Comment by crazygringo
5 days ago
Funny, it's the opposite to me.
A product on the shelf, I don't have the slightest idea if it'll break in a month or have a feature that doesn't work right.
When I start browsing Amazon reviews, I feel vastly more confident I know what I'm buying.
Only exception is clothing, since it's next to impossible to judge fit and texture and often even color online.
>When I start browsing Amazon reviews, I feel vastly more confident I know what I'm buying.
I hate to break it to you, but a large majority of reviews are fake.
I hate to break it to you, but the fake reviews are mostly all positive.
But if you find a ton of negative reviews complaining that the handle breaks after 2 months... then that's probably real. That's the stuff you look for, to see if there's any consistent pattern to the negative reviews.
I find that even this doesn't work as well as it used to. Too many sellers are using too many dark patterns at scale.
IMO this old approach suffers from the ubiquitous flooding and washing of bad reviews with sometimes thousands of positive ones that mask real numbers. Without a half-reliable denominator, it's very hard to tell how prevalent a problem is. E.g. if there are 5k reviews, 50 of which are negative (just to use any numbers), on the surface of it that looks like a pretty normal ratio you'll find in any review section. Some handles just do break off on any product, and in the end there's also always some nutjob who tried to jack his car with a pan. But how many of the total reviews are fake? There's 50 real dissatisfied customers - but out of how many? 100, 500 or 5.000? If I'm being really critical at the sight of any kind of negative review, there's really not much left to buy with a good consciousness.
Then there's grouping of very different products on the same page, so reviews get muddled. Those groupings change from time to time, so any amount of reviews on a product page can refer to an item that's no longer available on that page. Strangely, AFAIK Amazon does not provide a possibility to filter those out. So when looking for reviews on, say, a USB cable, I'm made to sift manually through lots and lots of unrelated reviews both good and bad, some of which mention a handle breaking and are obviously not about a cable at all (I'm exaggerating a bit, but the M.O. is real).
And above all, really bad products with an actual ton of negative reviews often don't last long. The listings get deleted, the sellers disappear, come up the next day with a different random letter brand name, and buy good reviews in bulk again.
Taking these (and more) factors into account, assessing reviews has become like solving a single equation with multiple unknowns. To me at least, finding the signal from the noise at this scale just using common sense has become nigh impossible.
I personally don't have any confidence in it at all anymore, let alone a vast one. The mere attempt to wade through reviews has become an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating affair. I increasingly find myself abandoning my research halfway through and question if I really need a product at all, because when I look into it, all the available alternatives seem to be shit. In a way, that's probably a positive.
If you've found a way to better navigate this mess, I'm definitely interested to know! But IMO unless Amazon starts to fight those dark patterns, which they show no inclination to, the fight against the review shadow industry is a losing one for customers.
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