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?"

Comments

Stalkers

[joeflies]

On KGO Radio in the Bay Area, an author called Len Tillum's law advice program last weekend. The author asked for legal advice on what to do about a stalker who (in addition to stalking her personally) is also stalking her online, making negative statements about the book.

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.

She gets around

[SplendidIsolatn]

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....

Safety in numbers

[migstradamus]

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

I write reviews on Amazon

[squiggleslash]

It's kind of fun, at any rate you can get things off your chest and go on and on about how great, say, Red Mars or Songs of Distance Earth are without boring your friends to death.

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.

Amazon Employees write reviews

[MrCaseyB]

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.

Trust but Verify

[timeOday]

Heh, a little oxymoron from Reagan I was reminded of by what I'm about to say...

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.

Re:I worked in Amazon's Catalogue Dept (insight)

[lugonn]

They are the department in charge of posting the reviews. (Note: I was a temp there for a couple months)

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!

Re:No you can't...

[lugonn]

Your so full of it. Just becuase you submit a some reviews to Amazon(and save them editorial fees probably) doesn't mean you know the process it takes to put it on the site.

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.

There was a book about female orgasms that a married couple had written that was supposed to teach you a technique for giving her more pleasure during sex. Well, several reviews of the book went like this: "Hey ladies, save yourself the time and money on this book, and just rub your clit during sex."

So the authors send us an email saying to take the reviews down cuase it basically gives away the reason for reading the book, which was basically telling women they'll have better sex if they rub their clit during intercourse.

I was the one that had to answer the author, and I was at a loss. a) Lose books sales on a stupid book and keep the review up or b) take the reviews down and let people get screwed. I asked my supervisor. He couldn't stop laughing. So after the whole dept comes and laughs the request from these 2 moron authors, it was decided to leave the reviews up becuase they were legit critiques of a rather silly book.

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.