Comment by mwexler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwexler | Hacker News Reader

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Is there a business model for reviews?

Consumers continually say they want and use them, trusting some type of collective wisdom of folks willing to take time to give a review, assuming some honesty and relevance (reviewer has same needs, experience, and use pattern as I do for the item).

Yet, like price engines before them, consumer demand alone doesn't make success (some might also say that reviews are a feature, not a product, but table that for now).

From Zagat to Angie's list, the BBB in the US, TripAdvisor, yelp, 4square, plus a zillion others (along with on-site reviews powered by Bazaarvoice and others)... So many have come and gone. Amazon reviews are gamed, unclear what drives "Google Reviews", blog reviews have faded...

Did social kill them? Maybe, but the few people who respond to a "Hey, is X any good" on any forum or group seems less helpful than these past offerings.

I've wondered about these "come and gone" tools for a while, since price engines and reviews to leverage collective knowledge were hallmarks of internet 1.0 lore, and it seems like we failed at really delivering on those hopes. Still difficult to find the lowest price on items, and still difficult to get a clear read on product quality or value... And restaurants and other service offerings are still harder.

Any thoughts on what commerce model would work for reviews to be unbiased but collective, more than just the Consumer Reports model of few experts and some surveys?

Validating the identity of each reviewer. If they post something slanderous then the business owner should then be able to get a warrant/court order etc to force the site to reveal the reviewers identity. So long as anonymous posting is allowed there is no way to have a truly reliable platform for reviewing anything.

IDing users wouldn't be too hard to implement. There are plenty of businesses that provide instant ID verification services, many of the new online banks and money transfer apps use these services. The two issues would be cost and the fact that the number of people using review sites that do this would be pretty low.

In my experience Reddit works quite well, when it works (i.e. when there are people to engage with you)

My current thinking is that you need the reviewers to have their reputation on the line somehow when they review something. There are quite a few options to do this algorithmically, happy to chat if it's something you are interested in too.

Customers want a 1-5 star rating that says "yes buy" or "no don't buy" - they rarely actually want reviews.

Even with all the gamed reviews on sites like this and Amazon, if you spend the time you can usually figure out what's up, but it takes time.

Yeah, what I find works pretty well with Amazon reviews is to look at the bad reviews and see what they're complaining about.

Often it's garbage (this won't do X--hey, if you had paid attention you would know they never claimed it would do X!) or irrelevant (it's not the fault of the product if it was late, damaged in shipping etc) and sometimes it's just a tread-with-caution (I've seen a lot of that on Amazon--customers burned by combined-inventory or bogus stuff). If it's legitimate gripes you've found something to avoid.

That's an interesting point and I agree to an extend, but sometimes I do look for mentions of a particular feature or use case, and in those cases a review that covers those points are more useful.

So unless the review cater to me personally by covering those points, I usually prefer a more detailed review (or a large number of reviews/discussions by Googling in the hope that someone covers those points).

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