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Should You Trust Website Customer Reviews?
crevette asks: "I was looking on Amazon for some gizmo when I got a review from G. Cooke, TX, who is in the top 10 reviewers. Out of curiosity, I checked her reviews... She has 658 reviews, many on the same day, which include everything from knife sets to a plastic duck! She reviews many books on the same day... She must be spending hundreds of dollars on useless stuff every month. Worst of all, most of her reviews are 5 stars. Do you think those people are paid by Amazon or some company? Do you trust them? If not (like I tend to think) what can we do about it?"
It's a public website; anyone can post a review. Trust it as much as you do Slashdot. :)
I read a bunch of Cooke's reviews. She has nothing bad to say, nothing critical, and all her reviews read like an ad. Yeah, I'd say something's wrong here.
Most of the reviews that I see are either very positive or very negative. There are very few reviews that label a product as simply okay or adequate.
This is probably due to the fact that only people that have had extremely positive or extremely negative experiences with a particular product will actually take the time to post. Well, other than a few people with too much time on their hands that want to be listed as top reviewers.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
How about ignoring the reviews if you don't trust them? This isn't difficult.
90% of the reviews I see fall into one of these categories:
1. 5 star reviews from crazy fan-types who absolutely love some movie/musician/cartoon, etc.
2. Anti-fans who post 1 star reviews about stuff they can't stand being popular.
3. Fans who've turned into anti-fans, claiming that item X "isn't as good as their previous efforts" and that the creator "has sold out."
I've come to rely on Amazon.com not only for good deals, but also for basic product information. They carry such a wide range of items and have detailed information about everything.
I also admit I take the product reviews very seriously when I am going to buy something, especially if it's not cheap. I do this even if I don't plan on buying it from Amazon.
I doubt I am the only person like this. It would seem only logical that companies would do anything they can to get favorable reviews about their products on Amazon.
I guess you just have to read as many of the reviews as possible and make a judgement call. I do tend to look for negative reviews as they're definitely not paid for! However, those also must be taken with a grain of salt.
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I was once looking through some of my old favorite Sci-Fi books on Amazon, and noticed a few "top 100" reviewer reviews. I noticed that they all had one thing in common. Two paragraphs. The first paragraph was so generic and "ooh ahh neato" that it could have been about anything. The last paragraph looked like it was paraphrased right from the back/inside cover.
So I went to one of the top 10 reviewers. She claimed to be a librarian who speed reads one book a day, and rewviewed each one. ALL her SciFi book reviews looked just like one another, and all of them had 5 stars out of 5, even some of the worst SciFi I've ever read in my life.
They don't just need meta-moderation. They need personalized meta-moderation. I want to select the group of people whose reviews I trust, and the people whose reviews of reviewers I trust. Maybe the "tragedy of the commons" is ok for Slashdot, but I'd sure hate to have that affecting the reviews that I see for actual products. I want other people like me to review the products that I buy.
This problem ranks right up there along with eBay auctions and the fact that they "close" at a given point in time. In the real world, an auction continues as long as people are making bids. eBay should extend an auction by 5 minutes or an hour or a day each time someone bids on an item. That'd get rid of "last minute bid services". (I'd suggest a 5 minute extension - because then there's a natural time for everyone interested in an item to "gather" together and do the final bidding.)
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This is nothing new, I tend to take peer reviews in a forum setting with a grain of salt.. it is too easy for a company to post positive information about their products or negative reviews of the competition.
I still like google to find more professional reviews of computer hardware and consumer electronics like PDAs. I was looking up information on the palm m130 vs. the m515 today, for example, and found google invaluable. After reading about four reviews on different sites, I feel that I have a good understanding of both products. The highest ranked reviews were actually very professional and well written too, something that is harder and harder to find now..
After reading through several reviews, you should probably be able to make a fair judgment on weather the reviews are valid or not. If some product gets 658 reviews all in one day, yeah, I'd probably think something's fishy, and not trust its reviews... go to another review site. Are people being payed to write reviews? Who knows, but it's definitely possible. You have to take every thing you read with a grain of salt. The way I do it is read through a collection of reviews and just get a sense of weather they look legitimate or not, then read them through again to get an idea if the product is really what I'm looking for.
I enjoy reading the reviews of music gear at: www.harmonycentral.com
--
Does anyone remember
One of the technical book publishers I was talking to recently was telling how they discovered whenever they would release a new title to Amazon (programming or software development usually), that they would immediately get a rash of very bad reviews -- all of which came about the same time from the same IP address which happened to belong to a rival publisher. He told me that now it's almost accepted industry practive to have your employees post bad reviews of your competitors products online.
Myself, I look for the reviews that are by people who clearly have actually read the book/used the product. There is sort of an art to picking them out.
Not to criticize or defend this review system, I think I have come up with what could be a reasonable explanation for many of the reviews being on the same day - a batch queue. Amazon does not allow you to post reviews in realtime. You post a review, and they review the review, and then post it. The way I imagine it would work is that someone reads through hundreds and hundreds of reviews in a month and then clicks on a button to force them live from a queue. One reason I know they do in fact review the reviews is that sometimes you will see somewhere where someone posts a price or a URL in the review, but Amazon brackets it out like [removed] or something like that.
--Jon
Read this review when she slags off a brand of laser paper (no kidding) and happened to have a technician on hand when 2 pages go through at once.
So she works in an office, but she uses Amazon bought copier paper (which she herself buys - so she knows that type it is).
How many offices do you know that are big enough to have laser repair technicians in, but small enough that the person buys their own copier paper.
Also how many companies do you know buy their office supplies from Amazon?
"1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
THE PAPER CHASE November 13, 2002
This was my first purchase of this brand of copy paper and, sorry to say, it was disappointing.
With the first use two sheets of paper came out of my printer - one blank, and the other with the proper printing. Of course, I initially thought something had gone wrong with my printer. When a technician happened by I asked him to check it, and he assured me it was functioning properly.
Out of curiosity one day I loaded the printer with another brand of copy paper and presto! - No more double sheets.
I really don't know what the problem was - perhaps the copy paper is too thin and the printer "grabs" two or perhaps there is some sort of treatment on the paper that caused it to stick together. "
When Ever asking people for an opinion about someting most people seem to have a very static 2 sided view on things thus 5 Stars and 1 Stars.
Lets use Slashdot as an example.
What ever Microsoft Does 1 star.
What ever Linux Does 5 Stars.
(They both did the same thing)
Marketing 1 Star.
Getting a Job 5 Stars.
Apple 2.5 Stars.
Half of the people are 5 Stars
The other Half of the people are 1 star.
And even look at moderation How many moderations do you see as 5 and -1 (1 and 2 happen without moderation) but there is usually only a little bit or 3s and 4s.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most all reviews are worthless because they simply lack any context. I've made this comment about the Slashdot book reviews too.
When Joe Blow say this product is great or that product is crap, it really means NOTHING, and putting any faith into these reviews is a major mistake. Unless the reviewer gives some background about themselves and their history with the product or category of products you have no way of knowing how they relate to you.
This is especially true of technical book reviews. Without having some idea about the persons knowlege and skill level and what experience they have, there is no real value in the review. For this reason, when I write book reviews I also include a brief resume listing things like years of experience in that field, certifications, other books that I have read on the subject, etc.
There's lots of noise in the reviews, but you can still filter out a useful signal. Many reviews are also obviously dumb, such as the guy that ordered a CD player, loved it, but decided he didn't need it after all, so he gave it one star. Brains entirely optional. After reading through ten or twenty reviews of the CD player, you'd find recurring mentions of good or bad battery life, skipping/no skipping etc, which is usually all you need.
Should You Trust Website Customer Reviews?
Heh..that's like determining your self esteem level by your Slashdot moderation points..
-ted
Informative??? This is supposed to be a JOKE. Froogle has nothing to do with reviewers. It's a products-for-sale search engine. "Find cheap reviewers at..." -- get it? JOKE!
The nice thing about the reviews, whether they are valid or not, is that they lead to more books being shown if your recommendations list. Why is this good? Remember: if you buy something from Amazon based on its recommendation, and you didn't like it, they'll take it back.
Get off my launchpad!
It seems the top 10 reviewers are based on the number of reviews they have ever written, not on qualtiy. The number 1 reviewer wrote over 4000. Where did fact that all reviews were written in one day come from? It seems she posted this over time according to the dates of each review. Also, check out the number of people that found her reviews helpful. She may be a troll, but come on, wheres the beef?
Every time I read the reviews at amazon I summarize how many positive comments vs. how many negative.
If a negative comment makes sense and could be corroborated by another negative comment then all the positive comments are suspect if they outnumber by a dramatic ratio.
my personal policy is to boycott any products promoted by fake reviews.
Upon seeing the above post, commercial-goods-search sites the web over are screaming in panic. What will google take over next?!!
Being CONVICTED of a crime is public information. (Like it or not.)
Being CHARGED with a crime (littering in your example) isn't. You're not guilty until convicted. So no, you won't have a right to know.
I believe it's legal in most states to wear Women's Underwear. Again, you don't have a right to inspect your lunchman's underwear without his consent.
But what if the guy you hired to paint your house was a convicted con-artist? Wouldn't you want to know?
Best Buy can have you arrested
We all know about "Google Bombing". This is the same thing, "Amazon Bombing", and involving public perceptions and trust being leveraged over the Internet. Amazon is a huge retail presence, and on top of that they have a public interface to their product review/promotion API! Cha-ching...the sound of money.
But the same thing happened when the snake oil salesman rode his wagon into town in the 1800's. There would be a plant, a shill, in the crowd who on cue would get all hysterical about the presentation and appear buy 6 bottles. Cha-ching...the oil flowed.
But then again, some celebrity going on about how great some gadget or pill is isn't so different; just playing on your goofy, unquestioning trust.
Trust is the ultimate sales API, and goes straight to the brain stem. Your instincts are used against you and...cha-ching...everywhere the sound of money.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Your reply is off the mark. The poster was talking about big releases and not about some little known dummies guide.
And with all due respect, had there been a conspiracy taking place in Amazon, I have the feeling that you were not high enough to be in on it.