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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I always skim through the worst reviews for places, rather than the best reviews. Every good review is kind of the same, but bad reviews tell you useful information. If all the bad reviews are basically people complaining about minor service complaints, that’s usually a good sign. If they’re all about bugs or the rooms being dirty, etc, you should definitely have second thoughts.

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I find this very useful for Amazon reviews too. If all the 1-star reviews are complaints about delivery or nonsense like that, the product is good. If they're all calling out a specific condition or a bad design feature, that's more than likely an actual problem with the product (e.g. frequent dead pixels on monitors or hiss on wireless headphones or some other annoyance).

I've recently been focused on the 2 or 3 star reviews because they're a bit more balanced and level-headed.

Of course take it into the context of the overall rating distribution for the product.

Unless you want delivery.

But delivery problems usually have nothing to do with the seller and will happen pretty much to any product at random.

Most of the time delivery problems have everything to do with the seller. The point is that the seller and the product should be separated in reviews of the product.

Sellers are the delivery companies' customer.

If there are a lot of delivery problems, it means the seller has chosen a poor delivery company which reflects poorly on them.

I don’t think that’s not necessarily true. I don’t know how it works now, but at one point I know that delivery companies like Postmates would take the end customer’s order, pay for it, pick it up, and deliver it, without the restaurant (necessarily) knowing that the courier wasn’t the actual end customer. In that case, clearly the bad delivery experience isn’t the restaurant’s responsibility, although at some point they might decide they need to take action to resolve the problem.

I take the count of five-star reviews and divide by count of one-star reviews. "Oh, it's an 11, that's a good product," I say to myself. Then I check the one-star reviews to see what people find problematic.

Not true, many complaints on delivery delay can point otwards a totally over-run company with eternal wait-times or massive scale up problems.

Anything that has multiple sellers it becomes completely irrelevant, especially if you have Prime and mainly get Prime deliveries.

It's got nothing to do with the product at all.

It depends. With a hostel for example, negative reviews will always mention the same thing (for every hostel). If you don't expect people to be loud late at night, smell of BO or a 'bad area' you shoudn't be staying in a hostel... yet they still do it.

Off-topic, but I do the same with student evaluations (I teach at a research university). This seems to be human nature: good reviews tend to be fairly generic ("nice", "clear", etc) but bad reviews are usually very specific.

On the flip side, when I write reviews, be it a product review on Amazon or in a referee report, I always try to include specifics in positive reviews.

I’d add a third metric: reputation of the reviewer. Yelp is full of glowing 5 star, and damning 1 star reviews from people who only ever write that one review. They tend to be short, one or two sentences, and once you start looking they’re everywhere.

Reputation can mean a lot, beyond just knowing who someone is.

That’s like the opening of Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Definitely, and in addition to what you mentioned, nobody intentionally buys bad reviews ;)

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