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Why You Shouldn't Trust Internet Comments
sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that all the reviews you read on Yelp and Amazon are easily manipulated. It's not that companies are stacking the deck, necessarily, it's that a few positive comments early on can influence future commenters. In fact, when researchers gamed the system on a real news aggregation site, the items received fake positive votes from the researchers were 32% more likely to receive more positive votes compared with a control (abstract). And those comments were no more likely than the control to be down-voted by the next viewer to see them. By the end of the study, positively manipulated comments got an overall boost of about 25%. However, the same did not hold true for negative manipulation. The ratings of comments that got a fake down vote were usually negated by an up vote by the next user to see them."
This comment is IMMENSELY trustworthy!
Nothing new here, move on...
What an excellent report. I read this to my Son and he loved it, would recommend to anyone and definitely read again. 5*
I've been here for over a decade and I STILL have yet to see Natalie Portman naked and petrified, despite all the hype.
Also, I miss OOG The Caveman.
is the best slashdot thread we've seen all week! I love it!
This is by far the most insightful treatment I've ever read on this important issue. Everyone who does business on the Internet must read this valuable study.
What's interesting about the study is:
1) The manipulation was a single positive or negative vote applied at random immediately when the article went live.
2) People would tend to correct false negatives, but amplify false positives.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I trust the article that there may be subtle changes in future comments due to past comments. However, there is still a very valid difference between a 5-star item with 2,000 comments and a 1-star item with three or four comments, and that is good enough for me.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
My hypothesis:
1) Products with positive comments are more likely to be purchased.
2) People identify themselves by their choices, and no one wants to make a bad choice. Ergo, almost by definition, any choice people make is "the right one". At the very least, people are predisposed to liking what they spent money on.
Remember; When discussing all things retail, it's not how good the product is, but how well it satisfied the need. At least half the time, that need is largely imaginary.
Sure, I could RTFA, but this is more fun.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm always glad to hear about research like this myself, but this has severe ethics problems. You don't con people to show how easy it is to con the people. I know that rationalization is popular with some segment of you "hackers" out there, but whenever social scientists do this, they end up getting hasled about it.
I'd say it's far more complicated then that.
If you have a bad experience and go to the product review and the other reviews are bad, you are apt to write a review confirming what you are reading.
On the other hand if you have a bad experience and all the other product reviews are good you may have a moment of self doubt (did I mess up with the product) which makes you less willing to post a negative review.
When I check reviews, one of the first things I do is check the negative reviews. Why? Because half the one-stars are often jackasses with no clue what product and/or service they were buying. Other times, knowledgable and otherwise reasonable people have found the service or product being rated to be inadequate in some significant way.
And then I look for high ratings to see if they are reviewing the product in a reasonable manner. From there, I make my own decisions regarding the validity of both sides.
Anyone who decides just based on the stars/review-based numbers is a fool.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
My wife has posted negative reviews on a certain vendor's website (from real product experience, not trolling) when a product she bought was unsatisfactory.
This elicited an immediate email from customer service offering various deals to bribe/entice her to change or withdraw the review. Companies are free to do what they wish on their website but that still struck me as disingenuous.
I hate to say this, but I find I am more likely to take the time to write a bad review than a good one. (Anger is a great motivator.) I assume others are like this as well so I read the negative reviews in that light.
Also, any review in all caps, good or bad, I automatically discard.
But how much less likely are you to down-mod a score-5 tweet than a score-1? And how much more likely are you to read-and-upvote a red firehose submission than an indigo?
Your hosts file comments are not trustworthy.
There is no value in positive comments.
If you're considering to buy something, you want to know where it fails, not where it succeeds.
Moreover I personally would never leave a positive comment. If it works as advertised, life can go on as normal. If it doesn't, then I leave a comment.
To use an example from /., it's not at all uncommon to see a comment go completely unnoticed from moderators for an hour, and then get a +1 from somebody, and within 30 minutes have gone from Score:1 or Score:2 to Score:5.
Bandwagon effects are quite well-known. After all, all your friends are paying attention to them! It seems to be a useful psychological reaction: If all your friends and family are jumping off the bridge, chances are you will too on the theory that they probably have a good reason to do so.
I am officially gone from
I hate to say this, but I find I am more likely to take the time to write a bad review than a good one. (Anger is a great motivator.) I assume others are like this as well so I read the negative reviews in that light.
Also, any review in all caps, good or bad, I automatically discard.
That's been my experience, too. Anger motivates you to want to do something, so people lash out on the comment board. People who are satisfied, by definition, aren't really motivated to take any additional steps.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I've certainly noticed that when I am one of the first to post on a Slashdot story, it tends to set the tone for many comments to follow. This was perhaps most noticeable when I pointed out all the BS in a certain anti-patent propaganda story. Commenters did some critical thinking and mostly agreed the story was a load of BS. It's apparent from other similar stories that without someone setting the tone, Slashdot readers generally revel in anti-patent propaganda, expanding it beyond the already BS claims in TFA of the day.
Everytime I look to buy something I am not not an expert on or are on the fence about quality, I look up reviews and sort by rating. And I look at negative ratings first because a vendor or retailer won't pad a product with negative reviews. And even though there will always be negative reviews from people who dont have a clue or give little to no info, there are som rea gems out there that give you a clear picture of what you are getting into.
Obligatory anecdotes:
When looking on newegg I sort by lowest score first and read the reviews. You always have some dummies who obviously have no idea what they are doing and rate 1 star because of a mistake they made. But you also run across some genuinely informative negative reviews which are more influential to me than positive reviews. For example, I was looking to buy a uATX board from ECS that had the AMD bobcat CPU onboard. It was perfect, had extra PCI shots for SATA cards for a low power Linux server box. It turns out in a few of the negative reviews there was an IRQ bug that severely impacted performance. I was close to buying it but then scratched it off my list.
Recently I was also looking to purchase a generator from a coworker who bought it after hurricane sandy but never used it, the box is unopened. The brand name was Generac and I have owned two other Generac products, a power washer and a 4kw generator. Both of those machines went south after little use, the generators exhaust valve stuck open when the valve seal went bad and allowed oil to seep down the valve and seize it (I fixed that but it never ran quite right, stalled and was a bitch to start). The power washer engine needed its carb rebuilt and then the water pump blew a shaft seal. But that was 6+ years ago and I figured Generac got their shit together by now. After reading negative reviews on Amazon I came to understand that Generac will try to weasel out of warranty repairs and "authorized" repair shops frequently change as they get shafted after Generac refuses to reimburse them for warranty repairs already performed. There were also negative reviews that warned of blown stator coils after a few hours use and lemons that wouldn't start out of the box. Since the generator could not be returned to the original vendor I took a pass even though I would get a sweet deal ($200 off retail as he wanted to dump it). Maybe it would have worked fine but I didn't want to risk losing 800 bucks and damage my business reputation.