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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

Most reliable metric: ignore 5 star reviews and only compare the number of 4 star reviews to the number of 1 star reviews. this works across all review sites. most sellers only fake 5 star reviews. however, if you review products and services that you know are quite excellent, you will that they often have way more 4 star reviews than one star reviews and more 4 than 3, more three than 2, and more 2 than one. this is because they are consistently excellent. but products with polar review metrics like all 5 star reviews and all 1 star reviews generally i find have the most fraudulent reviews and are most likely to have a bad experience. I think you should weigh 1 star reviews much higher than 5 star reviews. the new amazon metric or the advertisements talking about their aggregate quantity of five star reviews are wrong and misguided.

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You can't just compare numbers of reviews. You also have to make sure the reviews are for the actual product.

The practice of switching products after garnering high review numbers is so widespread, Amazon can't pretend it's not tacitly complicit.

Not just that, but sometimes there are completely different products on the same page, and the reviews are shared between them. It's impossible to know the rating of each product in this case.

1 star reviews can also be paid for. I tend to look at 1/2/3-star reviews that seem passionate (was written like a real person with actual emotions - bonus points for photos) and see if the things that bothered them would also bother me.

I like your idea though, and will use it as an extra data point.

I tend to ignore the 1 star reviews because, in my experience, most are either from disgruntled people who wouldn't even try to open the manual first, or absolute binary thinkers.

When it comes to more subjective categories, like books, 1 star reviews are even worse.

However they are likely not fake, or less likely than 5-stars.

Review bombing is absolutely "a thing".

> I tend to ignore the 1 star reviews because, in my experience, most are either from disgruntled people who wouldn't even try to open the manual first, or absolute binary thinkers.

Eh, not always. I was once searching Amazon for a cheap popcorn maker. The cheapest one on page 1 of the Amazon search results had mostly five-star reviews, except for a lone one-star review that said the popcorn make emitted a "tongue of flame" when plugged in.

That was sufficient for me to buy the second cheapest popcorn maker instead.

There's an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/937/

Oh, so there is. I was expecting the one about the bobcat.

https://xkcd.com/325/

OT, but for those still in the market, I absolutely love this one:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002Z9LHAG

Along with the right proportions of Snappy popcorn oil (butter burst tastes slightly more movie-ish but coconut is obv better for you and almost as movie-theater-like) and Flavocol, my popcorn is now way better than the theater popcorn, and I didn't even think that was really possible after years of terrible microwave popcorn.

oils: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003C4UDEY and https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AXK9ROC (we've switched entirely to coconut oil)

salt: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004W8LT10

you can probably get these last two things at commercial supply companies as well (buy local where you can)

These days I just make my popcorn in a covered wok on the stove, honestly. There's probably some argument about the extra fat I'm adding to fry the kernels vs an air popper, but, it works. I get about the same amount of unpopped kernels, and it's one less "unitasker" I have to find room for.

I read the one-star reviews and ask "do these people sound like they're complaining about the product itself, or something else?" (For example, if you're buying books that somebody could conceivably be assigned in school, you'll see one-star reviews that are really reviews of a class they didn't like pretending to be a review of a book.)

True, or my personal favorite useless 1 star reviews:

"The box was damaged [by UPS/FedEx] when it was delivered"

"I didn't know I would have to assemble [this piece of furniture with four screws]"

"This [completely different] product sucks" (though to be fair, this one is probably on the merchant for swapping out products under the hood to preserve ratings)

My favorite of all time though is the "this product does exactly what it should do, but I didn't want it to do that, even though that was what it was advertised to do, and that's the only purpose for this entire product category - one star". E.g. there was one for a l-cystine based dough conditioner, where someone left a one star review claiming that, get this, it made the dough extensible, and they didn't want that because they were making a pie or something. Incidentally, I understand why they don't sell raw l-cystine dough reducer to random consumers, because people would literally kill themselves with it.

Many complaints about shipping damage suggests a packaging problem. And Amazon will close your account if you return too many damaged items.

1 star reviews are often skewed by the "delivery company did something dumb" reviews or a part was missing or there was a problem with returning it or that kind of thing. I often just look that the average rating isn't complete trash, if it's averaging 2 star on a lot of ratings the product probably is not worth considering. Then I pick some longer 4-star reviews and read the text. In the long reviews someone's put some thought into it and they're often more balanced.

This also applies to app ratings, especially for company apps.

Uber's app might be perfect, but the rating will reflect on the company, drivers, and experiences of users.

Anecdotal, I've worked on apps for a train operator and currently a power company, it still holds up.

Also sort by latest reviews. These are more likely to be relevant to the current product and slightly less likely to be fake.

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