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Comment by jevgeni | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

(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 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.

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.

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

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