No, but I find myself gravitating much more towards the negative reviews. Not only are they more likely to be legitimate reviews, they tell me the reasons someone didn't like a product, which I find more valuable. Often because a failure for one person might not be an issue I care about: For example, if a reviewer for a book says, "Author spent too much time on the individual people and not enough time moving the plot forward" then I might view that as a positive if I like deep character building. It's a legitimate complaint, but from my perspective it's a feature, not a bug. Or I just might not care: "Item arrived broken" is not something I care much about when it's something that's easy to return/exchange, unless many people are also saying even when it arrived intact, It breaks too easily on use.
nowadays, the sweet spot of maximum information density seems to be the two-star reviews. They are written by genuinely concerned, but not furious, people about the legitimate shortcomings of the product. If a product has mostly five-star reviews, and the two-star reviews describe a reasonable tradeoff, then it is probably a good product.
When it comes to online marketplaces, this is an often repeated idea, but absolutely nonsensical for two reasons:
1. The number of people who read reviews are a small, small, fraction of total buyers. Most people look at review count and the star rating (not the number, the image).
But more importantly,
2. Ranking in search results is the #1 factor in driving sales. Everything else is a distant #3. Search engines will reduce rankings of products with negative reviews.
(This my anecdotal experience after 2+ years of being an Amazon 3P seller)
It's not so simple, because the machines that rank products and serve search results are evaluating the reviews too.
As those machines look for signals of "authenticity," review factories learn to manufacture reviews that fake those signals. If adding a small mix of two-star reviews helps with search rankings, the review factories will start doing it in a heartbeat.
Cueball: Spammers are breaking traditional Captchas with AI, so I've built a new system. It asks users to rate a slate of comments as "Constructive" or "Not constructive."
Cueball: Then it has them reply with comments of their own, which are later rated by other users.
Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?
I increasingly see that as one of the most misguided xkcd strips ever.
Unfortunately, the endgame for bot spam indistinguishable from humans isn't some benign silicon intelligence, but an epistemic war for attention, spending, manipulation, and/or fraud, benefitting deep pockets and highly motivated parties.
they are certainly inferior from the point of view of Netflix and the few others, because they are not obviously fakeable like the thumbs counts. For users, it is probably the opposite.
Definitely. Go look at new music video releases on youtube, so many of them are buying views to boost their numbers. The real trick there is to see how many up/downvotes there are in relation to the views, which seem to be the only way these days to gauge their true success from a consumer point of view.
I'm observing (I may be wrong) that more and more photos are getting posted as part of the reviews, which I assume it's caused by buyers reacting to this problem.
That's no foolproof solution, but of course, it increases the cost of fake reviews.
Also, language is not taken into account. It's probably more expensive to buy fake reviews in, say, Norwegian, rather than in the standard English, so non-English speaking countries have an advantage.
Photos also help against a trick where sellers replace the product name, description and pictures to basically transfer the positive reviews to other products they want to sell and know are garbage. Customer photos make it more obvious at a glance.
And at least for German I can say that fake reviews are probably not more expensive...they seem to just have lower quality and range between barely understandable auto-translation to almost passable if it weren't written like an advertisement.
Yes, but a picture is worth a thousand words. If the products packaging is highly misleading (making a kiddy pool seem far larger than it is, for example), a picture outside of a photo studio will show this fact quite readily and obviates the need to examine the product in further detail.
I still find photos helpful because they show what the product looks like in real life. How bright is that laptop screen really? An few indoor photos from different people is helpful here.
You have no idea what the exposure settings were on the camera or the amount of available light. It isn't possible to judge screen brightness from uncalibrated imagery.
>I find myself gravitating much more towards the negative reviews
Whenever I buy anything on Amazon I look at the negative reviews and most of them are people saying they straight up got the wrong product or whatever they got came broken/scratched up right out of the box. I see these complaints often enough that I assume people aren't just lying outright, but I personally have never had any of this happen to me despite all of the junk I've bought on Amazon. It's made the negative reviews almost as worthless as the positive reviews that are possibly just paid off.
Like another person said, the 2-3 star people are often what I find most helpful. I find they tend to be people who are honest but just way pickier than the average buyer, so the stuff they complain about usually doesn't matter to me, but its still informative.
> I see these complaints often enough that I assume people aren't just lying outright, but I personally have never had any of this happen to me despite all of the junk I've bought on Amazon.
I think this is a symptom of co-mingling inventories. You can 'buy it from Amazon' or buy it from 'Joe's super legit online shop' for $0.30 less. I suspect many reviews of wrong or broken products are coming from some kind of drop-shipping operation and the buyers aren't aware they're buying from a 3rd party seller.
Negative reviews can also be compromised. I was reading through Borderlands 3 metacritic user reviews when I noticed at least 3 reviewers made identical complaints of boring, "repeative" gameplay...
My best guess is it's attracted a culture war brigade for some reason. But it was a good a reminder to keep my guard up even on negative reviews- the same sockpuppets companies use to pump up their own products could be easily redeployed to undermine a competitor's.
No, some people just feel Borderlands is excessively grindy, and not the fun kind. I hold that same opinion, and I don’t think I’m part of any culture war or brigade. Some people may not like what you like for exactly the same reasons that you consider positive. Doesn’t make them shills or brigadists or whatever. It just means they have different preferences.
This absolutely happens. I assume crooked reviewers are a lot more savvy and coordinated now...back in the day, a competitor's employees panned our app using their own names!
Borderlands 3 did attract a lot of attention because it is an Epic game store exclusive. People are upset about it because they want all of their games to be on Steam.
Popular media is a unique market though, as they can attract highly tribalist reviewers pushing a certain angle that has nothing to do with the product itself.
People usually don't get all up in arms like that if a random Bluetooth speaker they bought doesn't sync as well with their Android TV as it does with their iPhone.
This is what I've been doing. I immediately filter to only see the negative reviews and then see if anything anyone is talking about is something that I would be concerned with or if it is a deal breaker.
I do the same thing for movies, restaurants and video games.
> No, but I find myself gravitating much more towards the negative reviews.
I try to be careful here as well. I feel a lot of the negative reviews are paid for by competitors. Of course they tend to be easy to filter out because they're low effort reviews.
He or she didn't mention asking for reviews, encouraging reviews, rewarding reviews, and doing anything at all to inform players about how reviews help the game.
Like, you have a garden where you don't plant any flowers but are pissed at having to deal with the weeds.
Need more reviews? Ask! Inform! Let your fans know!
There is a thing called "negativity bias", where negative experiences have a greater effect than positive ones. So reading negative reviews is actually the natural thing to do.
Should I want to game the system. I would definitely post negative reviews on my competitor's products. Safety-related issues, like some component catching fire would be ideal but even a seemingly well thought out disappointed review could be effective. With that in mind, I am also suspicious of negative reviews.
I don't know if that happens in real life. It's risky, and attacking all your competitors is a lot more work than paying for glowing reviews for your own products, but it is not like discrediting your competitors is a new thing.
I understand what you're going for, but this is a legitimate complaint for console-to-PC ports and ports/remasters of older games. There are some ports that I have bought that never ran after multiple troubleshooting sessions.
I don't expect developers to test every combination of hardware in a given market. That's silly. I do think it helps buyers understand the risk in buying ported titles though.
Totally agree. Additionally, those same customers will update their reviews throughout the lifetime of their experience with the product/company/etc. which proves invaluable.
True, what I have observed is that quantitative metrics help in empowering better decisions. That, and product putting in effort to collect feedback about things that matter in that context.
That part of what you're paying for though. If you want something Asap, and a number of reviews say it arrived promptly, or took ages, that's useful info. Poor packaging can lead to breakages so again useful info.
But that could only ever be worthwhile in markets with very few competitors. But when there is only a low number of competitors, customers usually have better ways to form an opinion than internet reviews.
The only exceptions are cases where customers are faced with a wide range of vendors, but only tiny, well-delineated subsets are in actual competition. Restaurants serving travelers in a small town would be an example.
While this is true, being so specific about something negative that someone calls them out is much more risky than the useless 1 star rating with comment "product did not work as expected". Low quality comments are almost never considered valid by those that pour over the comments.
