au contraire: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQ5TDLC
> Sample provided for review.
> Got this at no cost for unbiased review.
> *I received a sample product from Ivation.
Reviews are much more scattered if you filter by "Verified purchase only". It's interesting that this drops the number of reviews from 165 to 104 for a product which is designed for and presumably sold only on Amazon.
I'm not necessarily suggesting these reviews are shady, but given the other aspects of Amazon that this company tracks, it would seem reasonable to suggest they've figured out a way to track influential reviewers likely to give them a positive review.
EDIT: downvoters, care to explain what's wrong with this comment?
IMO I don't think religion, even if its "super-duper" is really on topic in a discussion about the quality and ethics of Amazon reviews. I hope this doesn't come off as critical, I'm just trying to explain where your donvoters may be coming from.
Occasionally, there will be a shining star. Recently I ordered an AIO printer and a reviewer had a fairly comprehensive reviews on multiple models, almost at a short article length.
Music seems to be one category where I sometimes find value in the reviews. It seems like people are more forthcoming about their music tastes, even though subjective, than what they think about utilitarian products.
I'm finding I have to work harder to parse meaning out of Amazon reviews than I did a few years ago. I don't see how this benefits Amazon, but I also don't see them doing much to fix it.
They are mostly bogus these days.
Unless you can find 3 star reviews, I usually read those.
You can also report the review and tell Amazon that you think the review is bogus.
Do you have any data to back up the claim that most of the recent reviews are bogus?
That's a bogus review, it's paid. You might argue free product is not payment but the IRS would then like to have a word with you (ask the people who got "free" cars from Oprah).
Amazon also gives free products for review (Amazon Vine) but these are made very clear with a banner above the review, and will remain part of the program so long as they continue to receive a high number of 'helpful' votes on their reviews.
Yes, after buying numerous products with great ratings and discovering that the people who rated the product negatively were often right about their complains.
From what I have seen people don't put to much effort to praise products, however they take the time to complain when they feel unsatisfied or burnt by a product.
I'm not trying to convince you or anyone but this methods has worked rather well for me.
Most people don't put any effort into writing a positive review for a product that does what its suppose todo or exceeds expectations.
I than take all the negative reviews and see the common reason for the product failure than determine if that is a concern for me ,before buying.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/18/technology/amazon-lawsuit-fa...
I would be interested to build a tool which tries to analyze the reviews e.g. using Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Machine Learning techniques to get the "real" picture for a given product. NLP could help to identify the most criticized aspects for a given product so a potential buyer does not have to go through any single review.
I am not an expert in NLP/ML though. Any ideas how this could be done?