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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

The best way to make a difference against this nastyness realistically available to us is probably the "one star review".

And when you do, resist writing 10 paragraphs about all the times HP has ever wronged you or a long story about how much you needed the printout when it refused to print.

One star, one sentence. "Expires full inks after only x months forcing you to buy new ones when you don't need them."

I know for certain these short, sweet reviews change the buying behavior of my non-techie family.

Make a difference. Write a product review today.

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Normally, I loathe one-star amazon and yelp reviews. They are almost always knee-jerk reactions to some function not working perfectly, or, more often, the consumer felt disrespected and didn't receive the proper service, even though the product or food is flawless.

However, there's an exception to everything. Just this week, my printer crapped out a week after inserting 3rd party ink cartridges. I just thought that printers have a planned obsolesce period of around 2 years. It's one thing to make a device so cheap that it's only capable of lasting 2 years. Intentionally sabotaging your own products just to extract a little more coin is beyond a slap in the face, it's consumer rape. Sony did something similar with their about face on installing Linux. Although I don't agree with what they did, they could at least explain it away as trying to prevent piracy.

I am never, ever, ever buying another product by HP again, never signing up for any of their cloud services and I will tell clients, friends, colleagues, and anyone else in shouting distance to do the same. Luckily, the TinyScanner app (my fave document scanning app, sorry Office Lens) and my phone are more than enough to replace my scanner/fax/copier/printer and I hope I never have to buy one again. For some reason though, faxes are still being used in high numbers in Japan.

Most one-star reviews I see are for anything _but_ the product: "delivery was late", "box was damaged", "came with wrong power cord".

Amazon et al should really make it possible for people to disaggregate their opinions on this kind of think. Lots of delivery companies are terrible but there's no ability to leave feedback ("driver threw parcel over fence") etc.

Tech support is also uniformly awful, and someone always winds up getting shipped a lemon and complains about bad tech support. Unless there's some kind of fundamental design flaw that led to the product failing, or truly common issue that is likely to affect me, I don't actually care. Someone always tries to install a brand new router and finds it won't even power on, then they call tech support and have a horrible time talking to someone in India who can't go off-script.

"Luckily", Amazon fixed the glitch by having the "star rating" consist of an "intelligent" summary of the reviews instead of the average, which means that there are products with 3.5+ stars despite having 50%+ 1-star reviews and very few 5-stars.

The top review they show is also a paid ("free product") review praising it with a lot of text, nicely pushing all the 1-star ones out of view.

It was a HP printer, too.

Excellent advice, but just one problem. For most sites, you had to have bought the product to submit a review, or to submit a credible review ("verified purchaser"). I personally stopped buying anything from HP years ago.

So HN readers and techies in general are in the ironic position of having better judgment about the products but less able to influence the manufacturers.

It's like hoping to see informed advice from doctors posting on a homeopathic website. The doctors are not buying homeopathic potions.

Even if it's not a verified-purchase , it's still counts in Amazon's count of percentage of 1 star reviews.

On principle I hate the idea of encouraging people to submit reviews for products that they haven't purchased. It's a crime worse than time-bombing generic printer cartridges and makes online reviews basically worthless.

I don't give a shit about your moral stand against HP. Give me an honest review of a product you own or don't say anything.

You think sharing honest information to help people is worse than lying for profit?

Because the internet justice mob has never been mistaken? Because vigilantes never get a just a little carried away, and firebomb completely unrelated products with one star reviews?

The one star rating is not an honest attempt to review the product--it's just pushing an agenda. For the vast majority of people the third-party cartridge issue is a footnote, not something meriting a one-star review.

It (the review) only concerns actual product features. No political slant, no revenge, etc. It's 100% a product review and nothing else.

Imagine test-driving two cars. On the first, a wheel falls off as you round a corner. Obviously you aren't going to buy it, but then by your logic - not having bought it - you aren't allowed to comment on it.

Also, do you really believe that someone is going to be okay with a product they buy refusing to function, just because it's a tech device? Replacing consumables, even if the consumable is high-tech, is something that even non-techies can understand. As proof, I couldn't fabricate my own tires but would be annoyed if my car wouldn't run with 3rd-party tires, despite not being a mechanic. It's rude and sociopathic, to assume others are too stupid to come to the same conclusions.

>For the vast majority of people the third-party cartridge issue is a footnote, not something meriting a one-star review.

Then those people can always NOT write an one-star review. As for the others, there's nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, if you think it's an important fault of the product.

I absolutely agree.

But nearly half of Amazon reviews these days are paid advertisements by the seller in my experience.

And while I think you should never write a review for a product you've never used, if you've:

1. Supported or used one at work

2. Had to make purchasing decisions at work, done research, and chosen a competing product

3. Helped a friend or family member with one

Then go right ahead.

I would agree that there's absolutely a difference between a review for a product you've used or helped support and a review written because somebody on HN told you to write it.

It really does feel like at least half. I went to buy an iPhone 7 case and they all had 50+ 4.5 star reviews... before the iPhone 7 had shipped. I filtered one case with 40+ reviews to "Verified Purchases" only, and only a single review was left.

In some cases it feels like 90%.

Disagree. You don't have to own a product to write an honest review of it. You don't need to have a Galaxy that caught fire to warn others of what's happening. I'm going to leave a 1-star review because my review is an accurate description of the product even though I haven't owned it.

The real problem is people who review products on unrelated issues, like the political positions of the CEO.

The end result of this isn't reviews that serve as helpful warnings to consumers, but rather reviews that nobody takes seriously at all because they aren't a reliable record of user experience.

It's easy to quibble with this in cases like the Samsung batteries. But exploding batteries aren't the common case: much dumber things are.

My review _is_ a reliable record of user experience. If the reader buys the printer he is likely to face the same issue that I'm describing. To not warn them of the issue with the product seems way more unethical to me in my moral framework than the moral stance of keeping the reviews sacred.

Heck, if I and others didn't do this and the printer was still at 4stars because the uninformed majority don't understand the technical aspect of this planned obsolescence, other uninformed readers may not feel the need to read the reviews at all (the average is 4! It probably has no issues! HP is a household name, I'll be using this for years!)

This mentality seems to me to have produced reviews --- on Yelp, on Grubhub, and christ have mercy on the Apple App Store --- that are basically worthless. You can painstakingly read all the reviews and try to glean useful tidbits, but you cannot look at the overall review scores and use them to make reliable decisions.

> you cannot look at the overall review scores and use them to make reliable decisions.

As I said, my review (that the printer has hard-coded planned obsolescence in place) is a fair review allowing you to make a more informed, reliable decision.

It's not worth a long debate, but you're not telling me your whole argument so I don't know how to respond.

The problem comes when a small subset of unhappy users... creates a mountain of bad reviews.

"It never happened to me, or any HP printer I've ever dealt with, but I read online that..."

I'd put a 5 star review on my Samsung Note. Why? Because my phone didn't explode. Hell... my phone has been through the RINGER and it still works. Can I give it a 6 star?

But because of a small SMALL subset of users that have issues with Samsung Phones, all of a sudden there are a thousand 1 star reviews who say "they explode and kill puppies (because that's what the TV/Internet told me)"?

What percentage of iPhones were affected by Bendgate? How many reviews were from Android users who never would have bought an iPhone anyway?

There's a line and, personally, I think that it's crossed when you review something negatively for an issue you've not personally experienced.

Is HP shitty for doing this? Does Samsung need negative press for it? Should Apple have to face their issues? Of course.

But unless YOU PERSONALLY have been affected, you are just part of a mob out on a witch hunt.

So if you haven't been killed by taking counterfeit or misleading cancer-drugs you don't have a right to call out the fraud?

You don't appear to have thought this all the way through...

Of your examples, only HP intended to make a crappy product. Apple and Samsung tried to make a better one (thinner, more battery life, etc) and just made some mistakes. Mistakes deserve pointing out, intentional dishonesty does deserve a witch-hunt. Every day you don't point this out to non-technical people is a day the scammers get rich from their scams.

Is a one star review really an accurate description of "replacement ink is expensive"? I mean, if the printer literally self combusted and burned your house down when 3rd party ink was used, that seems like it would be worse, but one star is already as low as we can go.

It is an honest review of the product, though. If you know for a fact that the particular model of printer is designed to take cartridges with forced expiration dates, then it is about a characteristic of the product which you consider bad enough to rate it 1 start.

This is very different than, hypothetically, going over all HP products in Amazon and giving 1 star because, say, HP sued someone you don't think they should have, or filed taxes in a way you think is fraudulent or clubbed baby seals. It is also different from rating HP laptops badly because of this issue with their printer, for example. It is actually a review about a major flaw in the product that I would be purchasing, and thus relevant to me as a buyer regardless of moral stands of any kind.

I'm curious to know if the scoring rubric that emits one star for printers with expensive ink was developed before this story, or invented as post hoc justification. An expensive but otherwise functional printer seems more like about three stars, no?

Nobody should review a product with which they do not have personal experience, even if the website isn't verifying purchases. If reviews are to be useful they must not be subject to crowd mentalities. They should be limited to actual users. We are free to scream about how what they are doing is evil, and get that to the top of google, but I would never submit a review of a product that I do not have hands on. The only honest 'review' is to not purchase the product.

I generally go for the three star review. It suggests I'm fair, and not some crazy, raving lunatic.

I suspect all three star reviews.

Either the product is totally mediocre (and people hold no strong opinions about it), or the reviewer is a crazy, raving lunatic attempting to hide that fact behind a moderate score.

The short reviews also have another benifit, they seem more factual and reliable. A long emotional rant nearly always looses all credibility with me, even if they had justifiable complaint.

Review me..

Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/HP-ENVY-Printer-Instant-Ready/dp/B0... Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/HP-F0V69A-B1H-Wireless-Printing/dp/B0...

I very much disagree. A one-star 'review' is seldom a review. Complaints, which is the better classification for these posts, are better when included in a 2-star review that offers some context and demonstration that the reviewer is in a stable state of mind.

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