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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

Though it’s very easy to fall into the opposite trap and get disillusioned with everything. Some people just have bad luck or like to complain a lot.

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It's important to evaluate the negative reviews for yourself. Often enough they'll complain about things that won't bother me or aren't relevant to the product itself or what I need it for. The frequency is also an important data point. If a single review out of 1000 says that it broke after a day, it has far less weight than if 10 or 50 reviews complain about quality.

> Some people just have bad luck or like to complain a lot.

But this is exactly what you look for. How many of the bad reviews are people who seem like they whine a lot, how many are just unlucky, how many have seemingly reasonable complaints, etc.

How dumb are the bad reviews? If most are just stupid, it’s probably a good product, if you can find at least one review that really seems like it was by a real person with a real issue, it’s an indicator that some of the reviews are at least real.

Yeah, but my issue is I find products, almost all having quite a few bad reviews that all seem real and about serious issues, and then I end up only getting a cheap item because if it sucks at least I didn’t spend much.

But maybe that’s just a "me" issue ;)

I've had this issue too, actually. I think choosing a cheap version is a perfectly valid solution. Either the cheap item meets your needs or you notice things that bother you and that experience can inform your next purchase.

In some cases, I've instead decided that a completely different kind of product can fill the same need in a better way.

> notice things that bother you and that experience can inform your next purchase.

That’s what often ends up happening, but then I also don’t want to be wasteful and buy something new before the old thing breaks.

I've also personally seen a pattern in low score reviews on Amazon or other shopping sites where the person leaving the low score just simply didn't understand how to use the item properly, in some cases this is a majority of the bad reviews.

Another is when they had a problem with something external to the item itself such as shipping.

One time I was reading reviews of teapots on another company's (not Amazon) website. They seemed like really well-made beautiful porcelain teapots, and I couldn't figure out why there were so many people leaving disappointed reviews about the teapots cracking. Eventually after noticing certain details and reading certain reviews, I realized the reviews were all from people who had been using the teapots to boil water, as if they were kettles. Suddenly these comments went from reviews of the teapots to an index of how many people don't understand the difference between a teapot and kettle.

I feel like there's a big gap in retail websites for reviews that encourage more back and forth between the reviewer and reviewee and maybe some independent arbitration to draw this stuff out.

Something like a cross between an issue tracker and a lightweight court of law.

If Amazon were whacked around the head with an antitrust stick like Microsoft was in 2001, this is the kind of innovation that might actually flourish from newer startups.

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