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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

I don't bother with 5 star or 1 star reviews. Too much emotion to be sensibly reviewed.

Three stars provide a nice balance. Things like "food was good, but service was slow." I find more valuable than a 2 paragraph review about how a waiter spilled a glass of water and only comped one entrée or a five paragraph review that can be summarized as "I love this place more than breathing."

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I like to read 1-star reviews (for anything) just to get a rough idea for what a 'worst case scenario' might look like for that particular thing. If the 1-star reviews are all about entitled patrons, that's pretty encouraging, whereas a few reviews about rats or cockroaches would make me look elsewhere. To use another example, I was looking at books on Amazon yesterday, and the only one-star review for a particular jQuery book was from this guy who was mad because the book didn't explain how to put quotation marks inside another pair of quotation marks (it was NOT a Javascript book) or how to download Firebug. Whereas another book's 1-star reviews might be about how the examples don't work, core material was skipped over, etc. When I was looking for a travel mug I could throw in my purse, I nixed any option that had a 1-star review about leaks (including many which were advertised as leakproof), and ended up getting the best travel mug I've ever had. I can shake it upside down or toss it across the room and my coffee stays safely contained. I think the bad reviews of it were about how hard it was to clean and how the lid came apart too easily. (It's supposed to come apart, to make it easier to clean...)

I do the same thing and I'm pretty sure I have the same mug.

Which mug? Tossing a full cup of coffee across a room sounds fun.

For some reason I can't find it on Amazon right now, but it's this one:

http://www.thermos.com/product_details.aspx?ProdID=282&C...

Agreed - and we think your friends would benefit from those short, honest, insightful comments as well.

Its all about providing an environment where people you care about can easily find your recommendations... so that when you do find a 5 star place, your reviews will be taken seriously.

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