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Comment by mcovey | Hacker News Reader

> today: the Amazon shopping experience is so filled with bullshit that it’s actually easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping

This is where I'm at. I only order products from Amazon that are sold by Amazon. Pretty much any legit third party seller will have their own website I can order from.

I still read reviews on Amazon before ordering elsewhere, although they've banned me from leaving reviews and wiped all my past ones for no discernible reason. I guess I left a review on some product that had a lot of fake reviews and I got caught in the crossfire.

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>I still read reviews on Amazon before ordering elsewhere

Why? I'm only adding more so it's not a one word response, but seriously, why are you still putting any credence whatsoever to Amazon reviews which is like scientifically proven to be gamed?

If you filter out reviews without picture and only 2-4 star reviews you can often find legitimate reviews on more popular items. The total star rating is of course totally useless but individual reviews still offer value.

Yeah, there's still value in Amazon reviews despite the noise. If you take the time to just sit there and read through them one by one, you can definitely learn things about the product. Obviously you skip over the trash "ya this product great, exactly what I needed" stuff. If you just read the long, multi-paragraph ones you effectively eliminate the fake stuff, because fake reviews don't get paid more for being longer. Long ones tend to have detailed discussion of actually product function and/or appearance, and THAT'S where you find the the product's potential shortcomings.

I've read some of these multi-paragraph reviews, and I'm not impressed there either. Some of them read as if they are a frustrated author that could never get published and now spends their time practicing prose searching for likes (similar to yelp). Some sound like GPT3 drivel. Some sound even worse.

Two and four star reviews are worth focusing on too. Vendors don't, for the most part, pay for four star reviews, and review-bombing idiots or people upset the delivery was late don't tend to offer two star reviews

Just because reviews are gamed on Amazon doesn't mean that there are no real reviews on there. For many purchases, there are no other sites with useful reviews. It's the best bad system we have...

Mainly for the negative ones, to see if there are many similar complaints indicating something is wrong with the product.

I've left bad reviews on manufacturer websites and often times they just never publish them so I don't really trust reviews anywhere more or less than Amazon reviews.

If we're talking about products with a large number of reviews:

- The fake reviews are commonly very low-effort: "best I've found, gift for grandma".

- A seller looking to do review spam doesn't want to keep pumping fake reviews forever. It costs money, and it's a risk.

Taking these two things into account, I sort for recent reviews, and only consider <5 star reviews OR reviews with some meat on them.

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