I just bought a house so doing some construction (fences and deck) and relandscaping. Since my soil is probably basic and I want to plant some rhodies in addition to other flowers I was looking at a soil pH tester and saw this one. Of course I read the reviews.
OMG! Some people are so stupid, they must be the ones in front of me at the Post Office using the self-service machine.
The TL;DR version of the bad reviews.
It’s not an actual pH tester, just a soil pH tester. I guess they thought “Soil” was the manufacturer’s name.
It only goes from 3-8. So I guess you’re out of luck if you want to see how acidic your soil if after dumping those 55gal drums of aqua regia all over your lawn. And suppose my soil has a pH of 8.5? All the tester tells me is that it is above 8. I can’t be expected to know to acidify the soil and retest. Lather, rince, repeat as needbe until it is in the range I need. But what if am making my own alkali garden and need to measure pH that basic? Ummm … go buy a specialty tester?
It’s as much as 0.5 off and I know because I had my soil professionally tested. First of all, you probably measured incorrectly because many reviewers did the same thing and were right on. But let’s say you’re right. What are you growing that needs such tight tolerances in soil pH? And if you are like international champoin orchids or something, then why are you using an $80 tester and NOT having it professionally tested?
Anyone have any examples of idiot ARs?
I love the ones where there’s 300 4- or 5-star ratings and 2 1-star ratings.
The 1-star ratings say something like “It got lost in the mail so I never received it.”
Okay, so a product you have never actually recevied or used gets 1-star?
Heh, have been looking at reviews for appliances online lately. Amazing how many give an appliance 5 stars, and comment “I just got it delivered and it looks grate!!!”
Yeah? Does it? How about give it whirl and call us back when you’ve had time to form an actual opinion?
1 star - It was defective so I called their 800 number and a new one was hand-delivered within 24 hours at no cost and I got an apology from the President and $500 in gift cards for my $30 item. The new one works better than I could have ever hoped.
On cat toys I see a lot of “My cat didn’t play with it so I give it one star.” Well yeah, it’s a cat, who knows what they want to play with. I just care if it’s going to fall apart as soon as I get it.
I don’t doubt that there are a lot of genuine idiots posting comments, but I love it when I stumble across deliberately hilarious reviews posted by wise guys. Sometimes, they’ll find ridiculous products that are actually for sale, and write mock-serious glowing reviews. Or they may adopt the persona of a redneck idiot and write a scathng review that (deliberately) misses the point of the item or book completely.
Some reviews on tools make me wonder if the buyer is capable of operating a spoon, let alone the tool he’s reviewing. “This block plane is too small for smoothing my cutting board.” Do you actually know what a block plane is for? Didn’t think so. “Tried using this chisel to cut a washer and it broke!” Yeah, it’s a wood chisel, moron.
The really dumb ones are along the lines of “I bought this coffee grinder, but it says not to grind spices in it. Useless!” :rolleyes:
The other day I was looking at a bag of sand online at a home improvement store. It was 0.5 cubic feet of sand. I noticed a link that said something like “34 questions have been asked about this item”, so I clicked it. Holy crap.
“What color is this sand?”
“Is this sand non-toxic?”
“What sand can I use for a volleyball court?”
“Can I use this sand to fill up the base of my basketball stand? How many bags will I need to fill up the stand?”
“What is the washing process? What are you trying to get rid of?”
“Can this sand be used as a base for a 7x7 shed?”
…and about a dozen or more variations of “How many bags will I need to fill an area of four cubic feet?”
I want an Amazon movie review to explain if a movie is a good piece of art/culture or not - I don’t care about the technical specs of the reviewer’s DVD. But the movie reviews are often completely littered with reviews like:
“Great movie, horrible DVD!
I’ve been eagerly waiting the DVD ever since I first saw this movie in 1970. Imagine my disappointment that the sound is in MONO, the Hungarian subtitles are unreadable and they didn’t bother including the extended version of the cow milking scene. BOYCOTT THIS DVD AND WRITE TO THE STUDIO! (blah blah blah)”
However, this may be a petty & personal complaint since lots of people seem to appreciate reviews like that.
Yeah, in this case I disagree. The product is what’s being reviewed, not the movie. You read the reviews to know whether you should buy the product. The movie quality of the movie itself is relevant, but so is the quality of the rest of the product.
Of course, someone being a pretentious snob like you described isn’t very useful. But knowing what features it contains is definitely useful. The only reason I even get physical copies instead of just streaming is the quality of the extras.
Here’s one I like. It’s a one-star review for WeatherTech wind deflectors.
The guy is a contractor. He should know things are made the way they’re made for a reason. The wind deflectors need a certain amount of compression in order to stay put. So after sanding off a half-inch from the tabs, this contractor can’t figure out why they’re loose. There’s ‘nothing’ to hold the front deflectors on… because he removed the means of holding them on! :smack:
If you want a review of the movie, that is what IMDb.com or an aggregator like RottenTomatoes.com are for. Amazon reviews should be about the product, so commenting on the quality of the DVD release and accompanying features is entirely appropriate.
One thing you need to realize about reviewers on Amazon (other than they are not held to any kind of standard nor ranked in any way for quality) is that most people either post a review if they have a really positive or really negative response to the product (or in many cases, the seller). I generally look at the negative reviews first and filter out those which are clearly inappropriate or just ignorant, and then cycle up through select positive responses to try to get a genuine sense of how the product has been received by people who actually take the time to carefully consider the product attributes. It is unfortunate that Amazon does not apparently make an effort to attempt to categorize review complaints or correlate reviewers with other postings, but then, Yelp does do that and it is almost completely worthless, so there you go.
Ya, really. Can people stop reviewing the goddamn packaging and the post office? Tell me about the product, you stupid jerks! So infuriating!
Also annoying, but at least vaguely useful? I mean, it tells me precisely dick about the product, but it at least lets me know I might want to check out the same thing from a different seller. Then again, someone who can’t distinguish between a product and a seller does not have an opinion worth trusting, so never mind. Completely useless.
On the other hand, there are some awesome amazon reviewers out there. Flashlight reviews, for instance, always seem to be unimaginably in depth (and check out selfbuilt’s on CandlePowerForums to see taking it to the next level).