Only sort of related but I hate how I sometimes get the impression that review sites do not take the date of review into the account when presenting a final rating.
For example I got an Instant Pot once. It worked fine for a year. Then one day I was steaming some lentils and it just shut off. No error or anything, it just shut off without a sound and never turned back on.
And because my continued existence was basically contingent on that Instant Pot I began to starve.
So I bought another.
Two weeks later it was dead in exactly the same manner.
And I went back to starving.
Then I went back and read the most recent reviews on Amazon and realized that if I had paid attention I might have noticed that so many other people were having the same kind of problem and various other mechanical failures and leaving one-star reviews. But because the reviews section was swamped by five star reviews from years ago that got highly upvoted, I didn't notice. At least, that was my impression.
I think it might be hard to change the public's mind if you have a large group of people leaving reviews saying "it works great" in the first few months of the product being released, and you build up this false credibility. Then suddenly a defect occurs that only appears after a very long period, say a year or more, and people don't bother to update the five star review and figure it's time to buy a new pressure cooker anyways.
If there were some way of verifying this were the case it would certainly be frustrating.
Do all the people who wrote those five-star reviews years ago that haven't been edited still use the product and never had it break on them after a few years?
Eventually I got a Yedi and it's more convenient since the pressure valve never clogs like it did with the Instant Pot all the time and is automatic release. I get the impression that it's just better engineered and Instant Pot was just overhyped garbage. But still that's my impression because I've had it for only a month and can't judge if I'll be able to keep using it for another year yet. Maybe I just got lucky.
Look at how Steam does reviews. If a developer releases a patch several months after initial release that improves or breaks something, you have a better chance to know about it since they have a separate rating for only the most recent reviews. And sometimes the difference between the two is stark. I would say this is innovative. More sites with review systems really ought to follow suit.
And I really wish Amazon were like that.
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