Comment by underhill
3 years ago
I feel like the crowd-sourcing / SEOing / optimization of reviews on the internet has, for all its benefits, made everything too noisy and untrustworthy. I know myself and a lot of other people first search reddit now instead of google because it's impossible to get anything written by a real nonbiased human otherwise.
For similar reasons I've used things like Yelp less and less and tried to use professionally editorialized reviews (Eater, The Infatuation, Bon Appetit, etc) for food, well-known travel sites/bloggers for hotels, etc. There's still some paid incentives there too obviously but I can at least calibrate it to how much I align with the publication.
Heh. The biggest problem I have with Amazon isn't even the fake reviews, it's the people who leave reviews and don't even know what a review is, which is almost all of them.
"My gadget just arrived today and I haven't even used it yet but it looks well-made and I'm sure it will last forever. Five stars!"
I see this ALLOT on AliExpress. I mean what can you expect, but somehow I expected more. Like why even bother posting if you havn't even opened the package up yet?!
A five star preview.
I (about half-honestly) blame Amazon, and more recently Google Maps.
All reviewers are not created equal.
In the early days before mass-SEO, you at least got the benefit of most reviewers being authentic, even if inept.
Now, we have the worst of all possible words: mass fake reviews + a public trained to expect only amateur-level reviews.
It doesn’t help that google has largely de-prioritized smaller sites.
For better or for worse, my reviews about banks and their products have now been replaced by 10 links in a row to different sub-pages of the bank’s domain.
At least it used to make sure a blog article and a forum would appear on most search term’s top10.
I get it for my “XYZ Bank’s Phone Number - talk to a human now” pages. They probably shouldn’t have out-ranked the bank’s own official site, but the bank’s own website was much less user friendly than my own despite the abuse potential.