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I'd guess that 1-star joke reviews help sales overall, by spreading links to the joke reviews, and thus to the product. And all of the products I've ever seen a joke review on already had a bunch of normal reviews, so the one review rating wouldn't affect the overall rating much.

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There's a strong correlation between the number of reviews of movies and box office performance, but not the average rating. Having a bunch of joke reviews, even bad ones, probably does more to raise awareness of products than it does to harm sales.

That is total "Correlation is not Causation"-bait. Is "number of reviews" a leading or trailing indicator of box office performance? Is "amount of marketing spend" a confounding factor?

Any links for this study?

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