Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

By removing the reviews, it's possible that Apple will be seen as less credible to potential buyers.

How could anyone disagree with this. Just look at Amazon for a shining example of reviews done correctly. They are always so credible, never gamed, and you never have to worry about fake products especially if you buy products labeled as “Amazon’s Choice”.....

View on HN

I've never understood why online reviews, at least on sites as large as Amazon with a competent technical team behind the company, aren't better. First step, if I review a product, then you should immediately be weighting the visibility of all reviews by reviewers who posted a review which agrees with my own. So if I rate Avengers: Endgame bluray a single star, guess that I have similar opinions to the others that rated it the same, and when I go look at some other Marvel film bluray, if those others have reviewed it, push them to the top. As I review more and more things, the weightings should get better and better. And gaming it would be basically impossible unless you managed to tailor bot posts to match the way I rated dishware, movies, books, videogames, food products, and the dozens of other things I've rated. Fake reviews would get pushed to the bottom with almost instantaneous speed if they would do this. If they cheap out and decide to aggregate and 'bucket' reviewers rather than training a recommender engine per-customer, its performance will fall short and still be gamed, but even that would be better (and seems to be the way big companies handle the computational load per-user systems would incur... personally I'd prefer they push the calculations clientside, but they haven't gone that way).

I have sometimes had amazing smiles and laughter reading amazon reviews. It tends to remind me that people are pretty diverse in their lifestyles and opinions. When sizing up a product, that gives nothing at all of value: this guy hates it, but seems slightly crazy; this other one loves it but what do they know? So I just have a good laugh at how different these people are from each other, and likely from me, and make gut decisions based on pretty much nothing anyway.

When reading online reviews anywhere, it's always fun to see what fraction of 1-star reviews are "this sucks and/or readily fails at what its supposed to do" versus "I'm using this wrong".

Somehow, I must believe you are being sarcastic, or you are terribly misinformed.

100% satire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com