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I'm not surprised. Most of them were just bitching about Apple, and not reviewing the product. Most of the reviews of the USB-C dongles were just complaining ab

I'm not surprised. Most of them were just bitching about Apple, and not reviewing the product. Most of the reviews of the USB-C dongles were just complaining about USB-C, for example. Useless.

ignoramous 7y ago
> Useless. Isn't it on Apple to assign resources to fix the problem instead of going nuclear on it? Surely, not all reviews are useless? > Most of the reviews of the USB-C dongles were just complaining about USB-C, for example. I've seen this problem with PlayStore too, but Google takes forever to delete the reviews: Even the ones that are unrelated. I wonder why AI isn't employed to weed out or help automate the process of flagging such reviews. May be someone should build it?
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Surely, not all reviews are useless? What am I going to do with the review? If I need a new Apple charger then I need a new Apple charger. I’m not going to read a review and decide not to buy it am I? It’s useless noise.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    This assumes only one product that meets your needs.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  I think it would be very difficult/expensive to build a system that wouldn't be called censorship. (I'm not even sure that would ever be successful, even assuming unlimited talent and budget)
jlarocco 7y ago
Is that really useless, though? If I'm about to drop $3-6k on a laptop, I want to know beforehand that it's going to be a PITA connecting things to it. The fact that lots of people think it's difficult, and that Apple responded to their problems, is also useful to see.
- derefr 7y ago
  Products are rated relative to one-another, though, not on any absolute scale (because everyone uses a different personal subjective scale, so all a review or recommendation system can hope to do is to normalize each person's ratings against their own learned model of rating criteria such that the person's lowest score becomes a 1 and their highest a 5.) If people don't like USB-C, they're just going to rate everything Apple makes as a 1.0/5, which, as far as a normalization algorithm is concerned, is the same as rating everything a 5.0/5. It carries no signal and gets completely dropped from the algorithm.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    I don't think anyone has a psychological issue with USB C. What they have is a perfectly legitimate issue with not being able to use their existing peripherals with a supposedly top-of-the-line professional laptop/desktop with an unquestionably professional price. Removing the reviews is PR sterilisation. It's appearance management. It's wilfully turning a deaf ear to any feedback that suggests the Emperor may not be fully clothed. It has absolutely nothing to do with raising the SNR in the store.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Let me be clear; I was mostly talking about ratings re: SNR. Ratings, in a very explicit mathematical sense, become literally undefined when you aren't comparing them between things, but just comparing something to itself. You can't have a vote with one candidate; you can't have an auction with one bidder; etc. The results are all undefined. In the exact same sense, you can't have a ratings system in a marketplace with one product in it. Or, for a direct analogy: you can't have Hot or Not where it's just one dude. Is he hot? Is he not? Undefined. Now, freeform text reviews: sure, they might hold some meaning, even in a single-seller marketplace. (For subtle behavioral-economic reasons, I would hypothesize that they probably don't, but let's pretend they do.) I would posit, though, that whatever's in those reviews is already the result of "PR sterilization." What you're seeing is what Apple wants you to see. It's their store. Reviews only "work" (i.e. have guaranteed real signal, rather than "maybe real, maybe fake" signal) when incentives in a marketplace are aligned such that even the marketplace owner has no incentive to tamper with which reviews are or are not visible. That is not true here, and so the reviews are not, and never were, trustworthy. They were noise from the start.

I'm not surprised. Most of them were just bitching about Apple, and not reviewing the product. Most of the reviews of the USB-C dongles were just complaining about USB-C, for example. Useless.

ignoramous 7y ago

> Useless. Isn't it on Apple to assign resources to fix the problem instead of going nuclear on it? Surely, not all reviews are useless? > Most of the reviews of the USB-C dongles were just complaining about USB-C, for example. I've seen this problem with PlayStore too, but Google takes forever to delete the reviews: Even the ones that are unrelated. I wonder why AI isn't employed to weed out or help automate the process of flagging such reviews. May be someone should build it?

chrisseaton 7y ago
> Surely, not all reviews are useless? What am I going to do with the review? If I need a new Apple charger then I need a new Apple charger. I’m not going to read a review and decide not to buy it am I? It’s useless noise.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  This assumes only one product that meets your needs.
bdcravens 7y ago
I think it would be very difficult/expensive to build a system that wouldn't be called censorship. (I'm not even sure that would ever be successful, even assuming unlimited talent and budget)

jlarocco 7y ago

Is that really useless, though? If I'm about to drop $3-6k on a laptop, I want to know beforehand that it's going to be a PITA connecting things to it. The fact that lots of people think it's difficult, and that Apple responded to their problems, is also useful to see.

derefr 7y ago
Products are rated relative to one-another, though, not on any absolute scale (because everyone uses a different personal subjective scale, so all a review or recommendation system can hope to do is to normalize each person's ratings against their own learned model of rating criteria such that the person's lowest score becomes a 1 and their highest a 5.) If people don't like USB-C, they're just going to rate everything Apple makes as a 1.0/5, which, as far as a normalization algorithm is concerned, is the same as rating everything a 5.0/5. It carries no signal and gets completely dropped from the algorithm.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  I don't think anyone has a psychological issue with USB C. What they have is a perfectly legitimate issue with not being able to use their existing peripherals with a supposedly top-of-the-line professional laptop/desktop with an unquestionably professional price. Removing the reviews is PR sterilisation. It's appearance management. It's wilfully turning a deaf ear to any feedback that suggests the Emperor may not be fully clothed. It has absolutely nothing to do with raising the SNR in the store.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Let me be clear; I was mostly talking about ratings re: SNR. Ratings, in a very explicit mathematical sense, become literally undefined when you aren't comparing them between things, but just comparing something to itself. You can't have a vote with one candidate; you can't have an auction with one bidder; etc. The results are all undefined. In the exact same sense, you can't have a ratings system in a marketplace with one product in it. Or, for a direct analogy: you can't have Hot or Not where it's just one dude. Is he hot? Is he not? Undefined. Now, freeform text reviews: sure, they might hold some meaning, even in a single-seller marketplace. (For subtle behavioral-economic reasons, I would hypothesize that they probably don't, but let's pretend they do.) I would posit, though, that whatever's in those reviews is already the result of "PR sterilization." What you're seeing is what Apple wants you to see. It's their store. Reviews only "work" (i.e. have guaranteed real signal, rather than "maybe real, maybe fake" signal) when incentives in a marketplace are aligned such that even the marketplace owner has no incentive to tamper with which reviews are or are not visible. That is not true here, and so the reviews are not, and never were, trustworthy. They were noise from the start.