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Does the internet have a 1 star review problem?

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Re: Does the internet have a 1 star review problem?

#21

Post by newaccount74 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #19
newaccount74 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On sites like here or Reddit, I’ve noticed users do a pretty consistent job of policing through karma. They do a decent job at downvoting/flagging spam and obvious harassment. However, if you post something that is just ever so slightly unpopular or polarizing, you will receive the same torrent of downvotes. This makes it very hard to discuss things where you don't agree with the majority. I would assume reviews ha…

Sorting by "controversial" can occasionally be illuminating. This of course depends on whether or not mods remove unpopular opinions, and/or ban people providing them.

"Controversial" gives a boost to polarizing comments, but it doesn't help with the fact that posts with ever so slightly unpopular opinions get downvoted, and unless they are somewhat polarizing won't get any upvotes.

When I look at my post history, I see that my most thoughtful and balanced comments are either ignored or downvoted. My most upvoted comments are usually rants that lots of people agree with, but I don't consider them worthy of the attention.

Re: Does the internet have a 1 star review problem?

#22

Post by dredmorbius »

newaccount74 wrote: post #21
dredmorbius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorting by "controversial" can occasionally be illuminating. This of course depends on whether or not mods remove unpopular opinions, and/or ban people providing them.

"Controversial" gives a boost to polarizing comments, but it doesn't help with the fact that posts with ever so slightly unpopular opinions get downvoted, and unless they are somewhat polarizing won't get any upvotes. When I look at my post history, I see that my most thoughtful and balanced comments are either ignored or downvoted. My most upvoted comments are usually rants that lots of people agree with, but I don'…

You're right that it's not perfect, and that there's a fair bit of content that gets ranked "controversial" which has few merits.

But some that's valid-but-unpopular also shows up. The specific characteristics can vary a lot by subreddit.

You can also use this sort on a personal page (" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/u/) to see which of their comments / submissions stirs up dispute.

Collaborative filtering / user-based moderation absolutely has its issues and limitations. You can eke some more information from it through the "controversial" sort, however.

Crowd-pleasing ranking systems like voting tend to surface crowd-pleasing content.

(There are reasons I spend little time on Reddit these days.)

Re: Does the internet have a 1 star review problem?

#23

Post by kypro »

The quality of reviews are the real problem I think. People could leave a 5 star review because they have a bias towards the product/service or could leave a 1 star because they're having a bad day.

What I think is needed is for companies to incentivise higher quality reviews. Breaking review in categories so I can understand exactly what's 5/5 and what's 1/5 about the product/service. Weight ratings with detailed explanations and photos. Moderate spammy / unhelpful comments. Allowing the owner to respond. All these massively increase the value of a review.

I'm not sure there's much you can do about the odd unfair 1 star rating. There are always going to be people who dislike your product/service and they should probably have the right to express than dislike. However, I think in the case you're describing if the rating was broken into categories and the reviewer 1 stared every category, you can probably assume it's low quality and negatively weight it. The owner should be able to respond to comments like this and provide their side of the story. I use Trustpilot a lot and I'm often happy to over look the odd negative review when a company provides a convincing explanation and apology in response to negative comments.

I guess to answer your question, I think the issue is more that we tolerate low-effort reviews where people can just hit 1 star button with a one sentence explanation and their review is weighted the same as someone who spends 30 minutes providing a detailed review.

Re: Does the internet have a 1 star review problem?

#24

Post by juve1996 »

jfoster wrote: post #8

This isn't a problem because a single bad review doesn't outweigh many good reviews. Something I think the next generation of reviews should take into consideration, though: places change. A place that used to be good can take a turn for the worse, and a place that used to be bad can improve. Besides an overall rating, I would like to see how the most recent reviews assess an establishment.

Agreed, ratings should definitely go stale, especially in this age where many things receive positive/negative updates. Over time high reviews that are very old should lose their weight.

Re: Does the internet have a 1 star review problem?

#26

Post by Gtex555 »

This is a fun post, I got a few ideas.

solutions 1:

Obviously most 1 star and 5 star reviews are not credible so you can just ignore them and get a rating based on the other ratings but the users cannot know that you are ignoring said reviews

solution 2:

Rating system from 0 and 10 as it gives the user more room to describe their experience, it also has the secondary benefit of being something you can normalize. If the average review is a 8/10 , that becomes your new 5/10 and you can devise some kind of mean and standard deviations from the mean system. again you can ignore like 0/10 or 10/10 ratings for the same reasons as previously mentioned.

solution 3:

Could use some combination of sentiment analysis and correlate it to the numerical rating.

Ultimately the user should not know how the sausage is made, much like the youtube algorithm, some things are obvious but its vague enough to make gaming the system harder than a basic 5 star rating of equal weight.

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