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Its a double edged sword. Reviews take effort so you want to make them easier for customers to write. But making them easier for your users also makes them easi

Its a double edged sword. Reviews take effort so you want to make them easier for customers to write. But making them easier for your users also makes them easier for those trying to game the system. This is why Amazon's product reviews are useless as well as pretty much any other community based review system. But on top of that you do have the problem of whether or not someone is really qualified to write a review. So Joe User thinks product X is good. What is their metric for good? It reminds me of an LTT review of the Amazon TV from a few months ago. They gave it an awful rating but noted that the reviews on the product page were generally very positive. And their reasoning was that the people buying these TVs and reviewing them didn't have a good comparison point for what a good TV actually is. They are probably comparing it to a much older and less advanced product not to a contemporary one. So then you think the answer must be get reviews from industry related media. But then you fall into the classic problems of unethical journalists or simply ones that are out of touch.

Spivak 5y ago
It's not a question of whether someone is qualified or not, everybody is more than qualified to write about their own feelings toward a product they bought or service they used. In fact no one is more qualified to talk about their own feelings and experience. How useful that review is to you is a combination of the writing quality and depth, and how similar the reviewer is to your own experience and preferences. Professional critics usually try to distinguish themselves by producing well written in-depth reviews but not from their own perspective but that of a hypothetical everyman who, ideally, is similar enough to a critical mass of their audience. So it always interests me when people complain about popular gaming review sites being out of touch because almost always it's the reader that's out of touch but doesn't realize their bubble. It's not an absolute rule but I'm in enough niche hobbies to realize that my desires for products are way out of whack.

Spivak 5y ago

It's not a question of whether someone is qualified or not, everybody is more than qualified to write about their own feelings toward a product they bought or service they used. In fact no one is more qualified to talk about their own feelings and experience. How useful that review is to you is a combination of the writing quality and depth, and how similar the reviewer is to your own experience and preferences. Professional critics usually try to distinguish themselves by producing well written in-depth reviews but not from their own perspective but that of a hypothetical everyman who, ideally, is similar enough to a critical mass of their audience. So it always interests me when people complain about popular gaming review sites being out of touch because almost always it's the reader that's out of touch but doesn't realize their bubble. It's not an absolute rule but I'm in enough niche hobbies to realize that my desires for products are way out of whack.