> We never hear about broken and worn-out products.
I disagree. When I read reviews (mostly on Amazon) I click on the 1 stars and read those first. Those will mostly all be about how crappy the products are.
That's a different aspect - people write reviews about products that are crappy immediately; however, this is about products which are fine initially, but get broken or worn out later, possibly years later.
But first filter out all the legion irrelevant 1-star reviews ("The courier left the box in the rain", "I couldn't return it because I waited too long to unpack it because it was a surprise present - SO MAD!!!!", etc).
Why is it failscouts domain to solve? That should squarely be laid at the feet AMZN, not some 3rd party. Seems like such a strange twist of logic to be a question like this.
It's why reviews, in particular AMZN's, are just not worth the trouble. Too many fake ones, so people have come up with "clever" rules for themselves to only read the negative ones. Somehow, they believe the good ones are gamed, yet the negative ones are not? Another strange twist in logic. Once you believe the system is gameable, then the whole system is suspect.
You got me wrong. Failscout is a reviews platform. How does it solve the "competitor sabotage" problem on its own platform? I never implied failscout should fix Amazon's.
Apologies, yes, I did read that like a suggestion of 3rd party reviews fixing AMZN reviews.
To continue the thread but being on the same page, I still think reviews are not something that humans can handle correctly. The people looking to game the reviews will always try harder than the people trying to stop them. I just don't trust online reviews from random internet people. I might ask people I know personaly and am familiar with and would be willing to trust their assessments. Randos on the internet just can't prove anything, because of course a bot could say/do everything a person would try to prove they are not a bot.
For those that are willing to put faith in reviews, have fun. Don't let my pessimism stop you.
| I just don't trust online reviews from random internet people.
What we need is to be able to give extra weigth to reviews we can (somewhat) trust. This means that we need to start keeping "files" on each other, and we need a tool for looking up authors of messages and traversing chains of trust ...
Right?
I disagree. When I read reviews (mostly on Amazon) I click on the 1 stars and read those first. Those will mostly all be about how crappy the products are.