E-commerce Sites Edit Customer Reviews

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Online retailers have a wide range of approaches to customer product reviews, with some struggling to balance candor with the desire to sell product. The Wall Street Journal Online has an overview of sites' policies. Newegg 'says it has a team of eight people who monitor reviews and reject submissions if they are too vague, mention competitors or criticize a brand without specific product insight, among other reasons. From July 1 to Aug. 2, the site received 18,188 reviews and rejected 15% of them, according to a Newegg spokesman.' Meanwhile, Overstock recently changed its policy: 'The Web retailer had been relying on its merchandising group -- the employees responsible for deciding which products to sell on the site -- to monitor reviews submitted by customers, but found that the group tended to approve only positive reviews. In January, the Salt Lake City-based company changed the monitoring responsibilities to its marketing team. The company now says it posts both positive and negative comments, as long as they are constructive.'"

Comments

Newegg rev 01

[bigwavejas]

Once you know, you never Newegg.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[antifood]

Whats wrong with Newegg? I have always found that they have competitive prices, and have always taken care of any problems I have had. Any insight is welcome.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[bigwavejas]

You're right Newegg have prices on and type products. They're the place for low prices.

that helps Good luck with your shopping.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[The Warlock]

Every review is a rave, and even the worst products have an average of three out of five stars (or golden eggs or whatever, it doesn't matter).

That said, Newegg is a great place, but just know what you're buying before you go there; don't pay too much attention to the reviews.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[acrolein]

So true. Painfully true. I submitted two reviews for two Newegg items that were basically shite. They both got rejected based on the merit that I suggested no one purchase them.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[generic-man]

The last time I went to Newegg, they had a big red disclaimer above reviews saying something like "Don't base your purchasing decision solely on these reviews." At least they're being honest about random reviews not being a good sign.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[idontgno]

You may be getting fooled by the fact that the item summary page displays the a few reviews, and pretty often they'll be raves because most customers wind up happy with their product (or give a pass to a marginal one). Even if the item you're looking at has 94 reviews, the item's catalog page may only display 3-5 of them, and odds are pretty good that the reviews will be positive. (The psychology of amateur reviewers and all.)

There will also be a link saying "Read more reviews", and by looking at 100 reviews per page you can scan for less-than-glowing ones if you want to rather quickly. Also, the "Average rating" value on the item catalog page might give you a hint that there may have been a few bad reviews.

I don't see much signs of an editorial conspiracy, since a few of the reviews I've seen are definitely in the realm of "very angry constructive criticism". I didn't see any obvious trollage (the kinds of stuff that gets modded to -1 here), which is the kind of stuff you sort of hope editors will remove. Unless you're the kind of person who reads here at -1, which is to say, easily amused.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[GoodNicsTken]

I bought a MSI K8N Neo board, and the PS2 keyboard didn't work. Not only that it was a known defect and MSI refused to do anything about it. Newegg rejected every attemp to post this bit of information. I started using competitors and ignoring the newegg reviews ever since.

They changed the review comment also. Here it is from the old site:

Newegg.com is not a forum for product reviews. For product reviews, we recommend sites such as www.cnet.com, www.anandtech.com, and www.tomshardware.com. Newegg.com is a private site that conducts the business of selling computer hardware and as such, any specifications and information posted by Newegg.com regarding products for sale must be factual. However, customer comments in regards to their experience with said products are the opinions of the user. The customer opinion reviews are used at the discretion of Newegg.com as a marketing device for positive and constructive ways to share the benefit of the product. It is not used as a source for negative commentary as we cannot endorse the validity of any negative comment. Therefore, the Newegg.com site is moderated to remove any unproven biased negative comments. It is not the intention of Newegg.com to mislead any customer and therefore
all purchase decisions should not be solely based on the customer review.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Lumpy]

newegg reviews are useful. if you are looking for a kick arse motherboard, dont look at the reviews but the NUMBER of reviews.

if one mobo has 4 reviews and another has 65,000 of them then I suggest checking out the one with high number of reviews, cut and paste it's number and go searching on google for more info. items with few reviews are typically items that nobody is buying, and there usually is a reason for that.

it's like a ebay rating, you need to look at it carefully. I even go so far as to check ratings of the last few people rating them.

If a seller that has been online for 4 years all of a sudden recieved 90% of their ratings in the past 3 months all from people that started their accounts within the last 3 months, you found yourself a scammer that phished an account.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Lagged2Death]

I don't see much signs of an editorial conspiracy, since a few of the reviews I've seen are definitely in the realm of "very angry constructive criticism".

Yeah, there are plenty of 1-star reviews on NewEgg.

Which confuses me a bit. I've submitted 5 or 6 reviews there, all of which were basically positive ("It works!") but some of which contained a few caveats or gotchas. I tried to inlucde the sort of end-user-experience details that I wish I had been able to get before buying - stuff like "Win2K drivers not so hot - good choice under XP though" or "May require more than just a screwdriver to install." I've seen other reviews there with the same sort of useful information in them.

But about half of my submissions were rejected, and some of the others were ruthlessly pared down, eliminating the caveats. Where do the other informative reviews come from, where do the angry 1-star reviews come from, if the editors are this zealous about removing any trace of negative feedback?

The NewEgg editors don't seem very consistent in what they allow and what they don't. Although praising NewEgg's prompt delivery seems to help a review pass muster.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[hackstraw]

Whats wrong with Newegg? I have always found that they have competitive prices, and have always taken care of any problems I have had. Any insight is welcome.

I bought a Seagate drive that did not work from Newegg. They happily refunded my money after I paid them 50 dollars plus shipping cost plus the time it took me to do it.

I partly bought the drive based on all of the positive reviews at Newegg. After reading at Amazon's customer feedback section about how _none_ of the Seagate 300 or 400 gig drives work due to a bug in the firmware on the device, and hearing stories about how people had RMAed 3 of them, and all 3 were bad. I figured it was not worth the effort to return the drive in order to get a series of other broken ones, so I cut my losses.

I left a 0 or 1 star, whichever was lowest for the drive and a comment that I had to prune to fit within their character limit.

Over time, the rating of these drives went from 4+ to 5 down to something like 1.5, which appears to be back up to 3 now. Check for yourself: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822154410

Now there is an almost negative comment that said that the drive was "pocking loudly". My experience was that the drive under heavy concurrent read and write use would go "klunk!" and then freeze. That is consistent with the comments on Amazon.

I then find out from a random phone call from Seagate that they fixed their firmware, and their harddrives can now store and retrieve data!!

I really wanted the disk space, so I call Newegg and asked them if there was any way I can be assured that if I were to buy another one of these drives that it would be a working one. They said No. They sell equipment as it comes shipped to them. Whether the stuff works or not is my problem.

With the cost of the RMA, the skewed comment feedbacks, and the lack of assurance that I am buying a quality product, I see no reason to ever do business with them again. I can get computer junk anywhere. I went on the recommendation from people here on /., but my experience was not a good one, and there is so much competition, I just don't see any compelling reason to use them again.

Granted, this may have been a completely isolated incident, but it was bad enough. I've learned that Amazon's feedback system appears to be the most candid and accurate, and I will be using that, and probably shopping from them or one of their partners from now on. This is always subject to change...

Re:Newegg rev 01

[JadeNB]

Every review is a rave, and even the worst products have an average of three out of five stars (or golden eggs or whatever, it doesn't matter).

I think reviewers who want to sneak in a negative review will often just give the product five stars. These reviews (where the text doesn't match the rating) don't seem to get flagged, and they're often the only way to hear the downside of a Newegg product.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[BearInTheWoods]

This hits close to my experience, since I purchased 2 external RS-232 modems from NewEgg recently and submitted reviews for both (after some test time with both). The cheaper one (an 'Amigo' [generic Conexant-chipset-based] modem) worked great. The more-expensive one (a Diamond SupraMax) was horrible -- wouldn't work with 'kppp', had no on/off switch, wouldn't remember (after an ATZ) S register settings that had been written to non-volatile RAM (AT&W), etc. Keep in mind that the Amigo modem had none of these flaws.

I submitted a positive review for the Amigo (see the one by 'External Modem User, 7/24/2005 2:52:49 PM') which got accepted and a negative (but constructive) review of the Diamond, which was rejected.

Here's my original Diamond SupraMax review (which I may tweak and re-submit to NewEgg sometime):

I bought this Diamond SupraMax (Model 'SM56E', NewEgg part #N82E16825116109) modem along with the 'Amigo' modem (Model 'AME-CA95', NewEgg part #N82E16825137104) to replace a Creative Labs external RS-232 'ModemBlaster' that recently died.

The Diamond SupraMax modem is a huge disappointment, mostly due to its poor design. The Diamond modem is also more expensive than the 'Amigo AME-CA95' (Conexant-chipset-based) modem even though the Diamond modem is of lesser quality.

For starters, unlike the Amigo modem, the Diamond SupraMax has no 'On/Off' switch. You must physically disconnect the 9V plug in the back if you want to power it off! Yuk!

The Amigo modem has a nice On/Off pushbutton on the back right side.

Furthermore, the LED indicators for the Diamond modem are the worst I've ever encountered! First off, there are only two LEDs -- one for 'PWR' (Power On) and one for 'OH' (Off-Hook). Despite what the photo on the front of the Quick Start Guide shows, there is no "DATA" LED, let alone a specific 'RxD' (receive data) and 'TxD' (transmit data) as one would expect on any decent external modem. Secondly, the meager 2 LEDs which _are_ present are very difficult to read, since they're not typical LEDs with permanent, silk-screened text near the LED but are of a design where the LED light shines through to show red-colored text ('PWR' and 'OH') and the text is almost unreadable at any angle except the exact "proper" angle. The 'OH' text is almost unreadable at _any_ angle, actually.

The Amigo modem, on the other hand, has dedicated, well-labeled (viewable at all angles) LEDs for 'RxD', 'TxD', 'OH', and 'READY'.

Annother annoyance -- the Diamond modem does not retain certain settings (e.g. 'ATS95=1', which causes the modem to report DCE [modem ISP] speed instead of DTE [PC modem] speed) through a simple 'ATZ' (modem 'soft' reset) even when they've been written with 'AT&W' ('store user profile' command). All other (good) modems I've encountered (including the aforementioned Amigo modem) will retain the 'S95=1' register setting through an 'ATZ' command as long as the 'AT&W' command was used once after setting the register. This isn't a "show-stopper" problem because you can always instruct the modem to 'ATS95=1' (or 'ATW2', which is similar and may work with some modems) as part of the initialization string in whatever application you use (Windows or Linux) to dial out, but it's annoying and indicative of the bad design of the Diamond modem.

The Diamond modem works well enough in W98se with the driver supplied on the CD-ROM.

Linux use (Slackware 10.1, currently) is a different story, unfortunately. I could not get 'kppp' (the KDE 'ppp' dialer application) to fully connect to my ISP using this modem. After lots of testing, tweaking, and cursing this modem (which is the poorest-designed of all the external RS-232 modems I've ever used), I finally got it to fully connect (and start the 'ppp' session) by invoking the 'pppd' process manually and using a 'chat' script. I still d

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Anonymous Coward]

Newegg probably needs to do this because if they don't then they might be sued by companies for hosting negative comments about their products. Since Newegg filters comments to remove trolls they no longer qualify for common carrier protection and are susceptible to lawsuits from companies alleging defamation.

Most companies obviously wouldn't care about positive feedback, but if they see someone posting negative feedback then they would probably ask Newegg to remove it. Newegg isn't really in the business of reviewing products so they probably can't verify the comments.

I think that most companies would conclude that having honest, unbiased reviews is good for business since it raises consumer confidence. However, since when is the general public either honest or unbiased? I doubt that this is a sinister plot by Newegg, they probably just don't care enough about the review system to try and get it right.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[SpecBear]

Here's a test I use on any site that posts customer reviews: I check out the reviews for products that I already own. I love NewEgg for the prices, selection, and service, but their customer reviews are crap.

I saw several reviews that described a hard drive I own as "quiet" among other things. It isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination that can be achieved without the use of mind-altering drugs. And anyone who owned on, or even read the drive's specs could tell this. After reading a number of NewEgg's review's I concluded that many people writing them were either on drugs or just filthly liars.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[pvxhound]

Because their user opinions aren't objective like their support. But I think they're excellent otherwise. I bought a modem that had a post claiming it was "controller based", and Linux compatible according to the mfg. It was a software modem and you needed to have the Linux source installed, which I didn't. I pointed this out three times nicely and constructively and was rejected 3 times. Heck, I even used IE for one. Last week a tv card on sale had 5 stars and 17 wonderful posts. All seventeen had strange spelling/grammar issues so I skipped it despite a wonderful price. The eighteenth said the previous 17 must of been the manufacturor because his mileage varied greatly. Well Yeah!

Re:Newegg rev 01

[saider]

Review: The drive _is_ quiet. Whisper silent actually. Its not until you plug it in that it makes this horrible racket.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[hackstraw]

"Don't base your purchasing decision solely on these reviews."

Yes, they never lie and they are always right.

Being honest about being dishonest still isn't very honest.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[John Hurliman]

Did they change their RMA policy? I've been buying stuff off NewEgg for a while and lately haven't had any problems, but two years ago I got a motherboard that was DOA. I went on their website and got an RMA number, put it back in the box and shipped it back. I had to pay return shipping costs, they paid shipping a new one back this way again, with no other fees just a new (working) mobo.

Nowadays I usually end up buying stuff from TigerDirect though, as prices are really competitive.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Anonymous Coward]

I have purchased $5000 worth of items from newegg, they are the best. I have had one bad PSU. No problems returning. Just take the reviews as "a review from a 13 year old kid with a monster PC". Or learn about what you are buying...maybe.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[SpecBear]

True enough. But I was focusing on what I thought was the innacurate portion of the review. The drive was generally described as "quiet, reliable, and fast." As I was using it, it was quite reliable and fast, but not quiet.

However had I been using the drive in the unplugged configuration it certainly would have been quiet and reliable, but I would have posted complaining that NewEgg's reviews were inaccurate regarding the drive's speed.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Billly Gates]

It seems to me Newegg did this due to fear of litigation from these companies recieving negative reviews.

If the bold disclaimer is also printed my guess is perhaps this was a settlement of some lawsuit.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[znaps]

Agreed. I submitted a mostly negative review on an LCD screen that I purchased on Newegg; Newegg pulled it as it never appeared on their site.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Elminst]

Well see there's your problem...
You submitted an ACTUAL review of the two products.

All they want is 2-5 sentences with buzzwords and exclamation points!!!11 And mention their fast shipping.

You expected people to actually read. Silly you. ;)

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Anonymous Coward]

More like "Once you see how you're getting royally fucked in the ass for shipping, you never Newegg."

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Pollardito]

i think what you mean to say is :

"I bought a MSI K8N Neo board for work. Not a defect! I stopped using competitors and pour through newegg reviews ever since."

Re:Newegg rev 01

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then I guess it's been a while since you went there. Here's a random digital camera link. I don't see any disclaimer.

I've found negative reviews at other sites to be very important. There was a digital camera I was interested in a while back, but it looked a little too cheap, so I looked up some reviews on it. They ranged from luke-warm to very bad. One reviewer said is actually started smoking, and most reported that it broke within a few days. If I'd bothered to look up some reviews on the IBM 75-GXP hard disk I bought a few years ago, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[MrNiCeGUi]

I can't seem to find it on the new site, but I remember also reading a disclaimer that the reviews were selected, so this comes as no surprise to me.

Some edits can be insidious.

[Anonymous Coward]

I once wrote something to the effect of: "I can't recommend this laptop backpack for anyone who travels a lot," and the site neatly editted out the "can't". Never filling out one of those things again.

Re:Some edits can be insidious.

[Frymaster]

I once wrote something to the effect of: "I can't recommend this laptop backpack for anyone who travels a lot," and the site neatly editted out the "can't". Never filling out one of those things again.

i'd probably try using my gpg signature... although there's no guarantee that that wouldn't be edited out as well.

Re:Some edits can be insidious.

[Asgard]

I suspect Newegg wouldn't be very happy with having their pages cluttered up with gpg signatures, unless you can somehow make them light-grey 1-pt type.

Re:Some edits can be insidious.

[Brandybuck]

Hell, I've seen NEWSPAPERS do that. A friend of mine got interviewed on a city council race and the newspaper editor did that to him. I've never trusted a newspaper since. Always get independent confirmation before believing anything you read, see or hear in the news.

Re:Some edits can be insidious.

[nmos]

I had this happen to a friend as well. I've been very suspicious of quotes and sound bites in the media ever since (which is probably a good thing).

Heh...

[BlackCobra43]

The company now says it posts both positive and negative comments, as long as they are constructive.'"

Nothing's easier than saying "Sorry, I won't do it again" and pulling up your pants after getting caught. It doesn't change the fact you WERE caught and you DID do what you were caught doing.I also in no way guarantees that this behavior will not resurface at a later date.

Re:Heh...

[Ingolfke]

Nothing's easier than saying "Sorry, I won't do it again" and pulling up your pants after getting caught. It doesn't change the fact you WERE caught and you DID do what you were caught doing.I also in no way guarantees that this behavior will not resurface at a later date.

They had a problem... people would post useless reviews "it's good", "I hated it", "Buy me an Ipod", etc. and this was detrimental to the customers who were trying to figure out whether or not they wanted the product. So they tried a solution... to have the product team screen the reviews to make sure they were accurate based on what the product teams new about the products. A good idea, in that who is better to validate a review than the people who manage the product. Of course, the unforseen consequence was that the product team didn't want to look like they were buying crappy products and not doing their job (or they just though they had the best products) so they biased the screening process. The marketing team has in theory less bias (and less knowlege of the product perhaps), and in theory should do a better job with the screening process this time. The point is that the company is interested in providing the customers with valueable meaningful reviews and in order to do that they are willing to continuously improve their process.

As long as they keep working to make it better for the customers and then that is a good thing.

Re:Heh...

[Stone Cold Troll]

Ah, shit. You're supposed to pull up your pants too? No wonder nobody believed me.

Re:Heh...

[GlassHeart]

No, it's not a good thing. The interests of the retailer are tied together with the interests of the makers of these products, so they are not a neutral third party that should be trusted to make censorship decisions on product reviews. I'm sure some retailers manage to stay ethical, just as you might grow up to be an upstanding citizen in a mob family, but any system that requires the highest level of ethical human behavior is not a good system.

Re:Heh...

[Ingolfke]

any system that requires the highest level of ethical human behavior is not a good system.

This system doesn't require the highest level of human ethical behavior. There is a wealth of information on the Internet about products, so people can check elsewhere to get a second opinion. And if the customer finds that the company is consistantly hyping its products they trust in the reviews will drop and then there is a question why have reviews anyway? Even for the sucker who buys a crappy product because of a hyped set of reviews... if they don't like it they'll return it (added cost for the company) or go somewhere else next time (lost customer).

The company wants to keep its customers... and with the information avaialble today they really aren't in a position to aggressively censor the reviews.

Re:Heh...

[fxer]

Newegg is the worst about this, anything remotely negative about a product is edited out or rejected, even the worst gear ever made has 4 stars at that site!

Re:Heh...

[GlassHeart]

This system doesn't require the highest level of human ethical behavior. There is a wealth of information on the Internet about products, so people can check elsewhere to get a second opinion.

In other words, you are agreeing with me that the system of allowing retailer censorship in product reviews is unworkable unless it contains an external check? (What you did was refer to a different, bigger system than I was talking about.)

Your "wealth of information" is also a bit of an overstatement. There certainly is a large quantity of information on just about every product, but finding independent and fair opinions on the Internet is anything but simple. In the end, you probably have to rely on a reviewer's reputation, which nullifies the purpose of having random user reviews in the first place.

if they don't like it they'll return it (added cost for the company) or go somewhere else next time (lost customer).

Many items, including movies and computer software, cannot be returned just because the buyer didn't like it. Secondly, from my personal experience, the threat of going elsewhere is not a big concern for many merchants. As long as every retailer lies equally much (think cellular phone carriers, for example), where are you going to go?

Re:Heh...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The marketing team has in theory less bias (and less knowlege of the product perhaps), and in theory should do a better job with the screening process this time."

Are you kidding? That's like saying, "I can't trust this lawyer, so I'll ask this politician instead."

Product review site

[bigwavejas]

I usually check reviews at www.cnet.com
To my knowledge they're an independent reviewer

Re:Product review site

[Shkuey]

They sure do have a lot of Sony and Dell adds on their site though.

Re:Product review site

[lucabrasi999]

To my knowledge they're an independent reviewer

The only true independent reviewer that I know of is Consumer Reports. Of course, there is the problem that they don't necessarily review the types of products that New Egg sells.

Re:Product review site

[pete6677]

Even a "non-biased" site will do what they have to do in order to retain advertisers. I would never expect a company to allow criticism of an advertiser on their site, for obvious reasons. This is why buyers need to research product information on multiple sites before deciding to buy something. Anyone can throw up a fake review site with glowing user testimonials, kind of like the ones you see on infomercials. A general rule of thumb should be to not believe everything you read on the internet, but if you're seeing the same type of comments from different people in different situations, there's probably some truth to it.

Re:Product review site

[lucabrasi999]

I know it is bad form to respond to my own post.,.but, I meant to say, they don't necessarily review MANY of the products that NewEgg sells.

Re:Product review site

[lucabrasi999]

Sony

It's kind of funny that you mention Sony .

Re:Product review site

[Johnny O]

Linux Today carries Microsoft ads. How convoluted is that?

Re:Product review site

[Anonymous Coward]

CNET is somewhat independant. but they are easily influenced by their advertisers. afterall, they are a media company and all of their revenue comes from ad sales.

but overall, i'd say their reviews are half-ass. they pretty much glance over products and don't do in-depth technical reviews. their reviews tend to focus on trivial things, like the way a product looks and feels. they rarely go into the functionality and technology of a product. i guess that's fine since CNET's target audience is mostly non-techie consumers looking for product suggestions.

Re:Product review site

[mcmonkey]

Even a "non-biased" site will do what they have to do in order to retain advertisers. I would never expect a company to allow criticism of an advertiser on their site, for obvious reasons.

No ads, no problem:

http://www.consumerreports.org/

I hope this isn't surprising to anyone

[ChrisF79]

This really shouldn't come as a suprise at all. The fact is, companies are out to sell product. I'm not saying they should delete all of the negative reviews, but don't be surprised if a lot of them do get deleted.

When you watch any type of commercial, you're not going to hear a negative review mentioned, correct? Why should the web be any different?

Re:I hope this isn't surprising to anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

If handled correctly, reviews can help a responsible company save and even make money. If a company offers something that their target audience thinks is junk, they can stop offering the item and save money in returns. If a company offers competing products they honestly shouldn't care which product you buy, as long as you buy something from them. If Product A is inferior to Product B wouldn't you be happer with Product B? If you're happy with the product, you won't be needing to return it and would be more likely to shop there again, correct?

I agree with the removal of idiotic 'reviews' like 'This produkt suxx0rs!' but don't find fault with 'I liked Company Y's Product X better'--especially if the mentioned product is also sold at the same online shop.

Re:I hope this isn't surprising to anyone

[ChrisF79]

Neither here nor there. What you're talking about may or may not be done. Who's to say that newegg didn't receive only 30% positive reviews on a given product and stopped selling it. That's not what we're talking about here.

Your last point is valid though. Negative reviews pointing to a better product are valid, and actually rather altruistic.

Dealt with Newegg censorship

[casualsax3]

I've had comments posted about a case I bought from Newegg that arrived in less than perfect shape never make it to the comment section. I went back and wrote a review of the case leaving out the state of the case upon arrival, and that one remains in the comment section today.

Re:Dealt with Newegg censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, They rejected your review that focused on the (to them) irrelevant.

Re:Dealt with Newegg censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand why it was removed

Saying "The case was damaged in shipment" really says nothing about either the case or the seller. It tells me about FedEx. Ehat would be helpfull is knowing how the seller handled the problem.

Edit vs rejection

[Dionysus]

Isn't there a difference between editing a review, and rejecting a review? Maybe I didn't RTFA close enough, but I didn't read anything about editing any of the reviews.

Re:Edit vs rejection

[fracai]

you're forgetting that this was posted on Slashdot, where "edit" is synonymous with "reject or accept".

sigh, I suppose the winky face is required. ;)

Re:Edit vs rejection

[Ravatar]

Yeah, I thought they meant that ecomm sites were actually editing the input of users to be something other than what the user stated. Guess I'll set my tinfoil hat down for now.

What did you expect?

[Joe U]

What did you expect?

They are trying to sell you as much as possible.

If every review could be a two page glowing review on how you can't live without the product it would be...

And now it is.

Re:What did you expect?

[B11]

We don't edit or reject negative comments where I work (an online aftermarket performance automotive company). As long as it doesn't contain profanity or sexist/racist, etc., comments, it goes up online along with the star ratings. Sometimes we don't even edit for grammar/spelling (unless it is unreadable without the editing), and usually we don't edit for length, unless it is huge.

We aren't afraid of losing a sale on brand X if we sell brand Y. And if the product is junk, we drop it, because it is too exensive to keep junk brands in mail-order, regardless of margin (APC, an importer of all the neon/gawdy auto accessories, had great margin, but lots of returns and fitment issues, our customers told us it was junk, we listened and dropped them like a bad habit).

Plus in our industry, a lot of customers talk to each other on web forums, so they know more about the product, what brands to look for, etc. for their specific vehicle, than anyone else. SO we aren't going to be able to pull very many fast ones on them. The honesty of our ratings/reviews lends us a lot of credibility in our customers' eyes.

Re:What did you expect?

[hotdiggitydawg]

This article is "fascinating and newsworthy".

(NB. My original review of this article was "It is fascinating how people can post the blindingly obvious to Slashdot and still somehow be considered newsworthy", but of course it was edited...)

Edit or filter?

[Linus Torvaalds]

Seems to me that this is just filtering. While that's still not good, it's a lot more understandable and acceptable than editing what people say. Yet another misleading Slashdot headline, I guess.

Re:Edit or filter?

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Now please close your browser and return to kernel development work.

Re:Edit or filter?

[Andrewkov]

Yet another misleading Slashdot headline, I guess.

Oops! You shouldn't have said that, now your comment will be deleted!

Re:Edit or filter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well some filtering is appropriate. If someone attaches a "review" on a harddrive that is an ad for Viagra, there's no reason to leave that up. Reviews that are simply "This sucks", or "This roolz" are only slightly more helpfull.

Re:Edit or filter?

[Cyn]

or censoring?

The conditions and determinations for rejection aren't clearly delineated enough for it to be called filtering IMO.

Still, I doubt they're being particularly mean about it - yeah they'll make money up front if they suppress bad press about a product, but chances are they sell its competitor anyway - and if they're seen as having BS reviews, people may stop going there.

Seems to me that most people go by lowest price after shipping anyway, so it's all moot.

Re:Edit or filter?

[nmos]

Newegg does appear to do a certain amount of editing. For example if a person mentions a price it's usually replaced with ***** or something similar. I don't have a problem with it since it's not hidden but it's worth noting.

Who pays attention to online reviews anyway?

[EvilStein]

"Astroturfing" certainly isn't something new, and neither is the practice of manipulating articles. Advertising slime certainly *would* stoop to that level to promote a product.

Heck, even movie reviews are total garbage. Sony just got busted for publishing "reviews" penned by someone that didn't even exist.

I don't trust *any* online review, be it on newegg, epinions.com, or amazon. Best reviews are still the ones you get from friends.

Re:Who pays attention to online reviews anyway?

[Amouth]

personaly i use the "Manual" review.. download the product manual and read it.. if it is readable then consider the product, if not tell the makers to learn english

Re:Who pays attention to online reviews anyway?

[cavemanf16]

True, astroturfing *can* be a problem, especially on the big sites, but the feedback comments are not entirely useless. I always recommend to people trying to purchase electronics that once they start to settle on a few different makes and models of the electronic item that they want to purchase to do a Google search on each one with the actual model number and the word "forum" in the Google search field. Read up on what a few low-brow, offensive-commentary-and-all forums and/or blogs say about the product and you'll probably figure out pretty quickly whether you might have any problems with said product in the future.

This strategy has kept me from buying crap from Newegg.com or other online vendors like Overstock.com, and apart from just their review section Newegg and Overstock have always been good with their actual "real life" service, even if all of the virtual services offered to consumers (the reviews in particular) won't always be the best.

Re:Who pays attention to online reviews anyway?

[SkidWilly]

I don't trust *any* online review...

Putting trust in something, and merely paying attention to it are two totally differnt things. I "pay attention" to reviews, not looking for truth, but to perhaps gain some insight on specific product details that I hadn't thought about, and may sway my decision.

It's kind of like reading /. I would never trust *all* of the opinions, but the ideas flow rampantly. It's up to me to decide if should get further investigation or not.

Even truly bogus garbage can be thought provoking.

Re:Who pays attention to online reviews anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, don't even trust your fucking friends. Best reviews are gotten from an COMPLETELY unbiased source like your dog or pet goldfish. They know... trust me.

Re:Who pays attention to online reviews anyway?

[toddestan]

Hell, don't even trust your fucking friends. Best reviews are gotten from an COMPLETELY unbiased source like your dog or pet goldfish. They know... trust me.

When it comes to buying somethings, your dog or pet goldfish probably have just as good advice as anyone else. For example, just start asking around about what brand of harddrives are best.

Trustworthy?

[Lord Marlborough]

I don't think this should really be much of a surprise. It is impossible to trust the reviews that you read. The only person who benefits from truth is the consumer. Everyone else benefits from praise, false or not. The fact that Amazon had a great many reviews of their books posted by the authors or people related to the authors/publishers should give some insight into whether or not "customer reviews" are a good way of judging a product's merits.

Surprised? Er, No

[kibbey]

Why would any thinking person be surprised about this? It's just like the hamburger pictures at your favourite fast food joint. The one you get never looks like the picture.

Freedom of Speech

[3CRanch]

So much for allowing freedom of speech in advertising. Did anybody honestly expect anything other than this? I mean, of course they are going to moderate what gets published. Especially when it comes to a potential sale of their product. Mess with a company's bottom line and you'll certainly get censored.

Re:Freedom of Speech

[InfiniteWisdom]

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. They are under no obligation to enable you to exercise your freedom of speech on their site. You're more than welcome to publish your own site, tell your friends or hand out flyers on the street corner.

All your talk of "free speech" and "censorship" is rather ridiculous.

Re:Freedom of Speech

[Winkhorst]

Er, getting back to the point...They don't have to publish the reviews in the first place, but having decided to do so and then claiming, at least implicitly, that those reviews represent the honest opinions of their customers, to then turn around and post what is basically a lie is deceptive and unethical and not likely to endear themselves to anyone who might conceivably be a customer of theirs.

And yes, I agree with the guy who said you should know what you want before you go to Newegg. Their service and prices are good but they aren't the place to do research on a product.

NewEgg's policies seem reasonable

[kawika]

I've seen constructive criticism of products in NewEgg reviews and if anything they made me more likely to buy. For example, there was a case that had the Firewire ports connected wrong but the reviewer pointed to a page that showed how to correct the pinout. I bought it and made the suggested change immediately.

I have seen NewEgg reviews where they censored prices and competitor sites but still posted the review, so they don't always reject an entire review because of that.

Re:NewEgg's policies seem reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you give a good rating (4 stars and above) newegg usually won't pull your review.

Fry's

[DarkHand]

Fry's Electronics owns Outpost, and I know someone who works at Fry's... At the penalty of losing their job, they're not allowed to say ANYTHING negative about any product whatsoever. They can't specifically say one product is better than another either. I wonder if this policy will change now as well?

Re:Fry's

[deathwombat]

Clerk: No you really dont want to buy that, theres some really better stuff over at our competitor's stores, oh you dont know where they are? ok let me show it to you on the map...

Re:Fry's

[ak3ldama]

I wish companies would realize, that if one product is reviewed negatively, then the customer can see that and turn to a different better product. Very rarely will the business lose a sale because of honesty. If anything, it will help to drive bad products off the market, and replace the bad products with good products. These bad products are surely only a drag on the market system, and creating friction. Does Newegg want to receive customer support calls, handle bad motherboards that keep getting sent back in for replacement, etc.? Is management at these companies retarded? Not only all of this, but typically the better products cost a bit more and have better features, so these would rake in more profits.

Re:Fry's

[Dhalka226]

At the penalty of losing their job [. . .] [t]hey can't specifically say one product is better than another.

That's not necessarily so bad, depending on how it is enforced in practice rather than inferring from a statement.

For example, it could be as innocuous as forcing clerks to promote the positives and let the customers decide. Even if the clerk IS knowledgable about a subject, I don't necessarily want them telling me which is better. Then their opinion gets into it, and if there are sales commissions of any sort (hell, even if sales performance is used in consideration of future advancement) it gets even more interesting. Let them, for example, give me the specs on those two new computers I'm considering. If I don't understand what some metric means, or whether I'd get a better performance boost by changing A or B, I can simply ask.

Of course that assumes the clerks have any idea what they're talking about, but then again, them giving opinions outright does too.

I'm sure part of it is that they don't want to lose sales, too, and in my opinion that's a load of crap. To be honest, if I was buying an expensive new TV or something and the clerk was able to tell me that one had frequent problems or tended to die off quickly, I would be as likely or more to purchase something different from that store. And if there WERE sales commissions, I'd make sure that guy got them every time. Good for him, good for business.

Re:Fry's

[Anonymous Coward]

Fry's Electronics owns Outpost, and I know someone who works at Fry's... At the penalty of losing their job, they're not allowed to say ANYTHING negative about any product whatsoever. They can't specifically say one product is better than another either. I wonder if this policy will change now as well?

really? this is news to me. i used to work in the software department and we could recommend whatever we wanted without penalty. on a related note, we got a lot of secret shoppers that represented certain software companies. if you suggested the "right" product, you get some prize or reward from them.

another thing to note when buying products from retail stores.. sometimes manufacturers offer spiffs and incentives to salespeople for each unit they sell of a particular product. so if a salesperson seems to be a brand whore for "X" instead of "Y", then he's probably getting something out of it; aside from the usual commission.

Re:Fry's

[Deadguy2322]

Oddly enough, during my stints as a salesman, I have done exactly this, many times. The weird part is, it often resulted in the customer coming back to me for other things because I was honest with them. The real fun would be the times when they didn't buy a piece of crap P.C., with no margin whatsoever, bought a different one elsewhere, and came back to me for all the high-margin accessories. My boss actually encouraged my approach, as we were more profitable, and actually moved more high-end stuff by coming right out and telling the customer when what they were looking at was not worth it. Not to mention, we had a lot fewer pissed-off people returning the junk.

Re:Fry's

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops.. I misread that as "sometimes manufacturers offer spliffs and incentives to salespeople"

I wonder if Fry's does drug tests?

Re:Fry's

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and Frys is the best place to be the clueless user since the people who work at Frys have as much knowledge of their products as the end users who want one and know nothing about it. They can't say anyhing bad about the product not because they fear losing their jobs (I can't think of a worse place to work, actually) it's because they don't know squab about any of their products.

Re:Fry's

[Generic Guy]

it will help to drive bad products off the market, and replace the bad products with good products.

The problem is that the vendor has to take all of the risk buying and warehousing a product before ever knowing if it is going to be good, bad, popular or whatever. Newegg has offered a number of bad or underperforming items as 'free gifts with order' to eliminate stock (I remember a particularly bad brand of DVD-R discs becoming 'customer gifts'). Newegg isn't so bad with the voter ratings, even if they remove some reviews. But I can see how tempting it might be "fixing" reviews of underperforming products at unethical merchants.

Buyer Beware - especially of reviews on the merchant's site.

Let's get real

[WebHostingGuy]

Who bases their entire decision process (or any substanial part of it) on comments from J.C. from Dallas?

I guess I always assumed that these comments were spiked. Go look at a lot of books on Amazon. The first ten reviews are always by the writer of the book and their family. I found one book in which the review was the same, but just the paragraphs were changed around. Eight different people wrote the same words but re-arranged? Don't think so.

Re:Let's get real

[18hrs]

Maybe J.C from Dallas alone isn't of much guidance, but it is ususally the case that if a product has a particular strength or weakness, that will come across several reviews-- you'll hear it from Steve in Tulsa, Margaret in Houston and Debbie in Des Moines... At least in Amazon which is the only customer feedback system I'm familiar with.

I do a lot of online shopping and customer reviews are a significant factor in my buying decisions. You just have to learn how to read them. You should look for comments referring to specific information about the product, and consistency across reviews. And of course the number of reviews for a product is important-- I don't know what a statistically significant threshold would be, but my personal rule of thumb is 8 to 10.

I knew it!

[TheOtherAgentM]

I knew that many people couldn't have liked the DVD Night at the Roxbury!

In online retail...

[Anonymous Coward]

We need more bad reviews to restore balance to the force.

Amazon does this too

[Oostertoaster]

Amazon does this all the time. I've frequently left reviews for products on Amazon, and if the review is anything but glowing adoration for the product, they tend to not post the review at all. Or, they'll simply edit the review so it doesn't say anything at all helpful.

Amazon.com is notorious for this

[AEton]

The WSJ article only mentions Amazon in passing (it no longer allows anonymous reviews), but they have the strongest review censorship I've seen yet.

Any bestselling item will never have an average review of less than 4.0/5.0 stars.

There is a much higher standard for poor reviews than good ones; and even excellent reviews of a product may disappear if they are unfavorable.

(And we can't forget the time that Amazon.com accidentally slipped and published the identities of every reviewer, so that it became obvious which were editorial, publisher, or even authorial! shills.)

On the other hand, Amazon does occasionally allow wonderful things, like hundreds of reviews of Bil Keane's work that are mostly interested in the ontological existence of being. But these are rare and hard to find.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

Any bestselling item will never have an average review of less than 4.0/5.0 stars.

I wondered about that too. Sometimes, I wonder if those folks even read the book or used the item more then once. What I like to do is to look for the 1 or 2 star reviews and read what they have to say. If they're along the lines of "This sucks!", then I ignore them, but if the review goes on to itemize the things they had a problem with, then I find the review to be helpful. It's the same the other way when folks post "This is the best book ever! You don't need anything else!" - ignore it.

And many times, for example power tools, people use the item differently and as a result get varying performance. You'll get a guy who used the item once and reviewed as being 5 stars. Then you'll get a pro who used it for 100 hours and knocks it because of parts wearing out too fast. Those are the reviews I look for.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Eric Giguere]

I don't know if Amazon actually does anything with reviews until someone complains about one, to be honest. It seems to me that there are just too many products on Amazon for them to review all the reviews manually before they're posted.

One thing I'd like to see on Amazon is a way to add comments that don't affect the review average. But you _have_ to select a star value, even if all you want to do is clarify/correct someone else's review. I'd do that for my latest book :-) (Mind you, I'm not sure how much they'd appreciate comments like "Of course you don't like the book, you ninny, it's for non-techies!")

I used to get upset over bad reviews, but the truth is that if there are _enough_ reviews attached to a book, even the bad ones can be useful if they're constructive, because they may convince someone that the book really is appropriate for them even if it wasn't the right one for the reviewer. But that only works when you have a dozen or more reviews, I think. Two of three "this book sucks" reviews on their own isn't a good sign!

Eric
www.EricGiguere.com/books

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Have Blue]

I think the problem is more that there are far more "this product is PERFECT" and "this product is HORRIBLE" reviews than any middle ratings. You won't be motivated to go back to Amazon and comment on the product unless either you had such a bad experience that you do want to take the time to warn people away from it, or it makes you so orgasmically happy that you can't stop talking about it. If you were reasonably satisfied, you just keep using the product without a second though to the buying process. If the product is slightly flawed but not enough to make it entirely useless, you either put up with it or throw it out and get something else- either way, you again never really bother to go back to its listing on Amazon.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Anonymous Coward]

On further examination, the Keane reviews have also gotten thinner; Amazon has taken out the least topical ones. Here, so you don't have to search through all the Amazon listings with no reviews for Bil Keane Family Circus comic books like "Oops! We're Out Juice!", "I Just Dropped Grandma!", "ANY CHILDREN?", and "For This I Went to College?" -- here are a full list of books and current Amazon reviews.

There were, once, hundreds more of these reviews. Now they are deleted. I weep.

The Family Circus (paperback)
Oh Rollie, You Liar!!!, July 27, 2005
Reviewer: Jane Smith "Book Maven" "Sam" (Florida, MO USA)
Surely anyone reading "The Family Circus" will see that Keane is keenly (heh) marking the Universe as a "yet discovered" personal journey.

Sure, Billy may sprout arms to evade the boulder, but what about when his grandparents turn invisible to evade him?

Keane places evolution in an ambigous strata, oscillating from quick escapes and subtle pranks (such as when the Father, perhaps a representation of God and Keane himself? dances, moving one limb per panel over what was the course of weeks, merely to teach Billy that he can dance).

However one reads this awe-inspiring strip, it is obvious, this one will keep with us for the ages.

The Satisfaction of reading this is akin to the joy of breaking the Da Vinci Code.

Facinating, If Controversial, Reading, January 12, 2005
Reviewer: Roland McBain "Rollie" (Twin Falls, Idaho)
This treatise is a must-read for anyone truly interested in the origins of man. While I understand the need for covert distribution to an otherwise jaded scientific review audience, it still came as a surprise to me that Professor Hawking would embark on such a monumental work under a pseudonym.

Against the backdrop of the Big Bang-initiated universe we find ourselves dwarfed by 'Keane's' laser-focus arguments concerning bacterial spontaneous generation and their link to a modern cartoon character boy. The intervening billion years is naturally where the bulk of the story takes place -- and where the controversy of course ensues.

I was particularly drawn to the extensive sections elucidating the age-old theory of 'spontaneous evolution.' Our subject here, Billy, is made the focal point of a lengthy examination of a fairly ordinary bacterial vegetation, existing on the underside of a rock. By pure chance that rock is shaken loose of its footings and careens wildly down a hill (perhaps a metaphor, perhaps reality -- we don't reallly know, do we?) toward the now-familiar volcanic fissure. Billy spontaneously 'evolves' legs, arms, a brain and hair to leap nimbly out of danger's catastrophic grasp.

Taken as a whole, this semi-scientific tome works on a variety of levels; it is both incredibly educational and incredibly visionary in its embrace of seemingly insane theories. Only the most conservative, backward, low-brow readers will find fault with the obvious explanations of our 'true history.'

We Didn't Do It (paperback)
Be the Most Recent Amazon employee to Erase this Review! Click Here!, July 1, 2005
Reviewer: Garrett A. Deane "nvarea" (Sunderland, MA USA)
(REAL NAME)
OJ Simpson. Michael Jackson. Phil Spector. Bill Clinton. What is Bill Keane trying to teach us in this tome? All these great Americans have one thing in common with our favorite family: they all said they didn't do it.

However, clearly they did.

And ergo the wackiness contained within belies the seriousness of this conundrum.

GRANDMA WAS HERE! (paperback)
A Little intense..., July 21, 2005
Reviewer: Dr. Blumpkin
Good overall, but some scenes may be too intense for younger readers, i.e. when Zombie Grandma bites through P.J.'s skull while saying "GRRRR Tasty brains!!!". Also, the sex scenes seemed cliched and overdone, except for when Mommy forgets the "safe" word and almost dies -- Man I did NOT see that coming!

Sm

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up the Flybar on amazon and you will see that a number of reviews reference reviews where people got seriously injured however the referenced reviews are no longer there.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Brandybuck]

...the strongest review censorship I've seen yet.

Do you know what "censorship" means?

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[dgatwood]

What I find telling is the proportion of those. Without reading a single line of text, if a product has a hundred "this product rocks" and only two "this product sucks" messages, I can probably assume it's a reasonably good product. The reverse generally indicates a bad product.

However, that only works if web sites don't reject reviews that they don't like. Companies that do that should get legally smacked down for it. Cutting things out because they are abusive/foul-mouthed/offensive is okay, but cutting things out because they review a product you sell in a negative way... that means your purchasing people need to reevaluate the product.

If a company is too stupid to reevaluate their purchasing based on negative feedback, people should be smart enough to stop buying from them and buy from a company that actually cares about the quality of the merchandise that they sell.

Based on what I have read here, I just blacklisted both Newegg and Amazon for my purchasing for the next six months. If I keep hearing about this sort of crap from them, that ban will become permanent. And yes, I have made purchases from both of those companies within the last year or so.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[MythMoth]

I think that's more a problem with their "Top Reviewer" system.

Many of their top-listed reviewers have quite clearly not read the books in question.

This is not sour grapes; a book I wrote has received 5 stars from "Top 50" reviewers who have clearly not cracked the book open and have no idea what it's about.

If you then go to look at their other reviews you'll find that they have a suspiciously eclectic taste, and never say anything you couldn't figure out from the information already on Amazon.

I don't know if Amazon award prizes to their top reviewers, or if these people are just astonishingly sad - but the tactic is obvious; they award 5 stars because people who like a book are more likely to "mod them down" in the "was this review helpful to you?" link and thus adversely affect their ranking.

In short, when reading an Amazon review, only trust reviewers who are NOT top N rated, and who are using their real names (as you imply, it is enormously tempting to astro-turf your own publication - I don't do it, incidentally, but I can see why people do).

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Have Blue]

What I meant, in response to the parent post, is that the vast majority of reviews submitted to the system are going to have either the 1- or 5-star box checked. Nobody's going to bother to spend time and effort declaring a product is mediocre (2), average (3), or "merely satisfactory" (4). And it's very unlikely that a product is going to receive 1- and 5-star ratings in similar quantities. So, regardless of how many bad reviews Amazon discards, products with an average rating of 2 or 3 are going to be very rare.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Amazon pretty much relies on the community feedback for products. There are plenty of negative reviews on the site.

Anyone can review stuff and that means people who want to shill can shill. OTOH, you can click on the user's name and see all their other reviews, and you can see how many people agree'd with the review via the votes (n out of x people found this helpful).

The fact is Amazon has millions of products and there's no way they can edit all of the reviews.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[AEton]

Yes. Okay, so there's no government involved, and it's a private company making decisions on what content to remove from its own Web site. I know that. Sorry for setting off your "get some PRIORITIES!" detector.

But at the same time, they say "customer reviews" and imply that the reviewers bought the product. There isn't a disclosure that "we'll probably eliminate negative customer reviews, especially on popular items". I don't always keep this foremost in mind when I shop on Amazon.com - I don't care very much (since it's not of course real censorship) - and as a result, I occasionally forget that their reviews require an unusually large dose of salt. (For example, the ten or fifty glowing reviews on a laptop case, digital camera, or esoteric novel probably won't help me at all in choosing whether to buy.)

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Dun Malg]

What I like to do is to look for the 1 or 2 star reviews and read what they have to say. If they're along the lines of "This sucks!", then I ignore them, but if the review goes on to itemize the things they had a problem with, then I find the review to be helpful.

Some of the 1-star reviews are hilarious, though. Some of the stupidest reviews I've ever seen were (paraphrasing):

"This novel didn't have enough pages for what I paid for it. It should have been longer. -- 1 star"

"this raclette dish is not like the one I had in switzerland, which came with tongs. -- 1 star."

"i am not sure what raclette is but I am pretty sure it is not whnat I ordered. -- 1 star"

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[way0utwest]

Actually, I have to disagree with the 4.0 review item, at least for some stores.

Doing some woodworking as a hobby, I check the reviews of tools there before deciding to buy from Amazon or some local guy. I've seen a few best selling items not rated well, but they sell because of the price.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[adrenalinerush]

Ahh, yes, and we can't forget the lovely David Hasselhoff - Very Best Of CD. The reviews are definitely something to savor.

And make sure you listen to the clip of 'Hot Shot City,' as it's particularly good.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[Anonymous Coward]

"Based on what I have read here, I just blacklisted both Newegg and Amazon for my purchasing for the next six months. If I keep hearing about this sort of crap from them, that ban will become permanent."

Wow, I bet they straighten up their act right away.

Re:Amazon.com is notorious for this

[loyukfai]

Any bestselling item will never have an average review of less than 4.0/5.0 stars.

Maybe that's why it's a bestseller?

Neweggs Honesty

[style7711]

I've read enough bad reviews on Newegg that I do believe they are removing only vague or troll posts. Removing only 15% of posts isn't much considering the amount of troll post /. sees.

Re:Neweggs Honesty

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah?? Well, your a complete fucktard!!

Re:Neweggs Honesty

[style7711]

Thank you for making me $10 :)

Probably skewed...

[op12]

While they say more positive reviews are kept than negative ones, there can be an explanation. Positive product reviews tend to analyze the product...not a lot of people posting a review say something simple like "It's great!". On the other hand, negative ones tend to just say "this sucks" or something to that effect. It can be because someone's just spamming or something. So if messages are removed on the basis of being too vague or critical without insight, more negative reviews will get rejected. At least that's my guess.

Re:Surprised? Er, No

[ChrisF79]

Right, or how your wife never looks better than she does at the wedding. That's why so many men cry at their own wedding--they know its all downhill from that point on.

So?

[Dun Malg]

I personally have no problem with them going through and removing "reviews" that say "Nvidia is teh sux0rz. this video card is not as good as teh ATI - 1 star".As for tending to remove negative reviews more often, I reckon they seldom run into spurious positive reviews.

User Reviews aren't always usefull anyway

[Nytewynd]

For the most part, when I read a negative review I realize that the only reason for the negative review is either user incompetence or inflated expectations.

The first type is when a user gets their new electronic device home, and can't figure out that you need to take the lens cap off before taking pictures. Or they set the resolution of their new video card to 16 colors and post about how the specs lied and it looks like crap on their monitor.

The other type are the reviews that scream about features a product didn't claim to have, and are upset that they don't have them. These are the guys that can't believe their coffee maker doesn't have a built-in FM radio.

Neither of those types of posts do any good for anyone. If they get deleted, it is probably for the better.

On the other hand, if Newegg is deleting posts about how a particular hard drive always crashes after 2 months of use, that is bad practice. Negative reviews by people that actually point out the negative side of a product help me decide sometimes. I don't usually worry about 1 or 2 bad reviews, but if I see 100 posts that the image quality of a digital camera sucks, I won't buy it.

ebuyer.com seems reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

I've frequently seen product lines where a single negative review has stopped anyone else buying the product, even when they have large amounts of stock. In the end, selling crap is going to lose more money in the long term than by allowing honest reviews.

Review...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this article and found it to be lacking in grammer, creativity, and punctuation. I will never read an article from this author again.

No surprise

[Overly Critical Guy]

Anyone remember eBay magically defying its own policies and reversing Microsoft's negative feedback?

My experience with NewEgg...

[John_Booty]

I have seen constructive negative reviews on their site, so in my experience they do a pretty acceptably balanced job. Obviously, relying solely on customer reviews as your sole criteria would be insane, but they can be helpful.

For example, I was all set to buy an external hard drive enclosure from them, but some of the customer reviews noted a known dataloss problem with that enclosure's particular firewire-to-IDE bridge. So I selected another model. Normally I'd have done my homework before buying, but I mistakenly assumed all firewire-to-IDE chips were the same, so the customer reviews saved me.

I don't have a problem with them selectively approving reviews to an extent - otherwise you get the unwashed masses posting unhelpful stuff like "DONT BUY THIS CARD NVIDIA SUX0RZ BUY ATI INSTEAD LOL ps: U FAG".

You definitely have to take the positive reviews with a grain of salt, of course. Just thought I'd mention my experiences because there are sure to be a lot of "omg, cens0rship" posts.

Re:My experience with NewEgg...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a problem with them selectively approving reviews to an extent - otherwise you get the unwashed masses posting unhelpful stuff like "DONT BUY THIS CARD NVIDIA SUX0RZ BUY ATI INSTEAD LOL ps: U FAG".

I agree but how is that materially different from this?

"I've always had a ati video card in my computer's and I always had the x600's but then Ive upgraded to the x850 xt and runs sooo smooth and I can play half life, doom 3,battle 1942 all theses games on high resulotion and LOVE it very very much....(:"

Riiiiiight

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I see lots of websites where the FAQs have things like:

Q: "Your products suck. Did you know that?"
A: We continue to strive to give our customers a rich/powerful/inexpensive/luxurious/satisfying [verb]ing experience.....

Re:Riiiiiight

[TheOtherAgentM]

So, what [verb] would go there for an adult store? Hmmm...things to ponder.

How to guarantee your review shows up on NewEgg

[vortexf5]

Just say something like "NewEgg Rocks!" or "NewEgg got my order here the day before I placed it!". It won't even matter if you didn't mention the product.

Seriously, I've never had a problem with NewEgg. Their prices are good, and the shipping is frequently quite cheap, but I seldom pay any attention to their reviews.

Re:How to guarantee your review shows up on NewEgg

[KillShill]

but you continue doing business with a dishonest company. editing posts is downright reprehensible. if you don't like the post, delte the entire thing, don't chop it up until it meets your needs.

they can fuck off and die. i'll never do business with those assholes.

The marketing team...

[Ponzicar]

" In January, the Salt Lake City-based company changed the monitoring responsibilities to its marketing team." As we all know, marketing is a bastion of honesty and objectivity, right?

Sometimes, I wish they would

[RobertB-DC]

I've been on both sides. I ran the message board for a (small-signal) radio station for a while, and fought with management over posts about competing stations. Hint: don't admin a board unless you and the management are completely clear on such issues! Especially if you have something of an emotional investment in the subject.

But sometimes it just gets out of hand. The message boards for Woot.com are full of spam postings, whining, and just plain crap. But they pride themselves on their free-wheeling tolerance for criticism, so they tend to not censor *anything*. It makes the board nearly useless for its intended purpose of reading the kudos and flames about a product.

The best compromise would be have a clear policy about what will be deleted, and stick to it. That way, you can field complaints from management for letting opposing viewpoints through, and you can also get flamed by whiners wanting to crapflood. If you're catching hell from both sides, you know you're doing something right.

Re:Sometimes, I wish they would

[quacking duck]

But they pride themselves on their free-wheeling tolerance for criticism, so they tend to not censor *anything*. It makes the board nearly useless for its intended purpose of reading the kudos and flames about a product.

I wonder then, how about a system where editors can flag the spam and other junk posts as "filter out". These posts would then only appear on a separate page ("Filtered posts" or some such), linked to from the main review. This eliminates outright censorship, since the original spam/junk posts are still accessible (and if you suspect they're removing all the negative reviews you can check), and keeps the relevant content on top.

Re:Sometimes, I wish they would

[RobertB-DC]

I wonder then, how about a system where editors can flag the spam and other junk posts as "filter out". These posts would then only appear on a separate page ("Filtered posts" or some such), linked to from the main review. This eliminates outright censorship, since the original spam/junk posts are still accessible (and if you suspect they're removing all the negative reviews you can check), and keeps the relevant content on top.

Great minds think alike -- I acutally did implement such a system on the radio station message board! Slashdot was my inspiration, but I knew that Slashcode would have been too robust (besides, I didn't have that level of control on the server). So I just added a field to the messages table with a value from 1 (admin messages) to 7 (stuff nobody would want to read), and did all the moderation myself. The default viewing level was 4, so casual visitors saw the discussion but not the crap.

It worked pretty well until the station went to a professional web design company (who were able to provide graphx that I could have never put together). This was shortly after a rather heated debate over "business" vs. "censorship", so they dropped the board altogether.

By the way, the message board admin at woot.com is a guy named "galloping cow". You wouldn't be related, are you, "quacking duck"?

Re:Sometimes, I wish they would

[Vitriol Angst]

These web sites need some sort of moderation like Slashdot--but perhaps with a little more "professional" scoring. Users who login and have a history of responsible opinion should be rated higher than others.

In addition, when it comes to product reviews, there needs to be a weighting system by date. Saying a camera is 4 out of 5 doesn't mean much if it is two years old. A new model at the bottom of the barrel may be better than the best of two years ago with the way the technology changes. So I find reading the reviews and looking for intelligent comments and noticing the date of the comment helps me more than just knowing how many people thought a camera was great.

But in general, systems need to weed the good from the bad... not all opinions are equal--that is just a fact of life.

I'm sure they see a lot of astroturfing

[Sterling Christensen]

I think product review comments should be moderated just like discussion forums. When posts are edited, they should be clearly marked as edited with an explanation.

Tire Rack does this too

[Stone Cold Troll]

I wrote a review on TireRack that got silently rejected last winter. The thing is, I wrote the review specifically to warn people that a particular set of "All-Season" tires was dangerously inadequate on even a light dusting of snow, despite the manufacturer's claims. Unfortunately, I suppose when you get up in the $250/tire range, sales trump safety.

Re:Tire Rack does this too

[N9801V]

I work on The Tire Rack website and can fill you in on our policy. We do reject a few reviews and there are two primary reasons.

1. Profanity. We don't edit it, we delete the entire review.

2. Being irrational. Demands for a recall because of a flat, complaints blamed on the tires caused by negligence, like driving on flat tires, alignment issues, etc. Unrealistic expectations fall into this category, complaining you only got 25K on the rear tires of your 911 Turbo for instance, when that's probably a record for treadwear on the car.

I'm guessing you may have falled one of those checks, but in general any negative comments that are rational and well thought out go up.

If you check a few tires and see the number of negative reviews, you'll probably agree we don't hold back on them. We really don't have a reason to, we want you to make the best informed decision and buy from us. Which product you purchase really isn't the issue.

The initial discussions with the tire companies when we put this up was interesting. When they complained about the negative reviews on a specific tire, the general manager pointed out their tire wasn't very good compared to comparable tires from other companies and offered to do a tire test on our track for them that day to back it up!

If you doubt our honesty at all, here's a few you should look at.

http://www.tirerack.com/survey/SurveyComments.jsp? additionalComments=y&commentStatus=P&tireMake=Brid gestone&tireModel=Potenza+RE92

http://www.tirerack.com/survey/SurveyComments.jsp? additionalComments=y&commentStatus=P&tireMake=Good year&tireModel=Eagle+GA

http://www.tirerack.com/survey/SurveyComments.jsp? additionalComments=y&commentStatus=P&tireMake=Cont inental&tireModel=ContiTouringContact+CH95

Re:Tire Rack does this too

[Stone Cold Troll]

Hmmm. Interesting. After seeing some of those comments (e.g. " These tires are crap, and thats the bottom line!"), I'm not sure why mine didn't make it. I didn't use any profanity, and I took pains to present my experience objectively. I don't remember the exact wording, but I said something on the order of:

"Despite the all-season classification of these tires, their performance characteristics are much closer to those of summer tires. They harden up like rocks when the temp drops, and provide almost no traction on even a light dusting of snow. I was lucky to get home in one piece after a 1/4" snowfall with these tires. If you need to drive in any conditions other than warm weather, do not under any circumstances buy this tire!"

I assumed it was dumped for negativity, but maybe it just fell through the cracks. Either that, or the reviewer decided that because they were ultra-high performance tires that my expectations were unrealistic (which I do not believe was the case - even on UHP tires, if classified as All Season, they should provide enough traction in 1/4" snow that one can make gentle turns at 5 MPH without losing control).

In any event, based on the reviews you linked, it appears that TireRack reviews are handled much more fairly than I had thought.

Misleading headline...

[davidu]

There is nothing in that article to suggest the reviews are being edited. Rather, the article states that reviews are simply being approved or rejected which, regardless of perspective, is an entirely different thing.

Editing someone elses words would be far worse than simply applying some editorial control as to what is posted on their own site. Slashdot does the same sort of thing in the form of moderation. Moderators can affect what is seen by readers but they can't change individual posts.

Thanks,
David

Re:Misleading headline...

[ChrisKnight]

Perhaps the editor added their own personal knowledge. Would you like an example of NewEgg editing a user's review submission? This review contains a complaint by a user that their previous review had been edited.

-Chris

Re:Misleading headline...

[MmmmAqua]

A crucial difference here is that Slashdot's moderation is essentially a reputation system which has nothing to do with censorship. Post intelligent, insightful remarks and you are rewarded with a higher reputation, meaning people are more likely to see your posts in the future.

But, it's an optional reputation system. Anyone can browse Slashdot at -1, and see *everything* that's been posted to an article, AC trolls, flamewars, and all. It's moderation, not censorship, and that censorship is why what some retailers do with product reviews is simply unconscionable.

Re:Misleading headline...

[KillShill]

and since when is an article the last word on the totality of a situation?

just because the article doesn't mention it, doesn't mean it isn't going on.

lots of people have experienced this disgusting behavior first hand, myself included. they are lowlives who deserve to get their business licenses revoked. DON'T EDIT THE FUCKING POSTS. delete them but don't edit. deleting legitemate posts is bad enough but editing them to say something totally different is reprehensible.

i won't ever do business with these bastards.

Amazon shill reviews

[jokestress]

In March 2004, Amazon purged 34 negative reviews of a controversial book overnight, which drove the book's overall rating up from two to three stars and eliminated a number of reviews by well-known commentators. One of their Top 500 Reviewers had to try three or four times before they would not subsequently delete his negative reviews of this eugenics-based screed on sight.

This is an abiding flaw of a non-transparent system in which an anonymous editor employed by the company chooses from anonymous reviews. They have tried to remedy this a bit with Real Name, but the fundamental problem remains: one or two dedicated shills or critics can easily manipulate the system.

As another example, some of you may remember the fake Amazon reviews of Bil Keane's Family Circus books during the heyday of spinnwebe's Dysfunctional Family Circus.

Re:Surprised? Er, No

[germanStefan]

mine does ; )

Newegg Review Suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a bit suspicious of many Newegg reviews. A large number of them say something similar or identical to the following: "NewEgg Rocks!" "and of course, Newegg shipping rocks!" "Newegg and Fedex make a great combination!" "Thanks NewEgg!" "Newegg as always, shipped quickly and promptly" "NewEgg and Fedex Rock" Sure, we have a bunch of happy customers here (including myself), but I get the feeling the Newegg reviewers are appending phrases to some reviews and at times these phrases can look very out of place. Sorry but, I just feel like raising suspicion to keep Newegg truthful. See for yourself what I mean and go read some reviews on Newegg.

Re:Newegg Review Suspicion

[globalar]

Sometimes I have second thoughts too. But have you considered other sites where people post ratings? 99% of all eBay reviews read like they were written by a speed addict thanking his/her dealer. The average eBay review contains a series of ++++++ with an A+ in there somewhere. So it is entirely possible this is how people like to post.

It's a common human behavior to express positive things with catch-phrases and certain words. Further, the Internet has proven to me that many many people like being fans of companies. Perhaps this "utility" they recieve from being a fan is attached their ability to proclaim it, just like sports fans receive their utility by cheering. Oh yes, and some are borderline illiterate ;)

I would assume normal human behavior before I move on to "editorial conspiracy." I mean, it is also possible that people (such as myself) are satisfied with Newegg. I say, "good" and some people say "Newegg Rock0z" or whatever. We could mean roughly the same thing.

False advertising, plain and simple

[kebes]

False advertising is illegal. There are laws regarding what types of claims you can make, and how much you have to back them up. You can say "our product is great" but you cannot say "the President loves our product" (unless of course he publicly said that, or you've arranged a contract with him, etc.). Similarly, you couldn't say "we have conducted an independant scientific survey, and determined that 99% of people love our product" if that isn't true. Of course there are cases where companies commision "independant" reviews, or distort stats to their favor. But laws exist to constrain advertising, and prevent out-and-out lying.

When it comes to online user reviews, the situation gets a bit sticky. The reviews are hosted on the company's site... but something that claims to be "user reviews" implicitly indicates that these are the comments from all the users who cared to enter a comment. To modify or distort the comments is to change the implicit nature of the commenting system. So the company needs to clearly state "these reviews have been filtered and edited by our staff" or else they have to let the comments stand, consistent with a reasonable person's expectation of what is meant by "user reviews." To do otherwise is to purposefully mislead the customer. You cannot say "this medication is approved by doctors" if by "doctors" you mean some English professors who have Ph.D.s ... that would be misleading. Similarly, you cannot label them as "user reviews" if they have been edited.

(Note: a certain amount of filtering to remove blatantly inflamatory or irrelevant reviews is of course okay, since this doesn't contradict a normal expectation of what a "user review" is.)

Re:False advertising, plain and simple

[John Hasler]

When it comes to online user reviews, the situation gets a bit sticky. The reviews are hosted on the company's site... but something that claims to be "user reviews" implicitly indicates that these are the comments from all the users who cared to enter a comment.

No it doesn't. It merely says that these are customer reviews rather than the yammerings of the company's salesmen. It does not imply that they are all of the customer reviews nor even a random subset thereof.

Anyone who takes such reviews seriously is an idiot.

Re:False advertising, plain and simple

[hackstraw]

Oh, so those "paid endorsement" people actually use things like that term life insurance and whatnot?

You cannot say "this medication is approved by doctors" if by "doctors" you mean some English professors who have Ph.D.s ... that would be misleading.

Although it may be "legal", I've seen some snakeoil salesmen on TV that were PhDs (supposedly, maybe from one of those email buy a PhD cheap programs).

Basically, I've learned that there is an inverse relationship between quality of product and advertising/marketing. Good stuff simply does not need that much external visibility.

Slashdot spin at it again.

[gblues]

How does rejecting some reviews based on inappropriate content, time-sensitive information, mentioning competing products, etc constitute "edit[ing] customer reviews"?

In fact, it looks like they're taking lengths to avoid editing customer reviews by simply rejecting the entire review. I feel sorry for the guy who couldn't post his comments on Newegg.com because he was breaking the rules, but if he'd actually read the review guidelines first he could've gotten it posted the first time.

Tangentally, the main problem with customer reviews is that they tend to be very emotional. The average person unleashes their frustration, disappointment, and anger into an electronic whirlwind that blows the issue way out of proportion. Just go to avsforum.com and read the user reviews of about any HDTV, and you'll see people nitpicking about things that most people wouldn't notice--much less care about.

For added comedy, read some of the user reviews for video games at gamefaqs.com.

I'm all for having reviews go through either a vetting process (as in the case of Newegg) or a self-policing model where users can report inappropriate reviews.

Nathan

Re:Slashdot spin at it again.

[r00ts]

The problem is they're not just rejecting reviews that are poorly written or don't follow specific guidelines, but they're endorsing products by rejecting reviews that they feel don't praise the product enough. It doesn't matter how constructive the review is; if the company wants the sell the product, they're going to reject the bad reviews. It's not "omg this product is teh suxor", it's "The product is completely buggy"

Freedom of Speech-Diluted.

[Anonymous Coward]

"All your talk of "free speech" and "censorship" is rather ridiculous."

It's more than just that. It dilutes those words. It's like using the word "evil" for situations that aren't.

Plus, I never heard a retailer, online, or off, promise me "freedom of speech".

Re:Freedom of Speech-Diluted.

[3CRanch]

I think you missed my point.

Lets try "freedom of commentary without moderation." Better?

Moreover, those sites request your opinion, with the hopes of honesty, but then only post those opinions that coincide with their sales bottom line. This is censoring.

Re:Freedom of Speech-Diluted.

[randyest]

With that change your post becomes:

So much for allowing freedom of commentary without moderation in advertising. Did anybody honestly expect anything other than this? I mean, of course they are going to moderate what gets published. Especially when it comes to a potential sale of their product. Mess with a company's bottom line and you'll certainly get censored.

It's still confused. There is no reasonable expectation for any company to provide you a platform or arena from which to criticize the product or services they sell.

I'll take it a step further: it is a good thing that this is the case. Why? Because if we all got used to trusting the reviews provided by the seller, we would naturally begin to lose some or all of the more independent and difficult-to-control-or-censor sources of reviews. Those sources are scarce enough as it is (i.e., consumerreports.org and, um, well, maybe others.)

After enough time of consumers putting (even warranted) trust in the amazon, newegg, or foocorp reviews, independents such as consumerreports.org that reply on user subscription fees to exist would go out of business.

Then you'd have no choice, whether or not the commercial sites continued to provide reviews (or selections of user-submitted reviews) that warrant your trust.

Why should a company allow criticism?

[pair-a-noyd]

If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable?

Should I even permit him to do the same thing in at the entrance door or even in the parking lot??
What about on the sidewalk across the street?
Where is the line drawn?

I think not. Go try that at Wal-Mart or just about any other physical store and see what happens to you.

Allowing people to criticize them on their ecommerce websites is really no different. I would do the same thing, delete the offending comments.

Now, OTOH, if someone wants to criticize them on their own website, no problem. That's more than acceptable. Go to google and type "walmart sucks" and you'll find more than enough sites to suit your needs.

Note: I deeply despise BIG business and BIG GLOBAL Corporations and the FAT PIGS at the top of the food chain that enslave the little people at the bottom. I hate them with a passion that you can't begin to fathom. If you want to criticize them, do so, by all means. But doing it on/in their property, that's never going to fly.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

No one is questioning their rights to edit or reject reviews. This story is simply how those online stores treat customer reviews. Since we are the customers, we would like to get an honest appraisal of what we are thinking about purchasing. If I find out that a store is not being honest in its review policy, then I may choose not to buy from that store.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[kebes]

If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable?

That's not a fair analogy. These websites are not required to post user reviews if they don't want to. The question is, once they've said that they are posting user reviews, are they allowed to edit and control that content? The brick-and-mortar analogy would be to say that you're going to have a "discussion night" about your store, and encourage everyone in town to show up. Then, anyone who speaks up with a negative opinion you tell to leave your store immediately, and when someone expresses a positive opinion, you let them stay. At the end of the night, only positive-opinioned people are left in your store. Was this fair? If someone walks in late, and hears only positive opinions, don't you think you've mislead that customer?

If the website only wants positive reviews, then they can have a section entitled "Here is a selection of comments from REAL USERS praising our products" and then list them. Many sites do this and it's fine. But when you claim that you're posting "user reviews" there's an implicit understanding that both the good and the bad are being let through. A company would do this to PROVE that their products/service are (more often than not) good. To filter the comments is basically false advertising (a type of fraud). The company can entirely remove the "user review" system if they don't like it, but to edit it is not moral and could even be illegal.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[pair-a-noyd]

The brick-and-mortar analogy would be to say that you're going to have a "discussion night" about your store, and encourage everyone in town to show up. Then, anyone who speaks up with a negative opinion you tell to leave your store immediately, and when someone expresses a positive opinion, you let them stay.

It works for Dubya...

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[Moo Moo Cow of Death]

You're forgetting something though. These people aren't waving a massive flag around saying "THIS STORE SUCKS" they're saying "this specific product on the shelf is not worth your time, try this one over here". It's the same store, just a single product in the store is being targetted though.

It's much like the same thing big biz does with radio, pay the radio stations big bucks to only play their songs (eerily similar to communist propoganda) and either totally filter out, or only allow mild critisism about those few they do play.

This I believe is one of the reasons why Howard Stern is so crazy popular, because he doesn't blindly follow his sponsers and tends to piss in quite a few people's cups. He states it like it is and allows boths sides of an object to be seen. If more stores/businesses took this into practice, then maybe they would actually learn what the users REALLY want and they wouldn't have to worry about stupid shit like hiring 8 editors to only approve the good little snippets for the companies that pay for their product to be "featured".

Do what you're there to do, sell a product and make money, but for baby Jesus' sake, don't sell out in the process. :)

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[youknowmewell]

If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable? Should I even permit him to do the same thing in at the entrance door or even in the parking lot??
What about on the sidewalk across the street?
Where is the line drawn?

That's a good question, where is the line drawn? Should I now not criticize a company because it may make them unhappy if I do so?

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[Apreche]

You're analogy is busted, as most are. Posting a negative review on newegg in the review section is like going into Best Buy and making a complaint at the customer service desk. When you put a negative rewview on an e-commerce site you aren't going into the store with a megaphone. You are posting a notice in a forum which the company made explicity for you to do so. As long as you are intelligent you realize that forum is moderated with bias and should be taken with heavy salt.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you realize that this comment makes no sense in the context of the discussion. Comming into a stored uninvited and critisizing is similar to say defacing their web site. However the review system at say amazon is more like a store inviting you into to a book discussion and then thowing you out if you say something negative. The review system at these sites is a forum they invited you into! Not one you entered against their policy. Do you see the difference here? Now if the policy in their review system restricts what you say to say only positive things then your point might have made some sense.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[hackstraw]

If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable?

Nah, just keep doing what pissed off that customer and watch that one customer turn into two, then three, etc.

Overall, I have found that the "customer is always right" go away and be replaced with "the dollar is always right".

I wish there was a more discriminating retailers in the electronics world that only sold quality products. Just imagine not having to return every other purchase, and having stuff just work. What a concept.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[symbolic]

What about on the sidewalk across the street?

Um, public property?

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[StrawberryFrog]

A company is within their rights to not allow criticism of the merchandise that they carry to be shown on their own premises. Even if it is annoying not to allow it (e.g. I go to Amazon intending to buy a book on C# programming, or a digital camera and I look through the reviews to see which one suits my needs best - reviews that are not just happy happy advertising praise drivel are a great help here) they are within their rights to conduct their business in any substandard or backward manner that they choose.

However this is different - the company is claiming to accept reviews, both positive and negative, and then editing out the negative ones to make it look like the only comments are positive. That is a deceptive practice, and it is unethical, if not illegal. If you as consumers stand for this, you'll deserve what you get as a result.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[PsiPsiStar]

If you don't want criticism, you shouldn't start a forum. If you want to edit your forum, it's not surprising if people call you on it.

There probably are some folks out there who don't know that the reviews are weeded. They deserve to know. That's what this discussion is documenting.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[daspriest]

"If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable?

Should I even permit him to do the same thing in at the entrance door or even in the parking lot?? What about on the sidewalk across the street? Where is the line drawn?"

The line would generally be drawn where the property line is drawn. Organized and peaceful demonstrations and protests on public property are legal, and tere is very little that the brick and mortar store can legally do about them. Just think of labor strikes as an example.

This is not to say that there are no permits needed for such peaceful and organized demonstrations though. Check with your local authorities.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[BaudKarma]

What if you're not sure that they're really a customer? What if you suspect that they're some random guy trying to stir up trouble? What if they work for your competitor across the street, and they're trying to create a stink to drive your potential customers away?

If an online vendor let every review stay up regardless of content, their site would soon be plastered with astrocrabgrass, all sorts of fake complaints about shoddy products, lousy service, billing problems, whatever. I think if I had a site, my police would be to delete any negative revirews about my company, but have customer service investigate them. Then fix the problem if the complaint is justified.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[legirons]

"If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable?"

If you've built up a business on the basis that customers can get recommendations from each other within your store, then yes!

If you don't like that idea, then you might be better suited with a website that didn't have any community aspect to it. But lots of e-commerce websites find it quite good for business to allow discussions, advice, and user-rating of products.

Re:Why should a company allow criticism?

[KillShill]

i love the smell of tax payer money in the morning.

Can't hide the negative feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is negative feedback about a product, anyone who can use Google is bound to find it somewhere. If all else fails, then use Google Groups to scavenge Usenet.

I always assumed there was some suppression of negative reviews. But think about it -- the most likely result of a negative review is to redirect the viewer's attention to a more expensive product. "The Spewtron 5500 lacks the advanced self-calibration features of the Megabox 6000. Sure, the Megabox costs 2x as much, but it's worth it."

Most retailers would be silly to kill the negative reviews, so long as the customer is not motivated to go somewhere else entirely. If the majority of reviews are claiming that your competitor's products are better, perhaps you should do something about it! In the long run, even the reviews that get killed will help forecast future sales and keep the crappy products from getting reordered by the retailer.

The best reviews

[MatD]

When I'm trying to find a review, I usually go to Amazon and read those reviews (I believe they were the first retail site to offer user submitted reviews). The trick though, is to check the lowest rated reviews first. If they have valid points about the product, then I pay attention. On the other hand, if the low reviews are written by some complete tools that are knocking it because because they are too stupid to read directions (or whatever), then I be fairly certain that the product isn't 'bad'.

Once a product isn't bad, it usually comes down to price for me.

Edit?

[donleyp]

I would like to point out that TFA doesn't say anything about editing reviews. It talks about reviews being rejected.

The policies described in the section about NewEgg seem reasonable to me, but as they have reevaluated their filtering process, it is probably a good sign.

I tend to put more stock in the reviews on sites like www.pricegrabber.com because they seem a lot more unbiased.

NewEgg is fine

[everphilski]

New Egg is great. I've ordered from them multiple times. Only once have I had a defective part (I purchased a refurbished motherboard) and they replaced it promptly, shipping me a replacement before they received the defective part back from me.

You should *NEVER* trust a review on a commerce site. That goes without saying. Always go to an independant source that doesn't have a bias. That's like going to a car dealership and asking the dealer their honest opinion on the car in the window. Stupid.

-everphilski-

Re:NewEgg is fine

[deadmantyping]

Although I have never ordered from Newegg I plan to shortly, and in my shop and compare phase I have found many helpful comments, with real world experience with the parts and some troubleshooting issues. I really wouldn't want to read reviews that say "don't buy this piece of $hit!!!" That's plainly trolling. However, I have seen many lower ratings on products but for the most part those reviews were intelligent and have specific gripes. So I say good for Newegg, keep weeding out the crap. I also agree that somebody should not purchase a product based solely on the customer reviews. I for one have done quite a bit of research on the products I plan to buy by sifting through well respected review sites. Customer reviews are helpful though.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[Particle010]

Actually, you should read the reviews. No not the manufacturer's review or the dealer's promo, but the customer reviews. More specifically, you should read the negative reviews. By doing so, I can sift through the idiots VS those who really do have a legitemate gripe. If after I read the gripes I have determined the product to have serious problems that I can't live with, then I choose something else.

Since Newegg weeds out negative reviews or those that list competing products, it'll only make life a little harder trying to do research on good products.

The customer reviews are what really made Newegg worth it for me. I'd hate to have this practice expand to a more serious precedent of elimination of valuable review material.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[IAmTheDave]

Agreed, NewEgg has always done right by me. I read the reviews but I usually go there with an understanding of the product I want beforehand.

You've gotta love this though:

changed the monitoring responsibilities to its marketing team

Because marketing isn't responsible for putting a positive face on a companies products or anything.

Never trust any opinion coming from an institution which stands to gain financially from one side of the opinion or the other.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[ppz003]

As some others have already stated, I use the review system at Newegg to look for specific problems with any piece of hardware. Hardware incompatabilities still exist, and it's nice to know if several people are having the same problem with similar hardware such as yourself.

Newegg has been a wonderful resource for me in terms of good prices (not always the best, but usually close), but in information on specific hardware problems that are not obviously going to be in the spec sheets.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[hackstraw]

You should *NEVER* trust a review on a commerce site. That goes without saying. Always go to an independant source that doesn't have a bias. That's like going to a car dealership and asking the dealer their honest opinion on the car in the window. Stupid.

Basically, NEVER trust someone selling something -- except with your money?!?!

I utterly despise sales people, or basically anybody that directly works for money. To me, my integrity is worth more than $10, $20, or even $1,000, but I guess that is why I'm not "rich" or whatever.

I will refrain from wishing that it should be allowable to permanently stop people from doing things like this, because its very unpopular here on slashdot.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[gradster79]

"You should *NEVER* trust a review on a commerce site. That goes without saying. Always go to an independant source that doesn't have a bias. That's like going to a car dealership and asking the dealer their honest opinion on the car in the window. Stupid."

What an awful comparison! They are called CUSTOMER reviews for a reason, these are customers not employees like a car dealer at a dealership.

Really, you've just got to be able to read in between the lines on the customer reviews. In some of the reviews I discovered different features or incompatibilities that you can't tell just from looking at the product information.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

I utterly despise sales people, or basically anybody that directly works for money.

Wow. That's a lot of people.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[honkycat]

Yeah -- New Egg has always been good when I have used them. The last time I was there, they were very clear about their review policy. The highly visible disclaimer basically said what people are saying here: "We are a commercial site selling products. We are not an independent review site. If you want independent review, look somewhere else." Even if their reviews are all more or less positive, they still often have useful information.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

When I read reviews on commerce sites, I ignore every 5-star review (assuming a scale of 1 to 5 stars). I read through all of the low to medium reviews, ignore the ones that are obviously written by idiots, and then look for a pattern of complaints. If 5 people complain about a certain aspect of a product, it's a pretty good bet that it's a real problem.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[laffer1]

Great idea, but how do you find a truely impartial site? Many hardware sites are biased to some vendor . Look at tom's hardware for example. That site used to be a great resource, but reviews are often slanted. Usually it starts out with product x is always superior but in some obscure case product y outperforms. (the obscure case is actually common)

The only solution is to search google for sites and newsgroups about products and read everything you can find. Eventually you'll have an idea what is wrong with a product and then you can make a decision.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[PsiPsiStar]

I utterly despise sales people, or basically anybody that directly works for money.

This is an interesting comment. Care to elaborate?

Perhaps it would be better to say that you despise the way things are typically sold? Or the sacrifice of integrity which is often involved in sales?

Everyone who gets money has to 'sell' themselves one way or another. Programmers sell themselves in an inverview or sometimes beforehand by proving that their skills are valid and worth the asking price.

There are some salesmen who are similar, nurturing a few large contracts rather than many small ones.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[hackstraw]

Perhaps it would be better to say that you despise the way things are typically sold?

Maybe better, but I guess I think its better to blame people vs methods. Its much safer to assume that 100% of the people are doing the despised method than not. Being that part of the method is pleasantness, deception, half-truths, and other fun stuff like cold calls, its simply just easier for me to view these people as people in sales that do sales because they can't do anything else.

Also, from a psychological standpoint, salesmen work on random reinforcement, which is the strongest reinforcement that there is. A salesman never knows when they will get rewarded with a sale, and they never know the exact amount of reinforcement from a sale (would you like to pay extra for an extended warrantee that safely covers your product during the lowpoint of the bathtub curve?)

Sure, there may be exceptions. I'm sure there are. But its annoying to go through a salesman to buy something that you already want to buy in the first place.

Even if there were honest and non-annoying salesmen, again, its much safer to assume the opposite, and its truer to reality.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[urikkiru]

I have to say that I'm actually disappointed in newegg. One of the things I really used to like was their customer reviews. I had always found them to be a broad spectrum of user reviews and experiences with the various products.

However, I just went to their site today, and read several different sections at random. I find an interesting discrepancy.. A product can, on the main search listing have a score of say... 2 out of five stars. If you go read all the reviews, none of them will be below 4 stars.(out of 5). Fun neh?

This is especially telling with a category of products like say.. hard drives, which *always* have at least a few people talking about how their new drive was toast on arrival, or after a few weeks. No such reviews can be found now.

Highly disapppointed. I plan to find a new vendor for my parts.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[ne0n]

try ncix.com, they are pretty honest and actively foster customer participation with incentives.. they give shitty customer service over the phone, but at least they're honest about their products.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's like going to a car dealership and asking the dealer their honest opinion on the car in the window."

Not if the dealer just gives you his own opinion and represents it as such. If the dealer tells you that everybody who's bought the car has loved it, then that's close. But online retailers display customer reviews, and represent them as their customers' opinions. If they remove all bad reviews and leave all good reviews, then that's dishonest. Customers shouldn't be expected to dig up and decipher some legalese disclaimer linked to at the bottom of the page.

Re:NewEgg is fine

[everphilski]

My philiosophy is to pay for the hardware, screw everything else. I don't care about reviews. I don't care about extended service contracts (except in rare contracts). Every sales person is out to make a buck, that's a fact of life, if you are so naive as to despise anyone who "works for money" you despise prettymuch everyone in the modern world.

-everphilski-

Re:NewEgg is fine

[drsquare]

That goes for amazon reviews as well. Over there, even terrible books get great reviews. Great books get poor scores, because only 3 people reviewed it and one gave it a 1, but then some shitty book by JK Rowling or Dan Brown will 5/5 because of hundreds of positive reviews by raving fanboys who haven't read anything else in their life, other than the instructions on the cornflakes box.

Before you buy a DVD, try and a find it on imdb, that's one of the only places which has a semi-accurate rating system. I think this is because it gives scores more weight when they're from people who review a lot of films, so it cuts down on fanboys somewhat, or people who've only seen 2-3 films and so think average ones are great.

buy.com

[OkanGuney]

I once wrote a bitter review about Microsoft's Mapping software at buy.com. It never got published. Don't get me wrong, there was no fault language or anything but I guess it would make the product look very bad. I re submitted the review several times and even wrote to buy.com about it. No reply... From there on I never trust a product review. After all why would a company post negative reviews and refrain themselves from selling the product and making profit?

In a similar vein

[ndansmith]

Sony recently was busted for promoting some of their films using reviews from fake film critics. So the pressure to present good reviews to the public is clearly not limited to Tech. It is funny how we as consumers can be so affected by the recommendations of people we have never met (and may not even exist-or worse, may be lying).

Re:In a similar vein

[cmdrTacyo]

I'm not suprised by that tactic at all because it's been going on for a long time. Food companies also use fake critics to 'review' their products. It's also funny how movie companies throw together a few reviews.

This film was.... amazing.. best.. movie.. of the.. year

Re:In a similar vein

[loraksus]

Not only busted, but there was a class action formed and a settlement has been proposed.
So.. If you got fucked out of $12 (or whatever a movie ticket is now), the courts have generously decided to award you a whopping $5 (plus an additional $5 per child if uhh... you took children with you)

The following movies are eligible Hollow Man, Vertical Limit, A Knight's Tale, The Animal or The Patriot.

Link to PDF of settlement form. Of course, the wonderful "we can't punish Sony too much, so if too many people sign up, we

More info on the case

Newegg: Lots of Problems & Been Censored

[Anonymous Coward]

I have purchased from newegg.com. Generally they are pretty good at what they do considering they are just a web front end to a JIT inventory system.

In general though, they have problems where they have shipped me the wrong item and wanted me to pay a 30% restocking fee for their mistake. On a $200 item that's a costly proposition.

I've had orders split and only received part of the order without even word of the other pieces.

I've had them quote one price and then charge a higher price.

I went to put a write up about my experience and found I'd been censored. I then took some time reading through various feedbacks and found that there is virtually NO content posted which states anything negative about newegg.com.

Customers can't get a good overview of their services and support, their pricing, and understand how others feel about those and others,such as their return policy when they censor like that. It's just morally wrong. Legally, that's another matter.

Newegg's edits understandable

[samdu]

Now, granted, I have no knowledge of the reviews that Newegg rejects, but they do post negative reviews. The only edits I've noticed have been removal of prices and mentions of competitors. I can understand them not wanting to have a review that says that web site X has this same item for Y amount less, but still finding value in the other content in the review.

To be fair

[rsilvergun]

a lot of bad reviews are result of nitwits who don't know how to install computer hardware but tried to anyway. I've got a local shop here that sells used computer hardware, and they'll often put stuff back on the shelf that comes back 'broken' because there's nothing wrong with the hardware, the customer just doesn't know what they're doing.

OT : Newegg customer support are rrrrubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that it's got anything to do with TFA, but I am wondering if anyone else has ever had any trouble getting hold of Newegg?

I bought a SODIMM off them months ago, which stopped working pretty much immediately, but they haven't replied to any of my (3) emails asking for a warranty replacement. One was to the complaints address, too.

Re:OT : Newegg customer support are rrrrubbish

[OmniVector]

Call them. They're very good with phone support.

Simple solution

[smchris]

Obviously they need a scoring system!

Would that be -- oh, shall we say -- "insightful"?

Too bad /. doesn't edit reviews.

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise Taco wouldn't forever be tagged as the guy who said, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

I used to Love Newegg

[bogie]

Just a side note, but I used to order thousands of dollars in PC related equipment from Newegg. For years and years I also used to tell everyone I know to shop there since they had such great prices. Now they stupidly charge tax in NJ. Bad Newegg, you let me down bigtime and now I shop elsewhere.

Re:I used to Love Newegg

[critter42b]

Um, if you'd have done just a smidgeon of research, you'd realize that Newegg didn't let you down - your state government let you down. Newegg didn't have a choice in charging tax in NJ. Their HQ's in NJ, NJ statutes REQUIRE mail-order/catalogue businesses with physical presences in NJ to collect sales tax on all purchases made by NJ residents. Same for Tennessee - Newegg has a distribution warehouse here in Memphis and is required by state law to collect TN sales tax for all sales to TN residents. So don't blame NewEgg - blame the politicians who passed the statute. But hey, don't let anything like the LAW get in the way of a good slam, eh?

Re:I used to Love Newegg

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they stupidly charge tax in NJ. Bad Newegg, you let me down bigtime and now I shop elsewhere.

sarcasm or just plain stupidity?
we may never know...

Bottom line...

[darrenf]

Find an independent consumer review site and read reviews written by actual consumers, who have actually owned and used the product in question for a reasonable period. Don't fall for the recycled marketing buzz "reviews" by some "professional" sites/reviewers, which seem to never be more than a cursory overview of available features, by someone who will never own or use the product. And don't bother with the OMG NEWEGG ROCKS I JUST GOT THIS CAMERA AND IT OWNZ!!! reviews by noobs who haven't even taken it out of the box. Find some people who've actually had it for a while.

Bad for advice, good for buying stuff

[Dachannien]

It doesn't matter what website you're talking about. "Customer" reviews can't be trusted at face value, because you can never tell when one's a shill.
(Wanna see an industry that has a 1:billions signal-to-noise ratio on reviews? Try finding legitimate reviews of web hosting services.)

In Newegg's case, they've always done a fine job when I've ordered from them, even though that free pen they sent me ran out of ink really quickly.

Re:Bad for advice, good for buying stuff

[vinohradska]

It is hard to expect a site selling products to host honest reviews & comments of those products. There are shills everywhere, you are right. And don't forget the possibility that people are writing negative reviews of competitors products. I doubt NewEgg is very different from any other site. DPReview seemed to be a very good when I was buying a digital camera a few years ago. But who knows...

Sites like consumerreports.org are more independent. But it would be nice to have an independent site with moderated user comments (ala slashdot) to help filter out the shills.

Beyond that, you have to just go with word of mouth. If your friend bought it and it was good then you might buy it too.

Word of mouth hasn't stopped UHaul from remaining in business though.

Re:Bad for advice, good for buying stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

I find Fatwallet.com has a great forum for discussion about current deals it finds.

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/"

Now, the problem is that its scope is limited. You usually can only find something that someone has posted about and can get discussion on.

Another issue is that the reviewers are only human, and can sometimes make mistakes, have biases, and generally be fanboys/girls about certain manufacturers..

But I guess if you go there, post a link to your item of interest, with a quote on price, you could find one or two people who might have had experience with what you're buying.

I perused it for my Fujiplus 19in LCD and the comments were mostly supportive. I was VERY hesitant to buy a 300 dollar LCD monitor on the web without seeing if it was working or in good condition.

Heck, I had to talk myself into thinking that 16ms vs 12ms was a huge difference. You know? It probably was.

Well, it being my first LCD, I had to know what could be wrong with it when I got it. People complained about colors not being right. I found that out, as well as how to fix it, before the thing even shipped.

  I just have to sit in a relaxed position to get the best contrast from the thing (its rather off if you move too much vertically, but quite good horizontally, not sure if that explains it well)

  Another worry, was dead pixels.. I got a single pixel, near the bottom corner, that only pops up as noticable once in a blue moon. Nothing I would complain about, though.

Re:Bad for advice, good for buying stuff

[vinohradska]

Not sure what you mean by "sit in a relaxed position" but if you need to slouch to see your monitor then you should throw a couple thick books under it.

Re:Bad for advice, good for buying stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

I naturally slouch, my monitor is higher up. The thing is, it gets awful dark when I slouch.

Solution: Don't slouch.

NewEgg 'screwed' my review.

[ChrisKnight]

I recently bought a new case from NewEgg. Typical aluminum miniATX case, nothing special. The case and power supply were fine, but the screws it shipped with kept binding up in threads, and one even broke off in the hard drive. I wrote a review praising the case, but suggesting that the user toss the screws and use ones out of their stash. And for this NewEgg rejected my review. It's a shame, I was positive for the case, and just wanted to warn users about the one pitfall it had.

I suppose it could have been worse, they editied the review of someone else who reviewed this same case.

-Chris

Re:NewEgg 'screwed' my review.

[fishbowl]

So return the product for a refund, with the reason being that you were not permitted to post your review. Enough returns like that and they will change their ways. If you kept the product, you're supporting their policy.

Newegg Reviews are a Joke

[iMightBeGiant]

Here's a review I submitted for a computer case a couple months ago:

"It arrived with one of the side panels bent, probably a manufacturer defect rather than shipping. I fixed it with a pair of pliers, but I shouldn't have had to. The pictures listed here are somewhat deceptive. It looks like there should be some color on the side strips on the front, but it's really just clear plastic. Other than these things, it's a sturdy case and weighs a ton. There are better ones out there for the same price."

It was rejected along with 2 other revisions even after I made them less negative. No specific reason was cited. They should have just said in the auto response that all negative reviews are automatically rejected. This pissed me off enough to take my business to zipzoomfly for a while.

I gave a review about an Information Society CD...

[artifex2004]

I said it was basically only something absolute completists would want, as it was a compilation of remixes with no new material, and anyone wanting to enjoy IS's work who's new to it should definitely buy other specific titles that Amazon carried, instead. They rejected the review saying I was being unfair to the artist. I appealed. Was ignored. I think that was the last time I tried to do a review.

I see reviews there all the time that talk about products in glowing terms, by people who are listed as top 1000 reviewers, and after they parrot ad copy they say things like "I would get this, but I already have this" or "I can't wait until this comes out so I can try it." That's far beyond simply stacking reviews, and I have to wonder what compensation the reviewers get for doing that. I do hear of the top reviewers getting free stuff sometimes...

Consumer Reports

[nobodyman]

I have a hard time finding fair, accurate reviews regardless of whether the reviews are written by staff or by consumers. There is a very real conflict of interest for sites that depend on manufactures for advertising dollars and testing samples. On the by-consumer side, you have to filter out shills and zealots (pick your favorite site and check out the consumer reviews of Quicken and Microsoft Money... it's like a holy war).

That said, I've been very happy with consumer reports. They only review items that they purchase themselves (i.e. no 'freebies' or higher-quality items specifically earmarked for product reviews). Furthermore, they accept no advertising and get all their revenue from subscriptions. These two factors take away much of the conflict of interest and/or bias issues that can plague other review sites.

Downsides? Cost (not necessarily expensive imho, but still a tough sell to people who expect everything online to be free). It's also doesnt work with early adopters because they wont review items before they available for purchase. Finally, though they've been getting a bit more 'hip' lately when it comes to technology I doubt your going to find an exhaustive video card shoot-out anytime soon.

What I'd really like to see is a site (or magazine) that can does a decent video game review. They seem to be either clearly biased, drip with ego and/or condescention, but usually they are just TOO LONG. Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??

Re:Consumer Reports

[arcmay]

They seem to be either clearly biased, drip with ego and/or condescention, but usually they are just TOO LONG. Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??

I buy games based mostly on reviews. If I'm going to lay down $50 for a new game, I want to know about the gameplay, basic plot, graphics, camera system, replayability, and everything else about it. If I go to a movie on a whim and it sucks, I'm out at most $10. A game costs 5 times that. So maybe the review should be 5 times as long.

Also, Consumer Reports rocks. You should have also mentioned that they are nonprofit.

Re:Consumer Reports

[WillAffleckUW]

note that Consumer Reports refused to even rate Saturn cars for years, because they were sold at a fixed price. even they have their biases.

Re:Consumer Reports

[poot_rootbeer]

Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??

Part of it has to be because Roger Ebert is a seasoned journalist, who has been writing by the mantra "less is more" for decades, while most video game reviewers* lack such credentials. Bad writers love to see lots of their words in print, and assume everyone else will too.

* with the possible exceptions of Wil Wheaton.

Re:Consumer Reports

[Anonymous Coward]

Consumer Reports is hardly without bias. Their staff is heavy on communist greens. They spend a great deal of money on lobbying the government to reduce the range of your choices in the marketplace. Odd, that... but, after all, they're the "experts". They imagine they know better than you, what you want.

Re:Consumer Reports

[Just Some Guy]

Although your post reads like flamebait, I think you're dead-on accurate. When I want to buy a home stereo, I don't care how much electricity it uses (which will be negligible when compared to the air conditioner anyway). I'm not interested in the behind-the-scenes details of toner recycling when I want to buy a printer. I couldn't care less which ice cream manufacturer has the best labor relations.

I trust their testing methodologies for the most part, but their subjective criteria diverged from my own until their opinions were no longer relevant to me. That's too bad, really; I wish their were a similar source that I could still trust.

Re:Consumer Reports

[Anonymous Coward]

When I want to buy a home stereo, I don't care how much electricity it uses (which will be negligible when compared to the air conditioner anyway). I'm not interested in the behind-the-scenes details of toner recycling when I want to buy a printer. I couldn't care less which ice cream manufacturer has the best labor relations.

Are you saying that this kind of information is included in product review articles? Unless you're confusing manufacturer ratings of stereo output power with how many watts they consume, I've don't recall ever seeing power consumption numbers in consumer electronics reviews. Maybe in a review of electric heaters..

There might be occasional articles about power suckage by all the electronics in your house in standby mode or with always-on transformers, but you can choose whether or not to read these. Same thing with articles about labor relations. I don't remember these being used as a criteria in review ratings.

their subjective criteria diverged from my own until their opinions were no longer relevant to me. That's too bad, really; I wish their were a similar source that I could still trust.

I find sources of objective data still useful even if I disagree with their opinions part of the time, whether I'm hearing from friends or reading a magazine.

Re:Consumer Reports

[Anonymous Coward]

"Finally, though they've been getting a bit more 'hip' lately when it comes to technology I doubt your going to find an exhaustive video card shoot-out anytime soon."

Because we all know video-card reviews are the epitome of Hip.

Karma whore

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect you just made that up, in order to get modded +5 interesting.

Can you really imagine a store doing that? If its true, name and shame!

It's hardware not a happy meal.

[databyss]

Maybe they're trying to cut down on redundancy and save a little bandwidth. Who knows.

When I buy from newegg (or hardware purchse), I usually have already researched my buy, but I always scan the reviews for the negative ones. Especially to find those little gotchas like you mentioned.

I'd hate to blindly buy something that won't work, only to go check the reviews and see 10 people saying that it wouldn't work with the same hardware that I have.

Re:Newegg: Lots of Problems & Been Censored

[tgrimley]

The thing is though, that's a complaint with Newegg itself. The purpose of the reviews are for comments about the actual product. Customer service may vary, but the product is what's important. I don't really care if it took you two weeks to get something and it was the wrong part, I care that the new harddrive I bought is loud and runs hot.

Correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, it's more or less completely made-up. Karma Whore, though? I posted it AC.

Re:Correct.

[databyss]

He never said you were smart...

allow the negative reviewer to re-edit

[faceword]

I used to work at an online retailer. The only product reviews that we would remove outright would be ones that used profanity.

On occasion, one of the product companies would see a bad review of their product on our website and complain to us.

We would then set up a conversation between the product company and the complaining customer. Often, the product company would immediately work to remedy the problems that the customer had with the product, and the customer would then give permission to withdraw the negative review. At the very least, the negative reviewer would post an addenda to the review mentioning how much trouble the product company went to in order to satisfy him/her.

That seemed to work fairly well. The bad reviews generally remained with bad products, and product companies that cared about the quality perception of their product had a second chance to fix any problems.

morons

[databyss]

Only an idiot would trust a salesman for a product review.

I love newegg and I buy alot of stuff from them, but I sure won't ask them what to buy.

There's nothing wrong with this

[IronChefMorimoto]

I have not one problem with this "constructive criticism" approach to review editing/rejection. I use Newegg.com all the time, and I follow their rules to ensure that my review gets posted. I think it's in both our best interests.

First, for them, in ensures that their vendors don't come by, see a shitty review for a product, and then get pissed and raise pricing and or pull their products. I'm not sure that CVS would carry, say, a cosmetic line if, for example, CVS had a very accessible website filled with bad reviews that ran the gamut of "this product sucks" to "this product cost me $1000 in dermatology bills." I can see Newegg or Overstock having to deal with that level/range of insane, angry reviews -- particularly if the store is for technology that can often suffer ESTO and ID10T errors.

Secondly, I think this approach is good for consumers visiting the stores and reading the reviews. Frankly -- I find a raging rant about a shitty book on Amazon.com rather useless. It represents the Ann Coulter or Ted Kennedy of reviews -- VERY SLANTED AND NOT NECESSARILY IN TOUCH WITH REALITY. I get more information and am more likely to buy or not buy a product based on very honest, calm reviews of a product -- good or bad.

Frankly -- people freaking out about these websites "editing" comments and "poisoning" the truth about good/bad products should step back and think about a "review." In the case of technology, I think people get more frustrated with technology if they have problems with it, and I think that infuriates them more. This gets carried over to a review, and that's why Newegg has to weed them out. It's not just a bad book that you don't have to read like on Amazon.com (and yes, I realize they sell technology too). It's a piece of hardware that might, in fact, be keeping you from friggin' getting work done. That translates to written rage that might be rather useless to a majority of users who KNOW how, for example, to install a hard drive or set up a barebones PC.

The point of a review is to inform, not vent, I think, in some of these websites. Does the PCI adapter work with Intel machines? If not, I'd like to know that. Does the AGP card have voltage issues without a decent power supply? I'd like to know that too. Venting just screams rant or newbie for technology, I think. And if you want to rant from the point of view of a genuinely irritated hardware expert, then you should be adult enough to do it in a calm manner.

My 2 cents.

IronChefMorimoto

good to get out there

[bad_outlook]

Never trust the so called "reviews" on places like Amazon. Look for a gernerally positive review, with one small critisism, and it's likely an ebedded ad. Someone associated with the company/product paid to "pump up" enthusiasm. Somewhat more believeable is the Music reviews, but as for any products, don't believe the hype.

Help & Info Tab on newegg

[databyss]

Very true, but do your outside research also.

If you click on the "Help & Info" tab at the top of newegg it'll take you to a page loaded with some partial and some impartial sites for reviewing products.

Anandtech has an awesome forum that'll help you figure out if something is good and if it's right for you.

Um... huh?

[Civil_Disobedient]

However, customer comments in regards to their experience with said products are the opinions of the user. [...] Therefore, the Newegg.com site is moderated to remove any unproven biased negative comments.

Lemme see if I got this right. If a review is positive, then it's taken as FACT, but if it's negative, it's BIASED OPINION. That's some happy horseshit there.

My experiences with their prices/shipping has always been fantastic, but this is a bit disconcerting. At least they're upfront about it, I guess.

Re:Um... huh?

[LurkerXXX]

Yeah, but where else can you buy a hard drive that cures cancer?

You're not the brightest bulb, either.

[Anonymous Coward]

My main account is karma-capped, so karma-whoring is pointless. This was just a mostly harmless mod-baiting exercise, I was wondering if they'd bite.

The last time someone tossed up an article like this, I saw a similar comment.

Re:You're not the brightest bulb, either.

[01101101 01100101]

The last time someone tossed up an article like this, I saw a similar comment. It was me!!!

So I submit a critical review to NewEgg...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. get censored, post a submit and get rejected..

While some joker from the Wall Street Journal does it and gets accepted?

Man, maybe I shoulda gone to journalism school instead of, you know, geeking out for all those years...

And just because a review is bad and detailed

[Sycraft-fu]

Doesn't mean it's valid. I was looking in to getting a particular synthesizer and found a review site with some information. The only review on there was a bad one, and a fairly lengthy one. However it was worthless. The reason was that the person clearly purchased this device thinking it was something else. They spent most of their time whining about the lack of features that were never supposed to be there in the first place (as in they weren't advertised, weren't in development, and weren't consitent with this kind of device).

Another problem can be the fact that people who are pissed off are more likely to speak up than those that are content or happy. When you get a product that does what you want, more often than not you are happy to just use it and don't feel the need to take the time to write about it. However when you get something that sucks, you want to go and bitch about it, and if possible, get back at the people who made it by hurting their sales.

When I was shopping for broad band ISPs I found that the review sites at the time (this was a few years ago) were more or less worthless because other tha positive reviews from people who were obviously employees of the companies, it was just people whining. This wasn't because the service was universally bad (I ended up finding and getting good service) but because only the people with bad experiences were taking the time to write reviews.

Re:And just because a review is bad and detailed

[Ingolfke]

I agree w/ you that the first review you mentioned wasn't of much value to you... but because it was long you could determine that that customer's low rating was not due to something that would affect you. Also, had I been confused about the product and read the review I may not have made the same mistake.

I would initially tend to agree with you about pissed off people... but my experience with Amazon's reviews and IMDB reviews have shown that this doesn't seem to be the case. I've seen more positive reviews on Amazon (maybe they're mucking with the... although I doubt it b/c that would be quite a scandal for them) and IMDB seemed pretty balanced. That's just my experience though. Sounds like your experience was different.

It sounds like you think reviews in general aren't much help... at least using the current tools and processes for collecting them.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

best product of the year #### *

[La Gris]

Not much different than :

Commercials saying this product was elected "best of the year ##### *1"
And at the very bottom and in very tiny typeface :
(*1) Elected by a consumer sample of 108 in a meeting organized by Dummy Marketing Corp Ltd

There are many exploits in low permitting many non-sens and intended beleafs. Just use proper wording.

If you want to publish positiv review only :
"Here are the nice review from our happy customers"
That is ok for the law and may sufficiently hide the fact you throw away negativ reviews.

No, they definitely filter the poor ones

[Rogerborg]

Example. I've sent 3 mediocre reviews for this product (with at least a month between them), all of which have been shitcanned. Note that some reviews say that it broke within an hour but have slipped through because they still (cleverly, in retrospect) give it a five star rating.

It's clearly deceptive, and I've lodged a complaint with trading standards, which I expect to be equally efficiently ignored, but it's a salient lesson that you should read the reviews, ignore the ratings, and look for any negative points that the censors let slip through.

Re:No, they definitely filter the poor ones

[Eric Giguere]

Interesting, indeed. My only experience with Amazon reviews has been with books, I don't shop on Amazon.com (actually, Amazon.ca) for anything else. It could be that there are different standards/review processes for different product categories. The same product on Amazon.com has several negative 1-star and 2-star reviews.

Also, there are many fewer reviews on Amazon.co.uk (and the other country-specific sites) in general than on the main Amazon.com site.

Eric

Move on, nothing to see here...

[mdecarle]

Move on, nothing to see here.

I have a webshop, and make websites for other people too. In all the software available for this work, if there's reviews programmed, they always can be approved before they are published.

Maybe at Amazon, you are able to submit bad reviews, on most other sites, your review will be read and must be approved before the public will be able to read it.

Buy.com

[E8086]

Buy.com may also be doing this.
Last week I left a less the positive review for an inexpensive ipod mini case. It had the potental to be good, silicon-rubber with screen cover and dust cover flap cut in the bottom for the dock/cable. Unfortunately the flap was cut off center and prevented the safe use with cable/dock/ac cord, it could be kept in place by brute force. It still says "Be the first to review this item" I wonder if they just rejected mine or there havn't been any positive reviews.

Anyone know of a good ipod mini case for under $10-15, silicon-rubber with screen cover and cut out for the comm port and the belt clip? I've looked but only ones with screen covers or belt clip cut outs, not both.

Bad Reviews, but crap reviews should be stopped.

[kinglink]

Anyone who has spent any time on the internet with anything that includes reviews must at some point or another see "Reviews" where no one checks them, and they expect people to review them themselves.

Some examples is for a large part Amazon.com, and Citysearch.com Both are fine sites, but I've seen reviews on the site that's complete crap.

Basically when people are allowed to do what ever they want as long as they appear intellegent they can say anything, and most of these sites don't have a way to compare most of their reviews so we can't tell if they are a wacko, a fanboy, or a friend or employee with invested interest in the product.

I'm glad when I read a review on City search for a new sushi restaurant, but not when the review is written by someone who obviously has no idea what a sushi restaurant should be. They can go to the trendiest crappiest place and call it great because they like that type of place.

On amazon.com and Imdb it's worse, your allowed to review dvds and movies before it comes out. It's a fine theory for people who get prerelease copies, but I've seen more then enough movie reviews of people who have only seen the commercials or like actor X, or actress Y's boobs.

Basically the point I bring up here is that there MUST be moderation, not by the public (well it would be fine if they mark stuff that need to be checked) but by editors who have set guidelines and will look at if the review is worthy of their site. The should be no specific guidelines, if someone writes a full review for 200 words just on the scenery in the movie (LOTR2 anyone?) it'd be ok, but there needs to be a limit for all reviews so sites don't get flooded by crap reviews.

At the same time there needs to be a way so that people are allowed to say what they want, so that if something is bad, it's allowed to be said bad things about poor products, but again we don't need people who just rant but actually show that there's some effort.

Evolution

[burtdub]

It's time to turn every one of these articles into a debate on creationism vs. evolution.

Gosh... it sure is a pity these guys are monkeying with the reviews.

FLAMEBAIT!

Reviews will ALWAYS be skewed

[WillAffleckUW]

If you love something, you probably want to post a review.

If you hate something, you definitely want to post a review - and use the most vitriolic language you possibly can.

If you're like the vast majority of people who thought it was ok but not that great or passable but not worth complaining about, you will very very rarely post a review, because you just don't care.

Thus, most opinions are never recorded, because people who are lukewarm won't even bother rating it in most instances, except in a comparison review, where their opinions frequently will be measured.

Random polling of customers would result in better measurements than reviews. Even being paid for a review - store credit, increased in reviewer ranking, whatever the spif is - will subtly distort reviews to become more positive than they should be - as marketers know.

But, hey, my first degree was focussed on sales and marketing, so what do I know ...

Edits are essential

[Anonymous Coward]

We run a site http://www.jobvent.com/, where people have been posting reviews about their employers. If we let reviews go unmoderated, we would see the site overwhelmed by comments such as "This company sucks", with no real information. Any site that allows people to comment on something needs to be moderated and maintained if it is to remain at all useful.

This doesn't mean, however, that we support the modification of reviews. The only editorial function we maintain at JobVent is to outright delete reviews that do not meet our criteria. We feel that other sites such as the aformentioned e-commerce sites should adopt the same policy: never edit, only delete.

SUE

[bluGill]

If true (and someone claiming to be you has said it isn't) you should sue. They can edit your words for grammar/spelling. They can edit it to make it shorter. However editing to make it mean something other than what you intended is illegal. Your lawyer will have a fun time deciding which laws to apply. (forgery, copyright, slander, and more could apply depending on how the courts in your area work)

Re:SUE

[jkauzlar]

I'm not so sure that's correct. On Amazon, they claim that once you submit a review the content belongs to them. I assume Newegg has the same sort of disclaimer. Does this mean they can change the content of the message as they'd like? I doubt it, but I don't know how far you can legally carry a disclaimer like that.

I'm sure they can legally get away with deciding which reviews to show, but I'd think they'd recognize that once customers found out it would kill their integrity and cause customers to worry about the company's ethics in other areas as well. How far will they go to make a buck?

Amazon, rather than deleting reviews (as far as I know) has a nice helpful/unhelpful voting mechanism that keeps reviewers in check. Maybe that would make a nice alternative to deleting reviews. Or they could just take consumers' opinions seriously and only sell highly regarded merchandise.

Re:SUE

[lpret]

You are correct. You have no legal control over the material once you have "given" it to them. This has been upheld in the California Supreme Court (good ol' California judges :-/ ).

My own examples were more arbitrary than that

[ianscot]

Any bestselling item will never have an average review of less than 4.0/5.0 stars.

There is a much higher standard for poor reviews than good ones; and even excellent reviews of a product may disappear if they are unfavorable.

I doubt Amazon is really able to pull off that sort of thing consciously, but we'd have to know more about how their process works to say for sure. From my limited experience -- okay, mod me an embarrassed loser, but over several years I've posted a bunch of Amazon reviews -- things seem much less calculated than that.

I've never had a review disappear entirely, and really most of the "editorial" changes to my reviews have seemed like arbitrary, almost nonsensical elisions made by rigid formula. Two easy examples I can think of:

• I compared the (godawfully calculating and soulless chick flick) movie "Love Actually" to a well-produced episode of "The Love Boat." The Amazon editors removed the name of the series, but left in the names of the characters - Julie, Doc, Gopher, and Captain Steubing.
• For one history book I said something about how people wanted "bastardized" history. They removed the bad word and stuck in a "..." for it. That's happened a few times, in places where my use of the language was not at all offensive.

So, okay, I can see a simple filter catching the bad words, but when did "The Love Boat" become a bad word? Did they think it was a copyright problem? Or what?

Most of my negative reviews are left as-is, but you know, I tend not to post "This SUX."

The overall effect might be to push products, in sort of the same sense that the overall effect of our court system can be racist. I don't think individual decisions within either system are rational enough to amount to a conspiracy, though. You'd have to look at how the process works to figure out why that happens.

Re:My own examples were more arbitrary than that

[greg1104]

From what I've seen, there's something driving what reviews get filtered out of Amazon that goes beyond any simple rules on their part.

I've been getting paid to write reviews of various sorts for a long time now, and I'm certainly not writing anything that would get filtered because of errors in its content, poor writing, foul language, or the like. Recently I got into reading about the stock market, and I wrote reviews for 10 different books that I had something to say about. These are a mix of the very best and the very worst of the books I read.

All but one of these reviews were untouched, including several 1 and 2 star ones where I panned the title as being basically useless or a waste of money (all books that, upon checking, I discovered don't sell well). But one of the reviews just dissapeared one day. It was a title called "Trend Following", by Michael Covel; Amazon ranks it #805 in books as I write this, which means it sells quite well indeed, and the average review gives it 4.5 stars. I said exactly what was wrong with the book. Shortly afterwards, review goes poof.

Now I'm curious. I wrote another review, with the same basic tone and an equally "+5 Insightful" commentary on why the book wasn't any good, but this time being especially careful to stick to the facts and not let my tone get negative beyond that. That one was also deleted.

The interesting part here is that there are many negative reviews listed for the book--all of which are basically useless themselves, because they either have an obvious ax to grind or they don't give enough information on the flaws of the book to really dissuade buyers. Although negative, they weren't convincing, so those are still there. After all, we wouldn't want all the reviews to be positive ones, right? That would look fake. (I'm laughing here because most of the reviews of "Trend Following" are incredibly obvious shills)

So someone here is noticing that my review is not just negative, it's genuinely likely to turn away a customer, so off it goes. Some number of reviews that are negative but not informative enough to convince are kept around just so it all looks fair. Who's driving this process? Amazon? The author? Someone who works for the publisher? I resubmitted my second version of the review again, and it was also whacked in short order, so whoever is doing it is at least consistant. But this much I am sure of: if I'm considering writing a negative review, I check the sales rank first and don't bother if it's high; just wasting my time otherwise.

At my place

[localman]

At Zappos.com we're pretty straight with reviews. We reject anything that is irrelevant or vulgar, but let through positive, negative, even weird reviews. Because of this they're one of the most popular features of the site.

Vaguely related: there's been a huge increase in review spamming for online casinos recently... they never get through, but that bot just keeps on trying.

Cheers.

My Newegg Review was Rejected

[Anonymous Coward]

Newegg rejected my review of a popular, expensive computer case that I felt was constructed poorly. I thought my comments were constructive, but they didn't. I asked how to change the review to get it accepted, and they didn't respond.

Interestingly enough, I couldn't find a single negative comment in the other reviews. The experience definitely tainted my view of Newegg even though I still use them.

C-Net Reviews

[Danger Stevens]

Lately I've been loving the way C-Net reviews items. They seem to be in contrast with retailers in the way they accept everything.

Whenever I want to review something I first go to the negative comments. Through those I can find out what the downsides of a certain product are. If none of those qualities will impair my ability to use/enjoy it then I consider it a good purchase.

Positive reviews only tell me that a large percantage of folks don't have problems with stuff they buy.

Newegg's Cult of Personality

[KhanReaper]

While I find this an interesting discussion for Slashdot, I asked a derivation of this question myself about a month ago on the Wikipedia entry for Newegg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Newegg>.

I posed the following question:

The connection of a cult of personality with Newegg may sound a bit odd at first, but I would like someone to comment about this. Repeatedly throughout Newegg's product reviews as well as testimony that I have heard from individuals, I encounter massive exultation of Newegg, almost to the point of disbelief and making me believe that such interest is manufacturered or adulterated. Are individual consumers really that satisfied with this firm, or does the firm just undersell expectations to its consumers? In any case, it appears that Newegg has certainly harvested a loyal customer base. Mattp3d 06:57, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Specific examples of this exultation may include having the ordered product arrive far earlier than expected or raving about lower prices.

What does the community think about this?

Re: Newegg's Cult of Personality

[nuknuk]

It's certainly interesting and a bit suspicious, considering their prices/shipping options aren't really better than many other online shops, like zipzoomfly etc. I mentioned this in a different thread already, but how useful is a review section if all it does is show positive reviews? Not everyone can possibly be happy with every product...hasn't someone experienced some lack of performance or slower 3dmark scores? Didn't someone's item show up broken? I don't know, it just seems weird.

Newegg doesn't allow anything bad to go up.

[abb3w]

Whats wrong with Newegg?

Newegg, per se, isn't bad. I can live with their returns policy , but do read it before you buy.

The problem is that they prevent posting of negative reviews. I've attempted several times to post about the IOGear GME322R Phaser trackball. It's not completely bad, but has a couple of weaknesses; to wit, a tendency to roll over depressing the top laser trigger and burning out batteries and/or laser quickly, and insufficient durability for carrying around — it needs to be treated gently and kept in one place. My department has purchased a total of five; after 18 months, two survive, although both have needed minor (soldering iron) internal repairs; I expect one more to fail permanently soon, and am looking for replacements.

Despite my recommending another Newegg-carried product for presentation control, and noted where the IOGear model would be suitable to use, they've refused the posting several times, with no details as to why beyond the standard notice.

Select, not Edit

[microbee]

It reads like they are just approving reviews selectively, instead of actually changing the content of the reviews. There is a vast difference! The title is misleading.

Newegg Edits

[nuknuk]

I had a person experience with this. It's probably a bit boring, but here goes.

I purchased about a year ago a LeadTek Geforce 6800 GT from Newegg.com After getting it and doing some benchmarks, i realized that somehow they had sent me some sort of wierd card...it was actually the equivalant of a 6800 GTS (it had memory running at a much lower clock speed than it should have been, and clearly didn't run at 'stock' GT speeds). I contacted newegg, they were very cool about it, and they refunded my money after I mailed it back to them.

I later wrote a review of the product along with the description of the problems that I had in the hopes that it could alert some people who may have been inadvertantly mis-sold a product like myself (Newegg had no idea how I had gotten this card) along with a actually glowing review of newegg for their customer service, but it was never added to the website. I tried a different version later, and it was also not added.

I can understand it to some extent, but I felt that in a way it's also just protecting their behind, and I felt like there should have been a way for me to warn other customers. After all, isn't that why we read reviews? Not just to look for the "5 STARS OMG IT RULES" reviews, but also the problems that people have? I know that's why I look at them. It is I think, a marginal business practice that I don't really agree with.

foxes vs henhouses

[sfjoe]

In January, the Salt Lake City-based company changed the monitoring responsibilities to its marketing team.

Whew - now I feel much better. We all know what paragons of truthfulness the marketing people are.

Their choice

[Sierpinski]

In my opinion this is no different than the real-estate or weight-loss infomercials, where they show the folks who really made a big difference. At the bottom of the screen is the normal "Non typical results, results may vary" or whatever. While this DOES let the user know that these aren't typical results, they still give "hope" to the users, to aid the their decision to buy the item or service.

On the flip side, have you ever seen an infomercial where the consumer gave the product a bad review? Of course not, because even if the person did give a bad review to the person doing the survey, the company would just choose not to display that one.

One thing that would not be acceptable to me was if they actually altered the responses themselves. If they keep them original and whole, but choose to either display it or not, thats perfectly fine in my opinion. Changing wording around or otherwise editing text that someone has written, without their permission, shouldn't be tolerated.

The "comps" come from outside Amazon

[ianscot]

and I have to wonder what compensation the reviewers get for doing that. I do hear of the top reviewers getting free stuff sometimes...

The few times I've gotten freebies, they've been directly from a manufacturer, not from the site. (No -- wait, now I think of it, I think Amazon might have sent me a complementary DVD. It wasn't really something I'd have liked much, either. I figured they were sitting in a too-tall pile in the warehouse.)

What'll happen is, when Penguin has a new book about X, they look for people who've submitted reviews on that subject. They don't seem to limit their choices to the shills, either. A couple of the free advance books I've gotten have been the result of a scathing review I submitted in that general area. (Dog breed books and "Intelligent Design," if you're curious.)

To my mind the whole deal's very much like with professional reviewers in the local paper. I've lived a few different places, and aside from Consumer Reports (which has its own issues, but which is at least truly independent) the car reviewers have always been shills everywhere. Book reviewers less so.

Re:I gave a review about an Information Society CD

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats why I created Between the Pages Book Reviews. At this point I get so few reviews that aren't written by myself or friends/family that it's easy to filter and cross check fake and shill reviews. The book review industry, like any review, is in a pretty sorry state IMO. Internet sites like amazon just make it worse. I had a lady whom I wrote an honest and positive review for her book, register several fake accounts and submit several perfect 10 shill reviews to my site. Since it is so easy to produce content online it seems that nearly anyone can be sucked into astroturfing, the temptation is too great. If anyone wants to help or get involved, check it out.

Eddie Murphy says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, wasn't me.

their own biases

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget the suzuki samurai fraud

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SJ413

Slashdot is the best ever!!! 11 stars!!!!

[aapold]

Go with this zonk guy and you won't regret it. All the /. articles are wonderful, highly recommended!!!

Re:Slashdot is the best ever!!! 11 stars!!!!

[boy_afraid]

Trying to be a brown-noser will not get you mod points. Good try, though.

Newegg

[custompccases]

I have yet to get a review posted on newegg. I have come across multiple items that have a Known issue (and have had the issue for at least a year) that I would have wanted to know myself before buying. It's not like I say it sucks or no one should buy it. I simply give the pros and cons, I went so far as to give twice as many pros than cons, so there is no pro/con ratio drop limit apparently. You would think that a person could be able to post useful information besides "Newegg rocks buy this product!!!1" yet they can't. I see useless gag reviews on newegg all the time, nothing more than "This will go great with my shoes, newegg rocks buy this product" and newegg lets that through.

This seems pretty common

[NitsujTPU]

This seems pretty common. A couple times at an old job I held, I had a boss who would "soften the language" that I used in documents that I wrote.

Honestly, my language was pretty straightforward and professional.

Taking the time to read through his edits, softening the language generally meant taking what I said, and changing it to what he wanted it to say.

This could be as blatant as:
"I recommend using product X, it's cheaper and the staff at that company are easily accessible." to
"I recomnned using product Y, it's more expensive, but we don't have to worry about hearing from anybody at their company ever again after purchasing it."

HI BONCH!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!

sigh

[aapold]

sigh, it was an attempt to make it seem like the "customer reviews" of this story had been "edited".

Some sites are worse

[rogerzilla]

There's one site I've seen where all comments are "moderated". This means that people *you've never even met* can mark your comment down so that other visitors to the site may not get to see it. Now, if that's not insidious, I don't know what is. In fact, I might make a Slashdot story submission about it. Oh, wait...