Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires?

Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers.

These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

View on HN

I think independent consumer reviews are a very valuable service to the (shopping) community and, yup, to humanity. It seems contradictory to collate "shopping" and "community", but in general people do spend a lot of time and, duh, money shopping to improve their lives.

Counting on peers to help you shop, what you shop for, how safe and reliable the product is ("Could this toy hurt my kid?", "Is this tattoo remover safe?") are not to be taken lightly.

Online product/services reviews are a huge milestone on how we interact with the world around us. It even causes me anxiety to try a restaurant without having checked it online for reviews... Any effort on how we can better correlate opinion and experience is not just helping "billionaires" here. It's helping everyone who want some feedback to help cut through flaky, moronic marketing that we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

Well yes, but it‘s not like the flaky, moronic marketeers don‘t know people like you exist. So reviews just become another topic of optimization for them.

>Why provide free services to billionaires?

Also why I never saw the point of sites like quora. Why are all these "subject matter experts" spending countless hours writing free content for a platform that is ultimately locked in and going to either a) Be infested with ads or b) Going to charge money (like the publishers' racket in scientific publishing).

At least for Quora (or rather StackOverflow for me) I could understand it as satisfying a need to be in a community of experts and exchange ideas on more fringe topics. Also it‘s probably a good thing to put on your resume if you have amassed sufficient fake internet points ;)

Amazon reviews however... you‘re just a drop in the ocean and there‘s certainly no community. Thus you‘d have to pay me if you want me to engage in this.

It could also be used to improve your technical writing abilities. Doesn't really matter that you have submitted review number 5397, the effort that you put into writing a persuasive argument is valuable to you in itself.

In the case of Stack Overflow, it's a great place for organic linking to your own content.

"You can do xyz in order to accomplish this task. Source: <link to my content>"

BAM. Just translated internet points into $0.002

You'll get marked as a spammer if you do this too much or in the wrong way.

For some people, I think it satisfies a human need to sort of brag about your knowledge.

For other people, it's simply a way to market their website/product by linking to their site when answering a question.

One of the best dutch webshops, coolblue.nl, actually has people responsible for each market section, they test the products themselves and have recommendations for the items in each category they think are the best. It's supplemented with user reviews, but still, it's nice to get a semi-objective indication for which products to look at. The pride themselves in customer service, only sell a select range of products for each category and you can tell real time and effort went into it, this, in turn makes this shop pretty trusted by people. That's both good and bad, because now companies could approach them to get into their favours, but still, from what I've been able to tell, they actually offer some good recommendations.

This - also things like "you can create a PR to change the microsoft doc's site" - FFS microsoft make so much money but the users are expected to maintain the bs documentation.

This makes me so mad

I don't get it. You have two paths if you know what's wrong with the docs: 1. tell them it's wrong, 2. tell them how to correct it (pr), 3. ignore it and let yourself or your team run into the same issue in the future.

The amount of money ms makes is irrelevant to any of those points. The docs writers will make mistakes - this is unavoidable. The question is then: do you care whether your coworker sees the same error in the docs.

I'd rather fix their docs than leave that to some random question on an unofficial forum that you have to Google with very specific keywords.

If reviews could be trusted, you would be doing more to help consumers than the business owners. Independent reviews have been a staple of commerce long before it went online.

Why are you giving your valuable insights even now

Reviews really help small businesses who don't have millions to spend on marketing and traffic.

For example I sell online video courses and reviews (legit of course) help quite a bit with sales. This is independently, not on Amazon or another platform.

That’s how they exploit us. They tell us we are helping the small business owner or the phone rep and play on our natural fellow feeling while the main beneficiary is the giant, faceless multinational.

I frequently do those surveys because if I plan to use something more than once I'd like it to be suited better to me, and because I feel I rarely get much info on how happy my own customers are.

In these cases I don't care either way about any billionaires, I care about the product being better for me.

I don't do these surveys when the company is irredeemably horrible (e.g. AT&T, Comcast, most airlines etc) with deeper problems than a mere survey can reflect.

I also abandon them when I it appears the survey is poorly designed (ambiguous questions, nothing but marketings, or simply too long).

They tap into a very natural desire to help other customers to find information about products and express themselves at the same time.

Issue is.. it's low signal/noise ratio and can be gamed to death. But it makes customers spend time on their e-shelves anyway.

I wonder what all the negative side-effects would be of rewarding review writing of certified purchasers with store credit, and if there would be a way to avoid those side-effects.

>Why provide free services to billionaires?

So you don't contribute content to large social networks neither, isn't it?!

Not much, no. But I’d argue that’s different anyway. Facebook is a quid pro quo. They provide me a service (distribution) in exchange for my content. Verizon gives me nothing in exchange for my survey response.

Do you value reviews written by other people?

If not, some certainly do, and you're providing a free service to them.

No, I’m not providing it to them. I’m giving it to amazon to do with it whatever will profit them most.

I mean, if we continue with that logic you're actually providing it to your ISP, who does what they think will profit the most. That is, delivering it to Amazon. Who will then deliver it to others looking to buy that product.

Is it so far fetched to think amazon might manipulate reviews? Yelp and Glassdoor do.

I'm sure they do, at least to some degree.

Sort of beside the point though - I don't actually care about the impact, good or bad, on Amazon. If I write a review it is to help a fellow consumer. If I think my review instead hurts the fellow, or has no effect, I won't do it. But how it impacts Amazon simply doesn't matter to me.

I'm not sure who first made this observation, but it's incredible how slowly, everything becomes labor (in the abstract sense of work performed for someone elses profit). With social media, we spend more and more of our free time working for companies for their profit. It is essentially, the ultimate form of labor from a capitalist perspective— where not only the effects, but also the act of labor itself has been externalized from the cost.

Lol who exactly do you think would assume the burden of the cost of hired product review staff?

Amazon derives a lot of value from the reviews on their site. They can put people who are skeptical about a product at ease and lead to a purchase, for example.

If hesitation from bad reviews was a substantial blocker they would have addressed it by now.

Most people don’t give a shit.

I was talking about hesitation from no reviews, i.e. no "objective" source on the quality of the product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com