4 ms·

People need to stop hoping for good crowd sourced reviews and ratings. Even if the platform would have the best interests it can't be done. Two simple reasons:

People need to stop hoping for good crowd sourced reviews and ratings. Even if the platform would have the best interests it can't be done. Two simple reasons: 1. Ratings: you can not compress information down to 1 byte without losing almost all of it. I've been a professional game reviewer in another life. I used to give ratings because I was forced to by the site format. When I retired from that I looked back at tens of games I rated. The scores made absolutely no sense any way you tried to look at them. Not compared to each other, not compared to what the game set out to achieve (one way I tried to grade them as objective as possible), nothing. It can not be done. 2. By definition half of the reviews/ratings are being given by stupider than average people. How are you supposed to draw any conclusion when half of the data is garbage? Only one thing crowd sourced ratings are useful for: helping the platform become a gatekeeper and then squeezing the reviewed.

pklausler 3y ago
Here's a free idea for you budding entrepreneurs: allow the user of a review site to apply their own custom weights to reviewers. If you discover a reviewer with good taste, weight their reviews more highly. And also be able to incorporate their weightings of other reviewers into your own -- if A thinks highly of B, then that raises your default weighting of B.
- squirtlebonflow 3y ago
  This is a decent idea, but not sure how it could work. I'm no mathematician, but it seems like you're dealing with an extremely large set of infinite fractions, that might take some time to compute. For example, if I leave a 5 star review and there is one other review, 1 star, it would be 3 stars if we had the same weight. But if someone votes me 76% "taste score", and THEY have 50% weight, and I voted THEM 37% "taste score", then both of our votes affect each other. And this would happen for an cycle of reviewers reviewing other reviewers. Unless you meant only personal settings, in which case I think it would only work for niche audiences. There's a good chance that there's zero overlap between sets of reviewers on many products on Amazon except perhaps people who are chronically online, reviewing products. IMO those people's reviews are not as helpful as a person who leaves an occasional review, because in the latter case, the product stood out for some reason.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

pklausler 3y ago

Here's a free idea for you budding entrepreneurs: allow the user of a review site to apply their own custom weights to reviewers. If you discover a reviewer with good taste, weight their reviews more highly. And also be able to incorporate their weightings of other reviewers into your own -- if A thinks highly of B, then that raises your default weighting of B.

squirtlebonflow 3y ago
This is a decent idea, but not sure how it could work. I'm no mathematician, but it seems like you're dealing with an extremely large set of infinite fractions, that might take some time to compute. For example, if I leave a 5 star review and there is one other review, 1 star, it would be 3 stars if we had the same weight. But if someone votes me 76% "taste score", and THEY have 50% weight, and I voted THEM 37% "taste score", then both of our votes affect each other. And this would happen for an cycle of reviewers reviewing other reviewers. Unless you meant only personal settings, in which case I think it would only work for niche audiences. There's a good chance that there's zero overlap between sets of reviewers on many products on Amazon except perhaps people who are chronically online, reviewing products. IMO those people's reviews are not as helpful as a person who leaves an occasional review, because in the latter case, the product stood out for some reason.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]