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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

This is why you should prioritize 4-star reviews if you want an honest positive opinion on the product.

For negative reviews, I look at 1-stars, but these are often "arrived broken" etc. types of reviews. Unless that's a large portion, I ignore them. I look at 2-star reviews when I want a good review on the flaws of a product.

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I've started to read only one star reviews and look for patterns and dates. If a bunch of people 2 years ago had a bad batch of broken product that's fine, but not last month.

> This is why you should prioritize 4-star reviews if you want an honest positive opinion on the product.

I think you mean de-prioritize

No, I de-prioritize reading 5-star reviews. I rarely more than glance at them. I prioritize reading 4-star reviews, figuring they're much less likely to be paid/fake.

I've also heard speculation that for cheap products, competitors will buy it & trash it in the review, not sure if it's true or not though.

so its the range 2-4?

I think GP had it stated correctly: if you want honest opinions, look at four star reviews. Five/one star extremes tend to read overly emphatic and aren't as likely to include both positives and negatives, so as a consumer (and perhaps as a platform hoping to show "good" reviews), these more moderate reviews will likely give a more accurate picture of the product, and thus could get priority for display. That said... as soon as you do that, obviously you're going to see four stars getting gamed as well.

as for the above comment, surely this is a normal distribution problem and both sides of the tail have to be looked at? you need to look at 2 and 4, or the range 2-4, not 1-5

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