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A system that has worked for me is:

1. Foremost Does the product meet my need?

2. I ONLY take the negative reviews seriously and look for commonality between them. If I can live with those issues than I purchase the product.

3. I'm also cautious of products where users appear a bit over zealous to correct bad reviews.

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Loads of products have fake bad reviews now, left by competition. The next logical step is fake corrections, and fake silly reviews on own product. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future every product has a 4.75 star average, and the shills instead of bad reviews start writing fake-sounding good ones.

This is close to my strategy, but I mostly read reviews of 2-stars, 3-stars, 4-stars. I sort by usefulness, and read about 10 of each star-rating by usefulness, then recency. I've been thinking about packaging that 'workflow' into a browser extension, but I'm not sure how often Amazon changes the structure of their review content.

> I'm not sure how often Amazon changes the structure of their review content.

All the time, I think they do a decent amount of A/B testing on product pages (which would make sense). I looked into scraping reviews and doing some analysis for this exact reason.

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