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?"
The point I'm making is that the reviewers aren't always participating in a community, but also acting out a personal agenda as well, which other customers may take in as fact.
Figuring out her Email address, then Googling it reveals Ms. Cooke probably does nothing but writes reviews allllllllll day long.
Man, what a horrible way to waste time. Well, back to reloading Slashdot....
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
I will rarely take the word of any one reviewer, top 10 or not. They often have simple factual mistakes about products. But if you read a dozen or so comments you can usually put together a decent impression and collect useful data. Review spam campaigns like the Rush Limbaugh-led attack on Michael Moore's book are rare.
I would certainly rather have the reviews than not. I've bought many cool things from Amazon that I never would have considered or even found (music mostly) if not for the reviews and comments.
Mig
There was an article on CNet last Friday about automatic recommendation systems. What happens when systems automatically recommend things?
In a incident that highlights the pitfalls of online recommendation systems, Amazon.com on Friday removed a link to a sex manual that appeared next to a listing for a spiritual guide by well-known Christian televangelist Pat Robertson.
The two titles were temporarily linked as a result of technology that tracks and displays lists of merchandise perused and purchased by Amazon visitors. Such promotions appear below the main description for products under the title, "Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these items."
Basically, the gist of it is that people shopping for the televangellist's spiritual guide, and Amazon's recommendation system suggested that people who bought this also bought another book called The Men's Guide to Anal Sex.
I'm speculating, but I would guess that such a system could be hacked by ordering both books, and then shortly later cancelling your order. The order cancellation probably does not remove the association of these two items in the recommendation database tables.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
And yes, most of my reviews are positive. Much of this is experience, negative reviews tend to get negative votes very quickly. Also the stuff I love is the stuff I want to write about. Occasionally I'll post a negative review of something I think deserves a health warning, but usually it'll be due to some technical rather than artistic consideration - "historical" CDs that aren't labelled as such, that kind of thing.
My advice is don't make a decision on the basis of one review. Note the ones that describe what the reviewer loved and see whether or not that would be something that you would love too. I usually put enough in my reviews to ensure that even if I write a rave review, someone who wouldn't like it will learn enough from what I've written to realise they wouldn't like it.
As for the reviewer that's the topic of this discussion, I have no idea. Why not read the reviews, see if they're actually useful, and if they are, then make the decision on that basis?
This isn't the kind of thing you have to get off your backside about. You can just talk about it on Slashdot. There's no need to write to your senator or congressman.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Slashdot should make a "public" account with login "Slashdot", and every single Slashdot user should go on and review one item.
We'd be the number 1 reviewer in no time. The current #1 reviewer has 4052 reviews.
- Vincit qui patitur.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
ok, she's a professional reviewer...so, does this mean she's posting lots of reviews on amazon to gain experience? or name recognition, or what? she's certainly not getting paid for it...i hope...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
If anyone read the book "21 Dog Years, Doing Time @ Amazon.com"
Mike Daisey discusses how he was a customer service call center lacky but also reviewed childrens toys for the site. He did this from home on his own time, The funny thing was he would fall far behind his reviews and have closets full of unreviewed Fisher Price and Playskool toys laying about the house.
Good thing a fat guy with no children who's never been a parent was reviewing childrens toys.
can be found here. As you can see, Harriet Klausner has reviewed over 4,000 items, which seem to be mostly books. I challenge you to find a book that she didn't like! Four stars is the lowest score that she has ever given as far as I can tell. She must be on vacation or something because she has only posted two reviews this month. Also, notice that her reviews are all three paragraphs long and the second paragraph tends to start with the word "However". Maybe she is just a book reviewing bot. She certainly doesn't write interesting reviews.
Lasers Controlled Games!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-rev iews/-/AA9IP6AYACFK5/102-2168050-5628139
Henry Raddicks reviews need to be read in full to get some of the jokes he mentions. He has a whole cast of characters (homophobic uncle, poor dog he's always trying some crazy theory on) that he references in many of his reviews..
Examples...
Handbook of Meat Product Technology
An admirably thorough guide to the tools of the production-line meat processing trade. The superb colour photographs particularly made it a perfect gift for my 15 year old daughter who is showing alarming signs of not becoming vegetarian.
God, Why Did Dad Lose His Job?
A truly wonderful guide which has enabled me to explain my recent sacking for vandalising company property to my children in terms of a minor act of redemption. First rate.
If these suspicious persons have reviewed so many products, they may have a reviewed a few of which you have personal knowledge. Those are golden data points.
If there aren't any such datapoints, maybe somebody whose reviews you DO agree with has reviewed products the suspicious person has also reviewed. Those are, shall we say, silver data points.
Obviously what I'm working up to here is an automated system for finding short paths in networks of reviewers. Not a Web of Trust, but a Web of Agreement, built upon the mutual information (the degree of agreement) between various reviewers.
I have seen "mutual interest" systems such as for music. Those are useless because of shills that (pretend to) like everything, but a system built on mutual information would find those reviewers to have 0 information content.
There are also people like me who rate things as a method of tracking what they've already seen/read/used.
I find Netflix's rating engine to be a perfect method of tracking what movies I've already seen so I don't go and accidentally rent the same one twice. This has led me to have an awful lot of ratings (~2000 DVDs), but I can be fairly confident that everything in my rental queue is new.
Of course, rating things (1-5 stars) is very different from reviewing something. Reviewing something requires you to think rather hard about what you liked or didn't like about a product and is usually done because you have a strong emotion about it and feel the need to tell the world about it. Rating something is so much easier that it can be done without much thought at all, making it much more common.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
In early '99, they were getting about 5000 reviews in a day. Each review is checked twice, once by a filter(dirty words), and the other by eyes(relavence). There were about 20 catalogue people then. They post all book listings, CD's, products, answer crazed author questions(my fav part)...and if they have time, post reviews.
If you guys think Amazon is trying to pursuade you with reviews...your high on conspiricy juice. They are pure fluff for your sake. We barley had enough time to add new products to the site, let alone check reviews. Trust me, Amazon would LOVE to get rid of the review system, cuase it is a pain in the ass to maintain and labor intensive. But they keep it cuase customers wanted/want it.
And no, we didn't re-order the reviews and put the good ones at the top. It is a pure FIFO (First-In-First-Online) system. People just usually post if they really hate, or really like something. So the reviews are more rants than critiques and tend to be very biased...just like /.
P.S. I still smell like the Art Bar too!
I make the occasional exception for very popular books which I think are overrated.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Well they don't sell anything, they just do a pricewatch-type thing on the prices for products and get paid for some of the referrals. And they let you review things they don't get any money off of (see the Restaurants section for example).
I haven't checked out Epinions extensively in a while, but I worked there very briefly a few years ago and their ultimate goal was to let the community build the product hierarchy, which is good for them (they don't have to pay experts full-time to build/prune the product trees) and good for the consumer (you could review just about anything, as long as the community was fast and responsive). That is, as long as certain people were in charge of keeping the product hierarchy clean and correct (think dmoz.org). I don't know if they have implemented this yet, though.
They definitely don't hide bad reviews of things (see the cell phone service provider section, for instance). They pride themselves on having a great deal of unbiased reviews. They just believe that if people are given access to good reviews on a product, it will help steer them towards the right product for them, which the person will eventually buy. Sure, sometimes a bunch of bad reviews will lead people to not buy something they might normally, but that isn't usually how things play out.
However, I was a 'Catalogue Specialist' (the people who post new listings) at Amazon for a few months and I can confirm you don't have a clue. You seem to think that Amazon has a whole staff of people making sure that product rankings are high, when in fact, they could give a shit what the ranking is. The only people I've ever heard of bitching about ranking and reviews were authors, complaining about their books negative listing.
In fact I have a memorable and funny story to illustate just how much Amazon could care less about the reviews and rankings.
So what was the point of that story...to a) illustrate how Amazon could really care less about ranking and b) that there is no review/rating conspiricy at Amazon.
I have a feeling the reviews in 'question' were like this, "This thing sucks, and it took an extra day to get here." Or some similar crap. In that case, yeah it gets rejected cuase it's a space waster.
Another difference is that most of the books I review are obscure. Most of Amazon's books are obscure too, but their reviews definitely cover popular titles better - how many thousand reviews of the Harry Potter books are there?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews