161–170 of 273 posts
Writing this comment has made me re-think why I'm writing this comment.
I usually just ignore 5-star and 1-star reviews. Many of five stars are either fake or people who just bought the product and are too excited to leave an unbiased review. Many of one stars are from people who are not satisfied with the purchase process (slow delivery / fake reviews / broken item), so they leave bad review that doesn't really reflect product quality itself.
You bet that after it was all over and done, I wrote that one-star review. While writing it, I noticed that other people had the same issue. One person also had to cite court fees before they paid up, and some others didn't know enough about applicable law or had amounts that were just too low to go to court over (like $50-$250). I usually don't put much stock in such reviews, but it turns out I should have read and considered them.
There are definitely legitimate cases for one-star reviews.
"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic" Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.
Couldn't it be that 1% is fake site-wide, but that for some products, 85% of 600 reviews might be fake? If I were Amazon and would want to downplay the issue, I would certainly quote the site-wide figure when the fake-review-posters are only paid to hype a couple of products.
I've been using https://www.fakespot.com to flag bullshit reviews for a few months now. After many happy purchases informed by its review analysis, I believe it works.
Probably not, though, so more likely the fake reviewers will find a way to avoid its detection algorithm at some point.
I'm not really sure why there are any real reviews on sites like Amazon, Yelp etc. Why do people leave reviews; what's in it for them? Is it some strange form of altruism where they're helping their fellow anonymous shopper while also helping out one of the world's most successful megacorporations? Writing this comment has made me re-think why I'm writing this comment.
I've found that it's more useful to sort by negative reviews. It's reasonable to assume that the product is what it appears to be at face value, but customers tend to speak up if they feel like they got cheated. On the other hand, I believe I read that some fake reviews are actually negative, as a means to funnel users to competing products. So who knows? Can't trust anything I read on the internet concerning a produ…
Oh, right. I often look for a few positive ones (to find what people thought was positive enough about this product to mention it) as well as the negative ones (to see if they complain about defect units and other one-off issues, or if there are actually real issues with a product), sorted by newest in the hopes that I don't happen to be looking right after a batch of paid reviews were added. But you're right, there is a reason why negative ones would be fake as well. Seems to be less common, though, but still.
Anecdata, sample size 1. I bought some toy for a toddler. Upon receiving it, I realized that the description was misleading; many of the "pieces" they had listed boldly were just cheap plastic pieces of crap that had no useful functionality. So I returned it, and wrote a 1-star review. A few weeks later, I got an email from them: they were offering $30 if I took down the review. I ignored the email. Several weeks lat…
I'm not really sure why there are any real reviews on sites like Amazon, Yelp etc. Why do people leave reviews; what's in it for them? Is it some strange form of altruism where they're helping their fellow anonymous shopper while also helping out one of the world's most successful megacorporations? Writing this comment has made me re-think why I'm writing this comment.
Me? Because I enjoy helping others - and it is my best way of punishing bad actors and supporting good ones, hopefully helping to balance the market in the long run.
Actually a bit of the same reason as why I'm writing here: help people by providing facts, add some balance and maybe sometimes a new perspective.