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Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

Product and service reviews are completely useless now too, and have been for a while. Restaurant ratings are pure noise, everything is 4 stars and there is absolutely no correlation to the quality of food or service. None of it is real.

It's bleak out there, on the internet.

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Good riddance. Reviews are just other people telling you how to live your life. Beyond it being subjective to the reviewer, there's really no upside in engaging with reviews. If it's a bad review, now you feel bad about having wanted to engage with something with abysmal scores (think: liking a movie then finding out it has a 32% on rotten tomatoes), or if it's a good review, it's useless because you were already going to engage with the thing being reviewed. You chose the restaurant for a reason, right? It sounded good.

We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.

Apartment reviews are pretty fucking important when you're committing to live somewhere for at least a year. I don't want to find out that my complex is infested with roaches.

Maybe this would be ok with good consumer protection laws, but in some places honest reviews are the best hope you have of not wasting money on products that might fail some way or another.

Which (in the UK and Ireland) solve this for me. As I pay them every month and they don't take stuff from the companies, our interests are aligned.

I know have actually good white goods for the same money I paid for crap ones.

What? Why would you feel bad about a negative review of something you didn't create?

Either the product is something I was curious about and hadn't decided to spend time and money on yet, in which case a negative review might save me the trouble, or it's something I've already done and formed my own opinion about, in which case I'm probably not reading reviews.

Reading a review from Roger Ebert provided a lot of value to me - I knew generally his likes and dislikes and could use that information relationship to contextualize the review. I think reviews break down when you move from individual to aggregates. What does 34% really mean, maybe 90/100 reviewers hate horror, are under 25, all from a specific city? I really don't agree with your take that on reviews but I do think reviews in aggregate - where there is no relationship to the reviewer -- are problematic.

The reason why Roger Ebert or Gene Siskel's reviews had value is because they were real people with carefully considered and sometimes strongly-held opinions. That's never going to be true of the algo.

> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too

One relatively minor counterpoint: amazon has seemed to resolve their review squatting issue. Several years ago, there were companies selling one type of product and getting 4* reviews, then swapping all of the product details for a completely unrelated product, presumably with a huge markup. So you might think you were buying a 4* say, hot water thermos, but if you actually read the reviews, they would all be for a USB charger or something. All the recent reviews would be much lower.

I haven't seen this in a while now. Or maybe they're just better at it :/

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