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Even if you didn't feel the reviews were gamed--why would BestBuy leave bad reviews on its site--it would basically be admitting they sell bad products. Ideall

Even if you didn't feel the reviews were gamed--why would BestBuy leave bad reviews on its site--it would basically be admitting they sell bad products. Ideally maybe they are removing products that get continuous bad reviews before you see them, but generally reviews can't come from the same place you buy items and be trustworthy.

Judgmentality 6y ago
> why would BestBuy leave bad reviews on its site Because any website that doesn't do this I immediately assume is untrustworthy and I will choose to buy nothing from them at all.
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- neltnerb 6y ago
  How would someone know this when visiting them for an occasional purchase? You might easily assume that the lower rated items rapidly stop being carried, that the items that are carried are curated to have a real bias towards higher ratings, or merely that the lower rated items are on a different page of results. Which isn't to say I trust Best Buy's customer reviews, I definitely don't. I probably trust Amazon's more simply by sheer quantity combined with fakespot.com to sanity check the reviews. But I don't think a website having weird average scores is very suspicious, especially when they have small numbers of reviews. If many items are totally unreviewed and others have only a few dozen reviews, the results are essentially noise right? That's why I would trust Best Buy reviews less.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
I can understand if a company uses truly bad reviews as an indicator that they should stop carrying the product. That makes sense, and you'd have survivorship bias from that. However, the problem I see with BestBuy's approach is that even average reviews are being diluted by a deluge of 5 star reviews. Decent products should be getting 3 out of 5 stars and only the truly exceptional ones should be getting the perfect 5/5. I sense the problem is partly due to the shortcomings of the X/5 rating system.

Judgmentality 6y ago

> why would BestBuy leave bad reviews on its site Because any website that doesn't do this I immediately assume is untrustworthy and I will choose to buy nothing from them at all.

deleted 6y ago
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neltnerb 6y ago
How would someone know this when visiting them for an occasional purchase? You might easily assume that the lower rated items rapidly stop being carried, that the items that are carried are curated to have a real bias towards higher ratings, or merely that the lower rated items are on a different page of results. Which isn't to say I trust Best Buy's customer reviews, I definitely don't. I probably trust Amazon's more simply by sheer quantity combined with fakespot.com to sanity check the reviews. But I don't think a website having weird average scores is very suspicious, especially when they have small numbers of reviews. If many items are totally unreviewed and others have only a few dozen reviews, the results are essentially noise right? That's why I would trust Best Buy reviews less.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

I can understand if a company uses truly bad reviews as an indicator that they should stop carrying the product. That makes sense, and you'd have survivorship bias from that. However, the problem I see with BestBuy's approach is that even average reviews are being diluted by a deluge of 5 star reviews. Decent products should be getting 3 out of 5 stars and only the truly exceptional ones should be getting the perfect 5/5. I sense the problem is partly due to the shortcomings of the X/5 rating system.