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Comment by anc84 | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Amazon reviews were useful and not a mixture of a) angry rants, b) bought reviews and c) jokes.

I have a system, where I read the most negative reviews of the book. If the reviews are eloquent and make a solid point, I don't buy the book.

If the negative reviews are mostly whiny,emotional rants without any valid solid arguments, then the book is most definitely worth it. A case in point:

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...

(Off-topic) The top rated review of this book is from Peter Norvig. He states "For most books, the review is a bell-shaped curve of star ratings". However, as a habitual window-shopper of books in Amazon, I have rarely come across rating distributions which look like normal. In my experience, 2 and 3 ratings are much less common than 5, 4 or 1.

I have a blog post I've never quite finished writing, walking through some analysis of the 34,686,770 Amazon reviews in the Stanford SNAP dataset (https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html, but there's a newer and better one at http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/).

Somewhat surprisingly, the median review score is 5, and if you look at median scores for products, the skew is very much left. So, the data pretty much backs up your observation!

Thank you for the links. And very timely - was looking for datasets to run some analytical and visualization experiments.

I'll second that method. Positive reviews are uninteresting; 1-star reviews reveal whether there really is a problem/deficiency, as usually the complaint is unrelated ("product arrived damaged"), misguided (expectations were bafflingly far from what product is, "this washcloth is a lousy database manager"), or a fluke (50,000 5-star reviews and one "one page was folded, replacement was fast & free").

Works for Yelp reviews too, after disabling "Yelp Sort".

I directly read 2 star reviews. 1 star reviews are often super biased and pissed. Much like in yelp, it contains things like "The shoes didnt fit" , "The delivery guy was mean" and stuff like that.

> I have a system, where I read the most negative reviews of the book. If the reviews are eloquent and make a solid point, I don't buy the book.

This works surprisingly well for any product on Amazon.

Yours sounds a great approach. I've tried many, and I always look at negative reviews, however I should weigh them more.

Huh didn't realize others do the same thing. I thought up this same method 7-8 years ago and I don't think it has ever steered me wrong. I may not always appreciate the book, but I can tell it is simply something that doesn't work FOR ME, which is always hard to gauge before you actually read something.

It started off as a cautionary thing for me, when I had to buy (optional) text books and didn't want to blow my money on something bad, so I started paying way more attention to the negative reviews.

I do that, but as a source of entertainment. The one star reviews for works (books, comics, movies) that I think are masterpieces generally come from a perspective that I have difficulty wrapping my head around.

Personally, I find the Amazon rating and review system very helpful and use it frequently. I only encounter Joke comments on things like 23 million dollar books or 10 thousand dollar A/V cables. I appreciate how verbose Amazon allows you to be in your comments as well as the ability to include images. I find rooting through the junk (jokes, paid comments, that guy who just received the product in the mail and either hasn't even used it or just begun using it and shouldn't really be commenting yet) is fairly easy too.

It's the next level of captcha. People will understand the joke, future bots won't.

All of those things are useful in the right context.

Sure, but I would say a review on a market site is not the right context.

I think he/she's saying that you can still glean information from jokes/rants etc.

I really wish Amazon reviews are restricted to those who actually purchased the product - Amazon does add verified purchase tag, but why allow me to review an item if I haven't purchased it? I can understand if they were a small e-commerce platform but at their scale, restricting the number of reviews would be beneficial. It is better to have 10 good reviews than 100 reviews with jokes and rants etc.

Another thing that is really annoying is people buying wrong product and leaving angry reviews. Whose mistake is it if I buy a product thinking it is water proof, when the description of the product says in bold letters that it isn't waterproof? I feel sorry for the sellers who get idiotic/unfair reviews and they can do nothing about it

You might have bought the item with a different account, in real life or someone else might have bought it for you.

sure that happens - on Amazon's scale, does it matter? As a consumer, I like a few honest reviews vs thousands of reviews that contain useless/dumb/rant type reviews. I'd have to weed through those reviews to find honest ones which takes time and energy, and ultimately I'd just give up - which defeats the purpose of reviews in the first place.

But if you still want to address this problem, just allow the buyer to say it is for someone else and allow them to put the recipient's email. If I buy something for you, I put your email, and Amazon could allow you to review the item instead of me reviewing it.

Once you take a turn off the mainstream there are thousands of products on Amazon without any reviews. People therefore appreciate any information whether it was bought from Amazon or outwith.

Slashdot-style moderation works well for this IMO: give ratings for usefulness, humour, etc., use meta-moderation to moderate the moderators (maintain a moderation profile so that you can reverse moderations from poor actors).

Steam does something similar in having the humour moderation so that things don't get moderated as useful just because they're funny.

I wish the non-obvious joke ones could be trusted. Some product categories are effected higher than others but in a few cases I've seen something like ~80% positive reviews are fake.

Youtube comments have the same atmosphere. Comments on these sites should have hidden "like/dislike" counters akin to Hacker News.

Trouble is, without strict moderation the stuff that floats to the top will be the memes / jokes / lowest common denominator echo chamber opinions, not to mention the people trying to game the system. Look at most of the default subreddits, for example.

Have you looked at the most of the top Amazon comments? They aren't as bad as you'd predict, at least for the books I'm interested in.

YouTube comments are uniformly garbage though.

Not sure whether you comment above is directed at Youtube only, but Amazon does have "Was this review helpful to you?". I believe voting on Yes makes it more prominent. As usual, this kind of system is subject to fan-boy treatment. I once left a 1 star review of a game which I genuinely disliked and gave my reasons (involved tinkering around graphics settings in XML files); there were a lot of clicks on the "No" button to the above question, presumably because the fan-boys could not tolerate someone criticizing their favourite game.

Do you object to satire too? In the right context?

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