom I'm pretty sure make up the brand names literally at random. It costs them nothing at all to make up a few dozen brands, each presenting the product in a slightly different way, in hopes that one of those presentations will catch a few more eyes. It's basically the same incentive structure that gave us junk mail and (even more so) spam email. The other problem is "review washing". Some vendors do the "bait and switch" themselves, but there's also an actual market for Amazon listings with good reviews attached. All an unscrupulous vendor has to do is buy one of those and change literally everything that goes into it, from contact details to the actual product. It's like if you could buy the right to a best-seller book cover, replacing the content for books already in brick-and-mortar stores with whatever you want. That's why sites like ReviewMeta and FakeSpot are absolutely essential for anyone shopping on Amazon nowadays.
  - hnick 7y ago
    If you have some spare time and are going for an item that's hard to make wrong, this can serve you too. I bought an item that was using a brand name in the title on eBay, but what I got was a cheap knockoff. The box itself had the Chinese branding so it was very obvious. I ended up getting a full refund and it works fine. I was annoyed at the deception more than anything - the item is fine, but they may have cost a sale to a legitimate supplier by abusing the trademark.
- ReviewMeta 7y ago
  This is called Review Hijacking: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/ https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/
dual_basis 7y ago
One thing I've noticed is that negative reviews, even very specific ones, often just serve to delay my purchase. I was looking to buy an ab wheel recently, and almost every single option on Amazon had some negative reviews which seemed legitimate and did give me pause. "Handle snapped off after just one week, causing me to smash into the floor and loose a tooth", for example. Of course I don't want that to happen, so now I end up spending over an hour looking through products, all which are under $40, none of which are free from some sort of specific complaint - "Handle is too narrow, this is not good for your lats. Can't believe the manufacturer would cheap out on this, I ended up with back pain after less than two weeks of use.", "The additional wheel makes this too stable. I've had many in the past, I clearly do not get as good a workout from this one. Will be returning it." etc. These all have 4-5 star reviews, and otherwise seem perfectly fine. If I saw them in a store I would have purchased them without a second thought. Ultimately I just went back and bought the first one I saw. It seems perfectly fine, I can't see any issues with it.
- eckza 7y ago
  But have you made it past the one-week mark yet?
- ptero 7y ago
  I think I have the same approach to the items I consider inexpensive (I would define it as forgetting about loss of money in a month if the thing turned out to be a total loss). But I see this "delay purchase" after reading negative reviews as a feature: it encourages a quick second look which occasionally makes me switch plans. For things that are more expensive and/or long-term, for example a car (which I buy as new and drive until it truly starts falling apart) I tend to pay much more attention to negative reviews, either digging in for statistics or thinking about whether a particular feature being dissed is important for me. My 2c.
- arcturus17 7y ago
  I also tend to check the one-stars but sadly I’ve become so untrusting that I always think it might be a competitor trying to undermine the product.
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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_0o6v 7y ago
TrustPilot is just completely ridiculous. For a company who's entire USP revolves around 'real' reviews, the vast, vast majority are so obviously fake.
- hnick 7y ago
  A very easy way to stack the deck on such providers is to just send review requests to customers that you know are happy. This is even easier if you have a two-tier system (use your internal reviews on-platform to find the happy customers).
Spooky23 7y ago
Yes, but. I don’t Amazon anymore, but the reviews were and I assume still are completely unreliable for many segments. Too many players running to the bottom. For other things, you need to know the market. Restaurants and hotel reviews are full of bad info (fakes, ultra-picky people, etc) but it’s easy to extract useful information. Usually the fakes have details that only workers would care about or are just pure praise without specifics. People on a vacation tell stories and business travelers usually complain about things that cost them time. You also need to consider how you use a review. The stars are there to sell the product. I look for corroborated information about things I don’t like, and mostly ignore the positive. That doesn’t work on Amazon because the fakes are more common and brazen than real reviews, and Amazon facilitates the fakery as more reviews drive transactions.
jurassic 7y ago
I think reviews have lost most value, but mainly due to Amazon’s co-mingling of inventory, merging similar product listings, and overall massive counterfeit problems. Even if you have a high quality review from a trusted source (Wirecutter? Friends and family?) you have no way to know if what you receive will be equivalent to the thing they endorsed. This happened to me recently with an exercise bike which was an absolute piece of trash compared to what my sister bought and recommended. It makes me want to completely avoid Amazon.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  It makes me want to completely avoid Amazon. Then why don't you? I seriously don't want to be glib, but I read so many complaints about Amazon, their intermingling of stock from various, partially shady sources, fakes, dodgy reviews, which they do shit-all about, etc, etc. Personally I don't buy at Amazon since when they pulled a bait and switch on their privacy pledge, which was pretty much in the beginning. Their predatory behavior, their treatment of employees, their not giving a fuck if you get sent fakes, their systemic viloation of privacy, their dodgy support of law enforcement and their overall creepy behaviour all just reinforce me in this and frankly: I can live quite well without buying anything at Amazon. So I'm genuinly curious: Why do so many people still buy despite an avalanche of complaints?
  - jurassic 7y ago
    I have significantly reduced but not eliminated my purchases. When I buy, it’s usually due to convenience and habit built up over nearly 20 years of being an Amazon customer. Also, in my latest job they sometimes give out spot bonuses in the form of $500 amazon gift cards, which brings me back to the site. It’s taking me longer and longer to spend those. It’s getting to where I only want to buy books on the site because even a counterfeit book (yes, I’ve received one of those too which was a scanned pdf of the original manufactured with print-on-demand tech) more or less gets the job done.
  - jdjb 7y ago
    I have a few reason why I almost exclusively shop online at Amazon. I try to trust as few companies as possible with my credit card details. Amazon having nearly anything I need makes this easier and convenient. I prefer the convenience of a brick and mortar store (the convenience being able to browse the products in real life and take it home with me immediately) but it's not always possible to find what I'm looking for locally. Lastly, for every person complaining here on Hacker News about their one anecdotal issue with Amazon there's thousands of products being shipped every minute that have no issue. Amazon mostly works, though I wouldn't trust it for very large fragile things.
AznHisoka 7y ago
In the enterprise side of things, I find G2Crowd and TrustRadius reviews useless in that they are too skewed towards the positive end of things.
myself248 7y ago
Betteridge's law thwarted at long last?
- tanr54ok 7y ago
  No not really. They didn’t have much value to begin with. Nothing fundamentally changed.
x86party 7y ago
1/5 Stars - Would not review again.
mattlutze 7y ago
As the trope goes, if the author asks a question in the title of their article, the answer is "no, not really." I'd counter that online reviews still have pretty much the same value they ever have had, and that we're more aware of what the limits of that value is. Lot's of real-person reviews exist on many platforms, and reading through a few often gives you a decent idea of what you're getting yourself into. Paid-for reviews are certainly a scourge, and one business getting loyalists to down-vote a competitor is also a problem. But that's been a thing since the beginning of recommendation features, and we should celebrate a little bit that we're more hip and conscious today to these operations.
- ghaff 7y ago
  The real question is: What is the alternative? There are some useful review sites like Wirecutter that arguably cut through the clutter in a lot of cases. But the amount of "stuff" and experiences (e.g. restaurants) out there is pretty overwhelming for what's left of professional reviewers outside of some fairly narrow domains. I do a lot of travel. Are Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews of restaurants great? Not really. Are they generally better--given some critical mass--than picking a restaurant at random or because it has a cool name? Almost certainly. (Of course, online menus and the like can be somewhat useful as well.)
  - rorykoehler 7y ago
    We're building Bibimapp so you can get recommendations from your direct and extended network. Personal recommendations from people you trust. https://bibimapp.com https://bibimapp.com
    - frutiger 7y ago
      Off-topic: is the name related to this delicious Korean dish? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibimbap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibimbap
      - rorykoehler 7y ago
harel 7y ago
I now look first at 3 star reviews. These are less likely to be biased and more likely to represent a middle ground between the good and bad aspects of the product. It's sad that we had to get there but the trust is gone with 4-5 star reviews for me.
- lloeki 7y ago
  Something strange I’ve seen on more than one occasion and on multiple platforms is 1-star glowing reviews and 5-star bashing reviews. Also, when looking at overall reviews for a given thing there is usually a pattern for fraudulent ones, kind of like students having to summarise from the same text.
  - fasicle 7y ago
    I've noticed this is particularly common on the Google Play store. Apparently the reason is reviews which go against what most people are reviewing are given a higher priority and more likely to be shown to potential users. E.g. if an app is getting mostly 5 stars and you give it a 1 star, your rating will be more prominently shown in Google Play.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    This kind of bi-modal distribution usually means one of three things. Most often it means the product is crap (Sturgeon's Law: 99% of everything is crap) and the vendor has been buying or posting fake five-star reviews. Occasionally it means the product is really good and a competitor has been buying or posting fake one-star reviews. Even more rarely, it means that the vendor and a competitor are both participating in a fake-review war. You could try looking at both sets of reviews to determine which scenario it is, but the odds are heavily stacked against it being the one that suggests a buy. As galling as it might be to let the miscreants win if that's the case, and to miss out on what's actually a good product, the safe bet is just to move on.
ineedasername 7y ago
No, but I find myself gravitating much more towards the negative reviews. Not only are they more likely to be legitimate reviews, they tell me the reasons someone didn't like a product, which I find more valuable. Often because a failure for one person might not be an issue I care about: For example, if a reviewer for a book says, "Author spent too much time on the individual people and not enough time moving the plot forward" then I might view that as a positive if I like deep character building. It's a legitimate complaint, but from my perspective it's a feature, not a bug. Or I just might not care: "Item arrived broken" is not something I care much about when it's something that's easy to return/exchange, unless many people are also saying even when it arrived intact, It breaks too easily on use.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  My favourite Steam review: "Did not load on my machine. Please help."
  - noxToken 7y ago
    I understand what you're going for, but this is a legitimate complaint for console-to-PC ports and ports/remasters of older games. There are some ports that I have bought that never ran after multiple troubleshooting sessions. I don't expect developers to test every combination of hardware in a given market. That's silly. I do think it helps buyers understand the risk in buying ported titles though.
- pizza234 7y ago
  I'm observing (I may be wrong) that more and more photos are getting posted as part of the reviews, which I assume it's caused by buyers reacting to this problem. That's no foolproof solution, but of course, it increases the cost of fake reviews. Also, language is not taken into account. It's probably more expensive to buy fake reviews in, say, Norwegian, rather than in the standard English, so non-English speaking countries have an advantage.
  - md8 7y ago
mrfusion 7y ago
I think shopping sites should simply show the percent returns for each item. Maybe break it down by return reason.
- codazoda 7y ago
  At first thought, this might be useful information. It might be less helpful for very inexpensive products where returning the defective item isn't worth the effort. I suspect sellers wouldn't want to encourage returns as a way to show dissatisfaction, since they are so expensive.
ddelt 7y ago
For me, once I became aware of the fact that it is now a commonplace activity to pay for falsified reviews, and there are technology platforms that scan reviews to determine if they are fake or not... almost any review I read on a mainstream shopping platform is suspect to me now. Which is unfortunate, because that's where most of the convenience and value as a consumer is to me. If I now want to make a purchase based heavily on user reviews, I do like many of the other posters here have said: I look at the reviews and low and high middle of the spectrum, have to read each review for obvious, glaring generalizations and seek out language that implies real-world usage vs. hyperbole, and use other features at my disposal, including a verified reviewer stamp (if on Amazon), tools like FakeSpot or ReviewMeta, and reading reviews from competing shopping platforms for the same item if possible (if shopping on Amazon for a widget, look for reviews on eBay or the website of the widget manufacturer). If it's a technology purchase, I'll also look up a bunch of reviews from at least 3-4 technology review platforms, placing a greater weight on those who have included screenshots of their actual usage of the product, which tend to imply a greater deal of rigor to go through for a fake review (but this doesn't mean it's completely trustworthy either). These additional forms of verification, on one hand, could be likened to how we used to shop before internet shopping was a thing (we'd ask a bunch of people for reviews in real life, visit a bunch of stores and window shop, and perhaps read about it in a newspaper or try it ourselves in a real-life demo in the store), but at the end of the day, I choose to shop online for the convenience vs. brick and mortar stores, and this is the unfortunate evolution of that technology.
rahidz 7y ago
I've found ReviewMeta (https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/) useful for Amazon reviews, though it still doesn't solve the issue of co-mingling products. So generally for buying items I use Amazon or a niche subreddit's recommendation, then buy the product off eBay, the manufacturer's website, or a physical store. As far as "place" reviews, Google reviews in my area haven't let me down yet. Yelp has been hit-or-miss; I dislike their "not currently recommended" review system. TripAdvisor isn't too useful in my local area as there's not nearly as many reviews as on Google/Yelp.
- sambe 7y ago
  I don't get the feeling ReviewMeta is very sophisticated. FakeSpot and ReviewMeta often contradict each other. I often spend time on both sites and then realise that either all the candidate products are not great, or I've wasted time gaining little confidence and should just pick one.
  - FakespotCom 7y ago
    Fakespot CTO here. That's a good observation. Our engines utilize NLP heavily conjoined with proprietary ML models to detect influenced reviews that basic statistical analysis will never (or with low levels of success) be able to infer from review data sets, unless there are very basic signals such as 100 5-star reviews posted in an hour. Fake review authors and providers are increasingly becoming sophisticated to bypass various filters in place on Amazon and other websites so you need to be able to leverage SOTA analysis to detect them. We also don't reveal how we detect certain fake reviews due to the fact that they will use that information to their advantage to further exploit our system, which allows us to be a couple steps ahead. Anyone interested to know more about this topic feel free to email me at saoud@fakespot.com.
    - tasubotadas 7y ago
      It would be awesome if you could support amazon.de
      - 7y ago
k33n 7y ago
I worked for Luma when they were having a review war with Eero. Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up with Eero's. We had an inferior product with a lot of problems, so it was a losing battle in the end. Probably the most interesting part is that Amazon was one of our lead investors. We came to them for help, and they told us in a wink wink nudge nudge sort of way that our only option was to just keep buying positive reviews.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  This is actually a pretty damning indictment. The most charitable thing you could say about Amazon vis-à-vis fake reviews is that they would like to get rid of them but are just overwhelmed by the difficulty of the problem. But this seems to indicate a tacit endorsement on their part. I guess we can’t expect any serious action on this problem anytime soon.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    If I were in the market for some fraudulent reviews I think my first stop would be mechanical turk. I say that as someone with zero knowledge review fraud or mechanical turk but is it possible Amazon stand to gain more than they lose on paid reviews?
- sundayedition 7y ago
  > Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up with Eero's. I can't help but feel that in addition to being unethical, this might also be illegal. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/03/los-angeles-based-sage-auto-group-will-pay-36-million-settle-ftc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/03/los-a...
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    I have been disappointed to find that many startup founders — even those who work in "impact" or "education" — do not care about the ethics or legality of paid reviews. I had a discussion with one founder a few years back, and at first I thought he was simply unaware of the then-new FTC guidelines. But it became clear that he did not care if what he was doing was illegal since "it's just the way business gets done", in his words. Caveat emptor!
bluedino 7y ago
If I'm looking for reviews, I look at results from forums. There's internet communities out there for everything. Forums are usually good for compiling lists of 'approved' items as well.
oflannabhra 7y ago
I have fully shifted away from doing my own research on what to buy to going to recommendation sites. I've always thought I had an astute ability to detect fake reviews (and I was probably right for the first wave of low effort paid reviews). What made me change was the following: 1) Companies and consumers cooperating in huge, fake review rings, 2) product search at places like Amazon becoming totally undifferentiatable, and 3) the lack of trust in tools to combat them (fakespot, etc). I now just go to a recommendation site that earns income through affiliate kickbacks. I use Wirecutter [0], Rtings [1], plus a handful of smaller forum / community sites for categories those don't cover. I actually think this is an enormous opportunity for several huge categories: 1) Tool reviews: especially with the rate of battery innovation, there is a huge opportunity to have thorough reviews and category recommendations of both consumer and professional tools. 2) Camera / DSLR / video - There's no lack of thorough reviews in this category, but making sense of it is near impossible unless you're a professional. 3) IoT gear - This isn't hugely important to me, but similar to cameras and tools there are a variety of systems that lock users in, and getting recommendations based on which system a user already has would be relatively simple. I have found these categories to be lacking not only in trustable reviews, but mostly in updated recommendations. Even if reviews exist, it is up to the effort of the user to read them all and build up a knowledge base of similar options to select from. Each of these categories have a high enough volume and purchase price that affiliate fees could easily support a recommendation business. [0] - https://thewirecutter.com https://thewirecutter.com [1] - https://www.rtings.com https://www.rtings.com
- FakespotCom 7y ago
  Fakespot CTO here. Care to elaborate on your lack of trust in Fakespot? Just curious.
- yborg 7y ago
  I don't follow why you distrust sites like Fakespot but trust something like Wirecutter which as you note is directly incented to shill review products that offer more affiliate revenue.
jacobkg 7y ago
Lately I’ve been looking at the distribution of reviews. TripAdvisor and Amazon both have bar graphs of rating distributions. In general, I see these distributions: Great products: Generally a very good product will have between 80 and 90 percent 5-star reviews and then the remaining percentages will tail down with the lowest percent of 1 star reviews. This was how I picked where to go on my honeymoon on TripAdvisor. Fake Products: All 5-star reviews with zero reviews of any other rating. So so products: Similar to great products in that the number of reviews decreases as the rating goes down, but the percentage of 4 star reviews is significant and there are less than 70% 5 star reviews Bad products: Less 5 star reviews than 4 or 3 star reviews. These are surprisingly uncommon and feel quaint when I see them. Mixed supply chain (Fakes) or serious quality issues: What I refer to as the “1 star bump” where a product has more 1-star reviews than 2, 3, or 4 star review. Similar to “so so products” except you see the 1 star bar sticking out noticeably in the graph. The 1-star bump is my most reliable signal not to buy something. Unfortunately it’s very common on Amazon.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  This is also my strategy 100%, I agree with everything you've said for Amazon. The histogram is the most important thing. Interestingly, I find restaurants on Yelp follow an entirely different pattern -- a hump at 3 stars, or at 4 stars, most often. There are usually a few 5-star reviews for every place, but when there are more 5-star reviews than 4-stars, the restuaurants have always been exceptional. I don't feel like I've ever been steered wrong once.
- tvanantwerp 7y ago
  I feel like I see only the "1 star bump" distribution for nearly everything. Most people happily rate something as a 5 with little thought, and a few write a very long screed to accompany a 1; almost nobody cares to do anything in between.
- benj111 7y ago
  I bought a controller last week that displayed the 'one star bump'(tm) They were 1 stars for the wireless version I wasn't buying, so you still have to drill down to see what the 1 star reviews actually say.
0x262d 7y ago
the reviews are hosted by amazon. they exist to facilitate profitmaking by selling stuff. the company never even pretends to have goals at odds with that. some part of that requires barely pretending to not encourage this behavior... but this is inevitable.
known 7y ago
Failed due to Homogeneity, Centralization, Division, Imitation and Emotionality as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Failures_of_crowd_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Failures_...
thess24 7y ago
Something I've been thinking about recently is that there should be a site that only takes the "good" products from amazon and displays them for different categories - maybe only the top 20 or so. If i'm looking for an oven mitt / phone case / whatever the amount of junk is overwhelming. I envision it would essentially be a semi-curated list of amazon items. Anyone know of something like this? It's on my backlist of projects to build if I can't find any substitutes.
- martin-adams 7y ago
  This is nice in theory, but Amazon have a big problem right now where merchants have figured out how to reuse Amazon listing to game the review rating. You'll often find you're looking at a product but the reviews are talking about something completely different. Here's an example - third product in the search results on Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Headphone-Connector-Converter-Accessories-Compatible-White/dp/B07VGLX24P/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Headphone-Connector-Converter-Acces... It's supposed to be for Headphone adapters for iPhone, but you get reviews like: "Super set of pocket friendly priced pencils!" "I purchased this Hub back in April of 2013" "On the first couple of uses, food did stick a bit and that is with seasoning the griddle" So it's got to point now of having to first find a product with good ratings, then make sure the reviews are indeed for that product.
- dewey 7y ago
  Isn't that kinda what https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/ is doing?
  - thess24 7y ago
    Thanks for the link - I'll probably just use this instead!
pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
Have Wall Street Journal Contributors Lost All Value?
aj7 7y ago
I first and sometimes only read the one star reviews, and look at their percentage. If one-five have a distribution with a big slope discontinuity… If it passes this test, I might read some of the other reviews looking for problems that I might agree with the viewer on.
harimau777 7y ago
It wouldn't solve everything, but I think that the problem could be significantly helped with the following changes: Only allow reviews from people who actually purchased the product. Make it fraud to pay spammers to review your product. Show the country where a seller is located. Make Amazon (and similar marketplaces) liable and on the hook for returns if a seller disappears.
olivermarks 7y ago
I look for practical information in reviews such as 'works well but the plastic grommet holder snapped off after a week of use, look out for the weak electric dimmer switch' etc etc. The subjective reviews are mostly a waste of time
tyfon 7y ago
I don't trust reviews at all unless I know the "reviewer" in real life, that is if someone I know tells me it's good. Good thing you have 14 day "no questions asked money back" guarantee on anything physical bought online in Europe. I've used that option quite a few times when the product is trash.
skizm 7y ago
Goodhart's law in action.
freeAgent 7y ago
They haven't lost all value, but you certainly can't take them at face value. I always make sure to read the negative reviews, as others have mentioned. I'll also frequently look at the review history of any review that resonates with me one way or another to see if they appear to be a normal person or a paid shill. Amazon could probably solve this problem if it wanted since it has access to purchase histories, shipping addresses, and review histories for all accounts on its site. I assume that the problem of fake reviews isn't solved because Amazon doesn't care enough about it to take the necessary action and fix it. It may also help Amazon's bottom line to have a bunch of highly-rated products for sale, even if those ratings are fake.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
I was getting a screen protector and apparently they're so cheap / specialized that they have no reviews at all. I ended up looking at reviews for other products by the same company. It could also be that they're all dropshippers and change their brand frequently to avoid negative reviews, but the stock graphics were at least slightly tweaked compared to Alibaba's.
kerkeslager 7y ago
I post frequently here with an anti-advertising stance. Briefly: advertising is often just unambiguously lying, and when it's not, it's still a one-sided collection of facts. Advertising breaks one of the core ideas of capitalism: that the best products or best prices will win, because a better-advertised product can beat a cheaper, higher-quality product. If one company spends money on advertising, all their competitors have to start spending money on advertising, which means that the entire market has to take money away from researching and manufacturing quality, or pass that cost on to the consumer. A common response I get is, "But how will we find out about products?" My stance is that professional review sites supported by users (examples: Consumer Reports, OutdoorGearLab, LabDoor) are the solution. So why not consumer reviews? 1. The obvious thing is that it doesn't solve the problem with advertising. Advertisers can pose as consumers and post reviews. Sophisticated methods of detecting this (i.e. ignore all 1- and 5-star reviews) just fall prey to more sophisticated advertisers (i.e. computer generate 30 5-star ratings to keep your star rating up, and then post one carefully-crafted 4-star rating written by a human). 2. Even if you do manage to filter advertisers, you still tend to hear from the extremes. Irrational positivity isn't better than irrational negativity: a person who posts all 5-star reviews because they want to be nice isn't better than the furious customer with a grudge. 3. Consumer reviews encourage what I'll call second-level advertising: if you can't advertise directly, then you try to get your consumers to advertise for you. For example: spamming your users with "If you like our product please leave a review on iTunes/GooglePlay/Amazon" or the YouTube classic, "Don't forget to Like and Subscribe!" 4. Consumers generally aren't experts, which means that consumer reviews are more susceptible to Parkinson's Law of Triviality[1]. A good example of this are the reviews on products that say things like "The parts feel cheap and flimsy." Well, did they break? Probably not, or you would have said that. Titanium parts are thinner and lighter than steel, which sometimes gives them the impression of being cheap and flimsy, when they are in fact more expensive and stronger. But in a more general sense, consumer reviews tend to focus on the look or price of something rather than harder-to-understand things like performance and durability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
JohnFen 7y ago
From my point of view, online reviews are not quite entirely without value, but their value is extremely low. I rarely bother reading them anymore.
scarejunba 7y ago
They have not. They've just graduated to a place where you can't lie: Reddit. On Reddit, everyone is sceptical of the guy who doesn't have a long history of comments. People who've only just joined a subreddit will be viewed sceptically. You'll get pretty good reviews if you do "XYZ reddit". The problem for the guy trying to game the reviews is that a real user reviews things too sparsely. There'll be one review in maybe a hundred comments and five submissions.
- mclightning 7y ago
  I do exactly this. It has worked for me so far.
mbostleman 7y ago
Nope. They just require the same critical thinking and situational awareness that is required to spot phishing, obviously malicious links, dark patterns, etc.
njharman 7y ago
Same media illiteracy problem as Fake News. Most people are unable to discern ulterior motives. So, "trust". btw; The solution is not improving one's ability to discern (because that is an arm's race the people with power motives (political, financial) are gonna out spend you and vast majority of humans are incapable of beating that) Rather it is by default not to trust and have high bar for earning your trust.
joeldg 7y ago
On Yelp yeah, Yelp is basically worthless as an actual rating system. There has been a trend of articles just taking the top yelp reviews for "____ type of food" and making top ten lists (there is a trend for doing similar articles with top voted Ask Reddit content). Anyway, where I live the top burger place on Yelp is in a mall and is basically a greasy less-tasty version of Five-guys. A mall.
deleted 7y ago
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RenRav 7y ago
For popular things? Yes, not enough of the information is reliable. Unpopular and niche things still benefit from reviews. It's almost as if the quality and usefulness goes up as the review count stays low.
username3 7y ago
View reviews by nth degree friends.
rossdavidh 7y ago
The star-ratings are nearly worthless, and to the extent there is any value, it is in 2-to-4 star reviews (less likely to be fake). However, the explanation, because harder for a bot to churn out believably, is still often worth something, not least because things that bother other people might be a plus for me.
dickdickery 7y ago
A big percentage of reviews on Yelp are fake. Sure you can buy fake yelp reviews on http://freepage.io http://freepage.io and other sites.
perseusprime11 7y ago
An AI-based platform that identifies legitimate reviews can easily find a product/market fit. Is anybody here interested?
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/m39hT http://archive.is/m39hT
notadoc 7y ago
Considering that anyone can go on Fiverr and pay for hundreds of 5 star glowing (or 1 star negative) reviews for nearly anything that can be reviewed on the web, I would say online reviews are largely BS.
flippinburgers 7y ago
When it comes to entertainment, largely a high level of positive reviews no longer tells me anything because the internet has saturated the planet. Average people are upvoting everything.
quantumfoam 7y ago
I prefer to read the 1-star reviews. Often, there's nuggets of information written if it's not entirely someone's complaint about a product/thing.
hnick 7y ago
Answer is no, as others have said. But I think it depends a lot on which reviews and what you're looking at. I frequently use Google's reviews for finding food places. While it's not 100%, and is HEAVILY biased to the top end (you probably want to aim for 4.2 or higher), it's been very reliable across many locations and even countries for me. Something I like is that a hole in the wall banh mi place is just as likely to earn a high rating as a 3 star restaurant - the ratings reflect the execution of what is being attempted, so cheap eats can rate well and sometimes that's all we want. For games and media, I actually like the aggregators a lot (Metacritic). It's not the final word, and idiots do review bomb some titles (but mostly AAA games that I would avoid), but the "wisdom of crowds" seems surprisingly accurate overall. Steam reviews with their "Overwhelmingly Positive" is similar. For individual items on Amazon or hotel rooms though, as other posters have said the mid-range reviews with something to say beyond the rating are the most worthwhile. I can tell if they're like-minded or whether their concerns mean nothing to me. On this note one amusing thing is that US reviews often focus on "the service" (probably because they're expected to pay extra for it) while I don't really care much about that and don't see it mentioned in other countries unless it's egregious.

235 points by ytNumbers 7y ago

I was looking for something on Amazon the other day, my searches revealed dozens of odd-sounding brands that I had never heard of before, all of which had lots of 5-star reviews, all of which seemed to be for a different product than the one listed.

notacoward 7y ago
You're looking at a confluence of two problems. One is that drop-shipping directly from Chinese manufacturers has become so cheap and easy (because of an international-postal-rule exemption that has been discussed here before) that everyone's doing it. Including the manufacturers themselves, some of whom I'm pretty sure make up the brand names literally at random. It costs them nothing at all to make up a few dozen brands, each presenting the product in a slightly different way, in hopes that one of those presentations will catch a few more eyes. It's basically the same incentive structure that gave us junk mail and (even more so) spam email. The other problem is "review washing". Some vendors do the "bait and switch" themselves, but there's also an actual market for Amazon listings with good reviews attached. All an unscrupulous vendor has to do is buy one of those and change literally everything that goes into it, from contact details to the actual product. It's like if you could buy the right to a best-seller book cover, replacing the content for books already in brick-and-mortar stores with whatever you want. That's why sites like ReviewMeta and FakeSpot are absolutely essential for anyone shopping on Amazon nowadays.
- hnick 7y ago
  If you have some spare time and are going for an item that's hard to make wrong, this can serve you too. I bought an item that was using a brand name in the title on eBay, but what I got was a cheap knockoff. The box itself had the Chinese branding so it was very obvious. I ended up getting a full refund and it works fine. I was annoyed at the deception more than anything - the item is fine, but they may have cost a sale to a legitimate supplier by abusing the trademark.
ReviewMeta 7y ago
This is called Review Hijacking: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/ https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/

dual_basis 7y ago

One thing I've noticed is that negative reviews, even very specific ones, often just serve to delay my purchase. I was looking to buy an ab wheel recently, and almost every single option on Amazon had some negative reviews which seemed legitimate and did give me pause. "Handle snapped off after just one week, causing me to smash into the floor and loose a tooth", for example. Of course I don't want that to happen, so now I end up spending over an hour looking through products, all which are under $40, none of which are free from some sort of specific complaint - "Handle is too narrow, this is not good for your lats. Can't believe the manufacturer would cheap out on this, I ended up with back pain after less than two weeks of use.", "The additional wheel makes this too stable. I've had many in the past, I clearly do not get as good a workout from this one. Will be returning it." etc. These all have 4-5 star reviews, and otherwise seem perfectly fine. If I saw them in a store I would have purchased them without a second thought. Ultimately I just went back and bought the first one I saw. It seems perfectly fine, I can't see any issues with it.

eckza 7y ago
But have you made it past the one-week mark yet?
ptero 7y ago
I think I have the same approach to the items I consider inexpensive (I would define it as forgetting about loss of money in a month if the thing turned out to be a total loss). But I see this "delay purchase" after reading negative reviews as a feature: it encourages a quick second look which occasionally makes me switch plans. For things that are more expensive and/or long-term, for example a car (which I buy as new and drive until it truly starts falling apart) I tend to pay much more attention to negative reviews, either digging in for statistics or thinking about whether a particular feature being dissed is important for me. My 2c.
arcturus17 7y ago
I also tend to check the one-stars but sadly I’ve become so untrusting that I always think it might be a competitor trying to undermine the product.
7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

_0o6v 7y ago

TrustPilot is just completely ridiculous. For a company who's entire USP revolves around 'real' reviews, the vast, vast majority are so obviously fake.

hnick 7y ago
A very easy way to stack the deck on such providers is to just send review requests to customers that you know are happy. This is even easier if you have a two-tier system (use your internal reviews on-platform to find the happy customers).

Spooky23 7y ago

Yes, but. I don’t Amazon anymore, but the reviews were and I assume still are completely unreliable for many segments. Too many players running to the bottom. For other things, you need to know the market. Restaurants and hotel reviews are full of bad info (fakes, ultra-picky people, etc) but it’s easy to extract useful information. Usually the fakes have details that only workers would care about or are just pure praise without specifics. People on a vacation tell stories and business travelers usually complain about things that cost them time. You also need to consider how you use a review. The stars are there to sell the product. I look for corroborated information about things I don’t like, and mostly ignore the positive. That doesn’t work on Amazon because the fakes are more common and brazen than real reviews, and Amazon facilitates the fakery as more reviews drive transactions.

jurassic 7y ago

I think reviews have lost most value, but mainly due to Amazon’s co-mingling of inventory, merging similar product listings, and overall massive counterfeit problems. Even if you have a high quality review from a trusted source (Wirecutter? Friends and family?) you have no way to know if what you receive will be equivalent to the thing they endorsed. This happened to me recently with an exercise bike which was an absolute piece of trash compared to what my sister bought and recommended. It makes me want to completely avoid Amazon.

CaptainZapp 7y ago
It makes me want to completely avoid Amazon. Then why don't you? I seriously don't want to be glib, but I read so many complaints about Amazon, their intermingling of stock from various, partially shady sources, fakes, dodgy reviews, which they do shit-all about, etc, etc. Personally I don't buy at Amazon since when they pulled a bait and switch on their privacy pledge, which was pretty much in the beginning. Their predatory behavior, their treatment of employees, their not giving a fuck if you get sent fakes, their systemic viloation of privacy, their dodgy support of law enforcement and their overall creepy behaviour all just reinforce me in this and frankly: I can live quite well without buying anything at Amazon. So I'm genuinly curious: Why do so many people still buy despite an avalanche of complaints?
- jurassic 7y ago
  I have significantly reduced but not eliminated my purchases. When I buy, it’s usually due to convenience and habit built up over nearly 20 years of being an Amazon customer. Also, in my latest job they sometimes give out spot bonuses in the form of $500 amazon gift cards, which brings me back to the site. It’s taking me longer and longer to spend those. It’s getting to where I only want to buy books on the site because even a counterfeit book (yes, I’ve received one of those too which was a scanned pdf of the original manufactured with print-on-demand tech) more or less gets the job done.
- jdjb 7y ago
  I have a few reason why I almost exclusively shop online at Amazon. I try to trust as few companies as possible with my credit card details. Amazon having nearly anything I need makes this easier and convenient. I prefer the convenience of a brick and mortar store (the convenience being able to browse the products in real life and take it home with me immediately) but it's not always possible to find what I'm looking for locally. Lastly, for every person complaining here on Hacker News about their one anecdotal issue with Amazon there's thousands of products being shipped every minute that have no issue. Amazon mostly works, though I wouldn't trust it for very large fragile things.

AznHisoka 7y ago

In the enterprise side of things, I find G2Crowd and TrustRadius reviews useless in that they are too skewed towards the positive end of things.

myself248 7y ago

Betteridge's law thwarted at long last?

tanr54ok 7y ago
No not really. They didn’t have much value to begin with. Nothing fundamentally changed.

x86party 7y ago

1/5 Stars - Would not review again.

mattlutze 7y ago

As the trope goes, if the author asks a question in the title of their article, the answer is "no, not really." I'd counter that online reviews still have pretty much the same value they ever have had, and that we're more aware of what the limits of that value is. Lot's of real-person reviews exist on many platforms, and reading through a few often gives you a decent idea of what you're getting yourself into. Paid-for reviews are certainly a scourge, and one business getting loyalists to down-vote a competitor is also a problem. But that's been a thing since the beginning of recommendation features, and we should celebrate a little bit that we're more hip and conscious today to these operations.

ghaff 7y ago
The real question is: What is the alternative? There are some useful review sites like Wirecutter that arguably cut through the clutter in a lot of cases. But the amount of "stuff" and experiences (e.g. restaurants) out there is pretty overwhelming for what's left of professional reviewers outside of some fairly narrow domains. I do a lot of travel. Are Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews of restaurants great? Not really. Are they generally better--given some critical mass--than picking a restaurant at random or because it has a cool name? Almost certainly. (Of course, online menus and the like can be somewhat useful as well.)
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  We're building Bibimapp so you can get recommendations from your direct and extended network. Personal recommendations from people you trust. https://bibimapp.com https://bibimapp.com
  - frutiger 7y ago
    Off-topic: is the name related to this delicious Korean dish? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibimbap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibimbap
    - rorykoehler 7y ago

harel 7y ago

I now look first at 3 star reviews. These are less likely to be biased and more likely to represent a middle ground between the good and bad aspects of the product. It's sad that we had to get there but the trust is gone with 4-5 star reviews for me.

lloeki 7y ago
Something strange I’ve seen on more than one occasion and on multiple platforms is 1-star glowing reviews and 5-star bashing reviews. Also, when looking at overall reviews for a given thing there is usually a pattern for fraudulent ones, kind of like students having to summarise from the same text.
- fasicle 7y ago
  I've noticed this is particularly common on the Google Play store. Apparently the reason is reviews which go against what most people are reviewing are given a higher priority and more likely to be shown to potential users. E.g. if an app is getting mostly 5 stars and you give it a 1 star, your rating will be more prominently shown in Google Play.
- notacoward 7y ago
  This kind of bi-modal distribution usually means one of three things. Most often it means the product is crap (Sturgeon's Law: 99% of everything is crap) and the vendor has been buying or posting fake five-star reviews. Occasionally it means the product is really good and a competitor has been buying or posting fake one-star reviews. Even more rarely, it means that the vendor and a competitor are both participating in a fake-review war. You could try looking at both sets of reviews to determine which scenario it is, but the odds are heavily stacked against it being the one that suggests a buy. As galling as it might be to let the miscreants win if that's the case, and to miss out on what's actually a good product, the safe bet is just to move on.

ineedasername 7y ago

No, but I find myself gravitating much more towards the negative reviews. Not only are they more likely to be legitimate reviews, they tell me the reasons someone didn't like a product, which I find more valuable. Often because a failure for one person might not be an issue I care about: For example, if a reviewer for a book says, "Author spent too much time on the individual people and not enough time moving the plot forward" then I might view that as a positive if I like deep character building. It's a legitimate complaint, but from my perspective it's a feature, not a bug. Or I just might not care: "Item arrived broken" is not something I care much about when it's something that's easy to return/exchange, unless many people are also saying even when it arrived intact, It breaks too easily on use.

EdwardDiego 7y ago
My favourite Steam review: "Did not load on my machine. Please help."
- noxToken 7y ago
  I understand what you're going for, but this is a legitimate complaint for console-to-PC ports and ports/remasters of older games. There are some ports that I have bought that never ran after multiple troubleshooting sessions. I don't expect developers to test every combination of hardware in a given market. That's silly. I do think it helps buyers understand the risk in buying ported titles though.
pizza234 7y ago
I'm observing (I may be wrong) that more and more photos are getting posted as part of the reviews, which I assume it's caused by buyers reacting to this problem. That's no foolproof solution, but of course, it increases the cost of fake reviews. Also, language is not taken into account. It's probably more expensive to buy fake reviews in, say, Norwegian, rather than in the standard English, so non-English speaking countries have an advantage.
- md8 7y ago

mrfusion 7y ago

I think shopping sites should simply show the percent returns for each item. Maybe break it down by return reason.

codazoda 7y ago
At first thought, this might be useful information. It might be less helpful for very inexpensive products where returning the defective item isn't worth the effort. I suspect sellers wouldn't want to encourage returns as a way to show dissatisfaction, since they are so expensive.

ddelt 7y ago

For me, once I became aware of the fact that it is now a commonplace activity to pay for falsified reviews, and there are technology platforms that scan reviews to determine if they are fake or not... almost any review I read on a mainstream shopping platform is suspect to me now. Which is unfortunate, because that's where most of the convenience and value as a consumer is to me. If I now want to make a purchase based heavily on user reviews, I do like many of the other posters here have said: I look at the reviews and low and high middle of the spectrum, have to read each review for obvious, glaring generalizations and seek out language that implies real-world usage vs. hyperbole, and use other features at my disposal, including a verified reviewer stamp (if on Amazon), tools like FakeSpot or ReviewMeta, and reading reviews from competing shopping platforms for the same item if possible (if shopping on Amazon for a widget, look for reviews on eBay or the website of the widget manufacturer). If it's a technology purchase, I'll also look up a bunch of reviews from at least 3-4 technology review platforms, placing a greater weight on those who have included screenshots of their actual usage of the product, which tend to imply a greater deal of rigor to go through for a fake review (but this doesn't mean it's completely trustworthy either). These additional forms of verification, on one hand, could be likened to how we used to shop before internet shopping was a thing (we'd ask a bunch of people for reviews in real life, visit a bunch of stores and window shop, and perhaps read about it in a newspaper or try it ourselves in a real-life demo in the store), but at the end of the day, I choose to shop online for the convenience vs. brick and mortar stores, and this is the unfortunate evolution of that technology.

rahidz 7y ago

I've found ReviewMeta (https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/) useful for Amazon reviews, though it still doesn't solve the issue of co-mingling products. So generally for buying items I use Amazon or a niche subreddit's recommendation, then buy the product off eBay, the manufacturer's website, or a physical store. As far as "place" reviews, Google reviews in my area haven't let me down yet. Yelp has been hit-or-miss; I dislike their "not currently recommended" review system. TripAdvisor isn't too useful in my local area as there's not nearly as many reviews as on Google/Yelp.

sambe 7y ago
I don't get the feeling ReviewMeta is very sophisticated. FakeSpot and ReviewMeta often contradict each other. I often spend time on both sites and then realise that either all the candidate products are not great, or I've wasted time gaining little confidence and should just pick one.
- FakespotCom 7y ago
  Fakespot CTO here. That's a good observation. Our engines utilize NLP heavily conjoined with proprietary ML models to detect influenced reviews that basic statistical analysis will never (or with low levels of success) be able to infer from review data sets, unless there are very basic signals such as 100 5-star reviews posted in an hour. Fake review authors and providers are increasingly becoming sophisticated to bypass various filters in place on Amazon and other websites so you need to be able to leverage SOTA analysis to detect them. We also don't reveal how we detect certain fake reviews due to the fact that they will use that information to their advantage to further exploit our system, which allows us to be a couple steps ahead. Anyone interested to know more about this topic feel free to email me at saoud@fakespot.com.
  - tasubotadas 7y ago
    It would be awesome if you could support amazon.de
    - 7y ago

k33n 7y ago

I worked for Luma when they were having a review war with Eero. Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up with Eero's. We had an inferior product with a lot of problems, so it was a losing battle in the end. Probably the most interesting part is that Amazon was one of our lead investors. We came to them for help, and they told us in a wink wink nudge nudge sort of way that our only option was to just keep buying positive reviews.

Analemma_ 7y ago
This is actually a pretty damning indictment. The most charitable thing you could say about Amazon vis-à-vis fake reviews is that they would like to get rid of them but are just overwhelmed by the difficulty of the problem. But this seems to indicate a tacit endorsement on their part. I guess we can’t expect any serious action on this problem anytime soon.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  If I were in the market for some fraudulent reviews I think my first stop would be mechanical turk. I say that as someone with zero knowledge review fraud or mechanical turk but is it possible Amazon stand to gain more than they lose on paid reviews?
sundayedition 7y ago
> Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up with Eero's. I can't help but feel that in addition to being unethical, this might also be illegal. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/03/los-angeles-based-sage-auto-group-will-pay-36-million-settle-ftc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/03/los-a...
- gnicholas 7y ago
  I have been disappointed to find that many startup founders — even those who work in "impact" or "education" — do not care about the ethics or legality of paid reviews. I had a discussion with one founder a few years back, and at first I thought he was simply unaware of the then-new FTC guidelines. But it became clear that he did not care if what he was doing was illegal since "it's just the way business gets done", in his words. Caveat emptor!

bluedino 7y ago

If I'm looking for reviews, I look at results from forums. There's internet communities out there for everything. Forums are usually good for compiling lists of 'approved' items as well.

oflannabhra 7y ago

I have fully shifted away from doing my own research on what to buy to going to recommendation sites. I've always thought I had an astute ability to detect fake reviews (and I was probably right for the first wave of low effort paid reviews). What made me change was the following: 1) Companies and consumers cooperating in huge, fake review rings, 2) product search at places like Amazon becoming totally undifferentiatable, and 3) the lack of trust in tools to combat them (fakespot, etc). I now just go to a recommendation site that earns income through affiliate kickbacks. I use Wirecutter [0], Rtings [1], plus a handful of smaller forum / community sites for categories those don't cover. I actually think this is an enormous opportunity for several huge categories: 1) Tool reviews: especially with the rate of battery innovation, there is a huge opportunity to have thorough reviews and category recommendations of both consumer and professional tools. 2) Camera / DSLR / video - There's no lack of thorough reviews in this category, but making sense of it is near impossible unless you're a professional. 3) IoT gear - This isn't hugely important to me, but similar to cameras and tools there are a variety of systems that lock users in, and getting recommendations based on which system a user already has would be relatively simple. I have found these categories to be lacking not only in trustable reviews, but mostly in updated recommendations. Even if reviews exist, it is up to the effort of the user to read them all and build up a knowledge base of similar options to select from. Each of these categories have a high enough volume and purchase price that affiliate fees could easily support a recommendation business. [0] - https://thewirecutter.com https://thewirecutter.com [1] - https://www.rtings.com https://www.rtings.com

FakespotCom 7y ago
Fakespot CTO here. Care to elaborate on your lack of trust in Fakespot? Just curious.
yborg 7y ago
I don't follow why you distrust sites like Fakespot but trust something like Wirecutter which as you note is directly incented to shill review products that offer more affiliate revenue.

jacobkg 7y ago

Lately I’ve been looking at the distribution of reviews. TripAdvisor and Amazon both have bar graphs of rating distributions. In general, I see these distributions: Great products: Generally a very good product will have between 80 and 90 percent 5-star reviews and then the remaining percentages will tail down with the lowest percent of 1 star reviews. This was how I picked where to go on my honeymoon on TripAdvisor. Fake Products: All 5-star reviews with zero reviews of any other rating. So so products: Similar to great products in that the number of reviews decreases as the rating goes down, but the percentage of 4 star reviews is significant and there are less than 70% 5 star reviews Bad products: Less 5 star reviews than 4 or 3 star reviews. These are surprisingly uncommon and feel quaint when I see them. Mixed supply chain (Fakes) or serious quality issues: What I refer to as the “1 star bump” where a product has more 1-star reviews than 2, 3, or 4 star review. Similar to “so so products” except you see the 1 star bar sticking out noticeably in the graph. The 1-star bump is my most reliable signal not to buy something. Unfortunately it’s very common on Amazon.

crazygringo 7y ago
This is also my strategy 100%, I agree with everything you've said for Amazon. The histogram is the most important thing. Interestingly, I find restaurants on Yelp follow an entirely different pattern -- a hump at 3 stars, or at 4 stars, most often. There are usually a few 5-star reviews for every place, but when there are more 5-star reviews than 4-stars, the restuaurants have always been exceptional. I don't feel like I've ever been steered wrong once.
tvanantwerp 7y ago
I feel like I see only the "1 star bump" distribution for nearly everything. Most people happily rate something as a 5 with little thought, and a few write a very long screed to accompany a 1; almost nobody cares to do anything in between.
benj111 7y ago
I bought a controller last week that displayed the 'one star bump'(tm) They were 1 stars for the wireless version I wasn't buying, so you still have to drill down to see what the 1 star reviews actually say.

0x262d 7y ago

the reviews are hosted by amazon. they exist to facilitate profitmaking by selling stuff. the company never even pretends to have goals at odds with that. some part of that requires barely pretending to not encourage this behavior... but this is inevitable.

known 7y ago

Failed due to Homogeneity, Centralization, Division, Imitation and Emotionality as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Failures_of_crowd_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Failures_...

thess24 7y ago

Something I've been thinking about recently is that there should be a site that only takes the "good" products from amazon and displays them for different categories - maybe only the top 20 or so. If i'm looking for an oven mitt / phone case / whatever the amount of junk is overwhelming. I envision it would essentially be a semi-curated list of amazon items. Anyone know of something like this? It's on my backlist of projects to build if I can't find any substitutes.

martin-adams 7y ago
This is nice in theory, but Amazon have a big problem right now where merchants have figured out how to reuse Amazon listing to game the review rating. You'll often find you're looking at a product but the reviews are talking about something completely different. Here's an example - third product in the search results on Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Headphone-Connector-Converter-Accessories-Compatible-White/dp/B07VGLX24P/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Headphone-Connector-Converter-Acces... It's supposed to be for Headphone adapters for iPhone, but you get reviews like: "Super set of pocket friendly priced pencils!" "I purchased this Hub back in April of 2013" "On the first couple of uses, food did stick a bit and that is with seasoning the griddle" So it's got to point now of having to first find a product with good ratings, then make sure the reviews are indeed for that product.
dewey 7y ago
Isn't that kinda what https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/ is doing?
- thess24 7y ago
  Thanks for the link - I'll probably just use this instead!

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago

Have Wall Street Journal Contributors Lost All Value?

aj7 7y ago

I first and sometimes only read the one star reviews, and look at their percentage. If one-five have a distribution with a big slope discontinuity… If it passes this test, I might read some of the other reviews looking for problems that I might agree with the viewer on.

harimau777 7y ago

It wouldn't solve everything, but I think that the problem could be significantly helped with the following changes: Only allow reviews from people who actually purchased the product. Make it fraud to pay spammers to review your product. Show the country where a seller is located. Make Amazon (and similar marketplaces) liable and on the hook for returns if a seller disappears.

olivermarks 7y ago

I look for practical information in reviews such as 'works well but the plastic grommet holder snapped off after a week of use, look out for the weak electric dimmer switch' etc etc. The subjective reviews are mostly a waste of time

tyfon 7y ago

I don't trust reviews at all unless I know the "reviewer" in real life, that is if someone I know tells me it's good. Good thing you have 14 day "no questions asked money back" guarantee on anything physical bought online in Europe. I've used that option quite a few times when the product is trash.

skizm 7y ago

Goodhart's law in action.

freeAgent 7y ago

They haven't lost all value, but you certainly can't take them at face value. I always make sure to read the negative reviews, as others have mentioned. I'll also frequently look at the review history of any review that resonates with me one way or another to see if they appear to be a normal person or a paid shill. Amazon could probably solve this problem if it wanted since it has access to purchase histories, shipping addresses, and review histories for all accounts on its site. I assume that the problem of fake reviews isn't solved because Amazon doesn't care enough about it to take the necessary action and fix it. It may also help Amazon's bottom line to have a bunch of highly-rated products for sale, even if those ratings are fake.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

I was getting a screen protector and apparently they're so cheap / specialized that they have no reviews at all. I ended up looking at reviews for other products by the same company. It could also be that they're all dropshippers and change their brand frequently to avoid negative reviews, but the stock graphics were at least slightly tweaked compared to Alibaba's.

kerkeslager 7y ago

I post frequently here with an anti-advertising stance. Briefly: advertising is often just unambiguously lying, and when it's not, it's still a one-sided collection of facts. Advertising breaks one of the core ideas of capitalism: that the best products or best prices will win, because a better-advertised product can beat a cheaper, higher-quality product. If one company spends money on advertising, all their competitors have to start spending money on advertising, which means that the entire market has to take money away from researching and manufacturing quality, or pass that cost on to the consumer. A common response I get is, "But how will we find out about products?" My stance is that professional review sites supported by users (examples: Consumer Reports, OutdoorGearLab, LabDoor) are the solution. So why not consumer reviews? 1. The obvious thing is that it doesn't solve the problem with advertising. Advertisers can pose as consumers and post reviews. Sophisticated methods of detecting this (i.e. ignore all 1- and 5-star reviews) just fall prey to more sophisticated advertisers (i.e. computer generate 30 5-star ratings to keep your star rating up, and then post one carefully-crafted 4-star rating written by a human). 2. Even if you do manage to filter advertisers, you still tend to hear from the extremes. Irrational positivity isn't better than irrational negativity: a person who posts all 5-star reviews because they want to be nice isn't better than the furious customer with a grudge. 3. Consumer reviews encourage what I'll call second-level advertising: if you can't advertise directly, then you try to get your consumers to advertise for you. For example: spamming your users with "If you like our product please leave a review on iTunes/GooglePlay/Amazon" or the YouTube classic, "Don't forget to Like and Subscribe!" 4. Consumers generally aren't experts, which means that consumer reviews are more susceptible to Parkinson's Law of Triviality[1]. A good example of this are the reviews on products that say things like "The parts feel cheap and flimsy." Well, did they break? Probably not, or you would have said that. Titanium parts are thinner and lighter than steel, which sometimes gives them the impression of being cheap and flimsy, when they are in fact more expensive and stronger. But in a more general sense, consumer reviews tend to focus on the look or price of something rather than harder-to-understand things like performance and durability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

JohnFen 7y ago

From my point of view, online reviews are not quite entirely without value, but their value is extremely low. I rarely bother reading them anymore.

scarejunba 7y ago

They have not. They've just graduated to a place where you can't lie: Reddit. On Reddit, everyone is sceptical of the guy who doesn't have a long history of comments. People who've only just joined a subreddit will be viewed sceptically. You'll get pretty good reviews if you do "XYZ reddit". The problem for the guy trying to game the reviews is that a real user reviews things too sparsely. There'll be one review in maybe a hundred comments and five submissions.

mclightning 7y ago
I do exactly this. It has worked for me so far.

mbostleman 7y ago

Nope. They just require the same critical thinking and situational awareness that is required to spot phishing, obviously malicious links, dark patterns, etc.

njharman 7y ago

Same media illiteracy problem as Fake News. Most people are unable to discern ulterior motives. So, "trust". btw; The solution is not improving one's ability to discern (because that is an arm's race the people with power motives (political, financial) are gonna out spend you and vast majority of humans are incapable of beating that) Rather it is by default not to trust and have high bar for earning your trust.

joeldg 7y ago

On Yelp yeah, Yelp is basically worthless as an actual rating system. There has been a trend of articles just taking the top yelp reviews for "____ type of food" and making top ten lists (there is a trend for doing similar articles with top voted Ask Reddit content). Anyway, where I live the top burger place on Yelp is in a mall and is basically a greasy less-tasty version of Five-guys. A mall.

deleted 7y ago

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RenRav 7y ago

For popular things? Yes, not enough of the information is reliable. Unpopular and niche things still benefit from reviews. It's almost as if the quality and usefulness goes up as the review count stays low.

username3 7y ago

View reviews by nth degree friends.

rossdavidh 7y ago

The star-ratings are nearly worthless, and to the extent there is any value, it is in 2-to-4 star reviews (less likely to be fake). However, the explanation, because harder for a bot to churn out believably, is still often worth something, not least because things that bother other people might be a plus for me.

dickdickery 7y ago

A big percentage of reviews on Yelp are fake. Sure you can buy fake yelp reviews on http://freepage.io http://freepage.io and other sites.

perseusprime11 7y ago

An AI-based platform that identifies legitimate reviews can easily find a product/market fit. Is anybody here interested?

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/m39hT http://archive.is/m39hT

notadoc 7y ago

Considering that anyone can go on Fiverr and pay for hundreds of 5 star glowing (or 1 star negative) reviews for nearly anything that can be reviewed on the web, I would say online reviews are largely BS.

flippinburgers 7y ago

When it comes to entertainment, largely a high level of positive reviews no longer tells me anything because the internet has saturated the planet. Average people are upvoting everything.

quantumfoam 7y ago

I prefer to read the 1-star reviews. Often, there's nuggets of information written if it's not entirely someone's complaint about a product/thing.

hnick 7y ago

Answer is no, as others have said. But I think it depends a lot on which reviews and what you're looking at. I frequently use Google's reviews for finding food places. While it's not 100%, and is HEAVILY biased to the top end (you probably want to aim for 4.2 or higher), it's been very reliable across many locations and even countries for me. Something I like is that a hole in the wall banh mi place is just as likely to earn a high rating as a 3 star restaurant - the ratings reflect the execution of what is being attempted, so cheap eats can rate well and sometimes that's all we want. For games and media, I actually like the aggregators a lot (Metacritic). It's not the final word, and idiots do review bomb some titles (but mostly AAA games that I would avoid), but the "wisdom of crowds" seems surprisingly accurate overall. Steam reviews with their "Overwhelmingly Positive" is similar. For individual items on Amazon or hotel rooms though, as other posters have said the mid-range reviews with something to say beyond the rating are the most worthwhile. I can tell if they're like-minded or whether their concerns mean nothing to me. On this note one amusing thing is that US reviews often focus on "the service" (probably because they're expected to pay extra for it) while I don't really care much about that and don't see it mentioned in other countries unless it's egregious.