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She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

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Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#41

Post by ReactiveJelly »

nomilk wrote: post #36
6DM wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment made me go lookup my old reviews. It's crazy, most of them were deleted. I would have expected to receive some kind of notification. I thought I could sift through the rubble to discern fake from real but now I know Amazon reviews are absolutely worthless.

Wonder if we could make a browser extension that stores and presents amazon reviews. Could be useful to fill gaps on other sites too, for example when an uploader turns off comments on youtube. It would be a pretty big middle finger to amazon if the primary site for amazon seller reviews was not actually amazon, but a third party site/app.

Yeah I've been wanting to have that "comment on anything" for a while.

It's possible in technical theory. But sharing the comments would be hard. Federation might work. Spam moderation could be hard. And most websites refuse to go into iframes, so your options are limited to browser extensions, SOCKS proxies, and Opera Mini style apps that re-render the page. Which means you'll get less than a percent of a percent of people to use it.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#42

Post by Buttons840 »

iammer wrote: post #7

Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and reali…

Leave a 5 star review, get your gift card, then change or remove your review. If this was done often enough nobody would even try buying reviews.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#43

Post by Scarblac »

lakpan wrote: post #24
irishloop wrote: post #14

I once gave an Airbnb 4 stars because I was annoyed they had no way to make coffee, even though it was basically a hotel being run as an Airbnb. Like, not even a cheap Keurig in the lobby They DMed me and told me that was bullshit and if I wanted coffee, I should've filtered by that amenity Which is amazing because coffee is so expected you can't even search by it

I mean… they’re not 100% wrong.

It's a review. Customer didn't like something, why not mention it for others? It's supposed to be a service for people like you in the future.

The problem is that the scale is now so compressed that 5* means "OK" and 4* means "not OK". 3* is assumed by the system to be a user abusing the review system.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#44

Post by labster »

candiddevmike wrote: post #29
fsckboy wrote: post #9

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." N…

Counterpoint: steam reviews with their binary choice result in a better aggregate experience and remove the need for bell curves. Binary choice leaves less room for interpretation and fuzzy ness, you either like something or you don't.

Steam has other problems with user submitted genre tags. Make a DLC that people thought under-delivered and you be may surprised to learn that you shipped a hentai game. Though that is definitely on the user’s side.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#45

Post by kstrauser »

Buttons840 wrote: post #42
iammer wrote: post #7

Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and reali…

Leave a 5 star review, get your gift card, then change or remove your review. If this was done often enough nobody would even try buying reviews.

That's an option. Still, it's not worth the small amount of money, to me, for a skeevy vendor like that to be able to say that they've paid me.

Like, I don't judge. And when I was younger and broke half the time, I might've leapt at the easy money. I just wouldn't do it today.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#46

Post by safety1st »

iammer wrote: post #7

Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and reali…

How is this not a violation of some kind of truth in advertising law? Is the US government just of the position now that "if you violate the law and make us your bitch it's totally cool as long as you're automating your crime and committing it at scale?"

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#47

Post by throw__away7391 »

iammer wrote: post #7

Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and reali…

I received a “warning” insinuating that my Amazon account would be suspended for a bad review of a product that offered me a gift card for more than the value of the product in exchange for a screenshot of my 5-star review.

I am not sure what to make of this, I have considered that possibility the company has an employee on their payroll.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#48

Post by mplewis »

fsckboy wrote: post #9

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." N…

Stuff like this doesn’t naturally fall on a bell curve. Most hotels are great. Most restaurants are pretty good. There is no such thing as an objective 5.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#49

Post by 2143 »

justworkout wrote: post #3

I'm currently planning a trip to India. I've been to several countries around the world and never worried about reviews too much, but India really seems to align with this story. I'll see hotels with countless 5 star reviews (hundreds or even thousands!) that are overwhelmingly positive and get ready to book. But with one hotel my BS meter got triggered, since it was in a rather dingy seeming part of town but still h…

Go stay at those big name hotels, such as Sheraton, Mariott, Hilton, Le Meridian, Obero, Ritz-Carlton, Taj, Leela etc.

Most of these are present in major cities across India. They're a little on the expensive side though.

(I'm NOT affiliated in any way with any of the hotels mentioned in this post).

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#50

Post by fsckboy »

mplewis wrote: post #48
fsckboy wrote: post #9

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." N…

Stuff like this doesn’t naturally fall on a bell curve. Most hotels are great. Most restaurants are pretty good. There is no such thing as an objective 5.

in a normal distribution, you expect the mode to be at the mean to be at the median. If that's where most hotels are, and most restaurants, welcome to what 5 objectively means.
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