Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 think the question the author is trying to ask is how can we get truthful reviews on a product. Considering what marketers are willing to do, I would not put 'padding' their reivews past them.
.
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.)
.
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.
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.
Should You Trust Website Customer Reviews?
Heh..that's like determining your self esteem level by your Slashdot moderation points..
-ted
Upon seeing the above post, commercial-goods-search sites the web over are screaming in panic. What will google take over next?!!