Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

Let's face it, 5 stars has become the new meets minimum expectations. When looking at products I review the lowest ratings as find those are more informative than high ratings.

Low ratings have two general categories, idiots and disgruntled. Idiots are the people who have pebkac problems and just fail at understanding the product or its usage. These people leave one star reviews on hammers saying "doesn't pound nails only smashes fingers". These reviews I totally ignore and actually make me believe the product is decent when used correctly.

Disgruntled reviews contain details on why the product is bad. They usually convey a sense that the reviewer understands and is competent in using the product it's that the product actually is failing in some way beyond the user's control. These make me believe the product itself is bad.

The thing is, most of the time one star reviews tend to be of the idiot category.

I used to write Amazon affiliate articles and I would look to reviews for a sense of what to write.

At first, I was astonished at the number of reviews where the product flamboyantly failed its purpose, e.g. "hammer cut off my fingers".

But over the years shopping I have begun to see new sellers with new products with lots of reviews for other products that they never had, bizarre reviews that don't quite make sense, reviews for completely different products, and reviews that seemed too suspiciously easy to read for their message, and realized how very deep the fake advertisement industry is embedded.

There is a third-class of one-star reviews. Opposing businesses posing as disgruntled customers.

And yet there's also a fourth class.

Shipping problems.

People will receive a box that looks like it fell off the truck and then got hit by every car that was driving behind it, and then leave a 1-star review on the item.

Fifth class would be when sellers repurpose old listings for totally different products, which keeps the reviews of the old product.

This is a super simple problem to solve technically (just require manual review when more than 10% of the description text changes), proving that Amazon is absolutely complicit in whatever bad shenanigans are happening on their platform.

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