That impacts the star rating but does not make the reviews unhelpful. One star reviews are often given for shoddy service but it is not unusual to see privilege or unreasonable expectations even without scratching the surface.
Has there ever been a time or place when anonymous, un-curated reviews were ever worth anything?
That other thread in IMHO about how you research online purchases reminded me of this anecdote: I was looking as sous vide machines on Amazon, and find one that seems reasonably priced and has a lot of positive reviews. So I add it to my wish list. Then I think maybe I should look at some other reviews before committing to that one. And look at the test results on, Serious Eats, I think it was, and they found that model that had all the positive reviews on Amazon was actually one of the worst ones they tested. Namely, in their tests it seemed to struggle to bring the water up to temperature, while others did much better. So I took that one off my wish list and added one of the ones they recommended.
So why did that one get some many positive reviews on Amazon? Here’s my theory. Sous vide is a fairly new cooking technique, and until very recently it was entirely in the domain of restaurant kitchens. So most likely for most people who bought this product this is their first sous vide machine. The have no basis of comparison as to how a good sous vide machine should work. For all they know, taking a long time to get the water to the proper temperature is just normal, and it produces adequate results once it is, so five stars.
That’s why I tend to trust review sites that actually do testing and comparisons between comparable products more than customer reviews. Assuming they’re real honest reviews and not fake, all customer reviews tell me is that people were satisfied with the product. Which is all well and good, but those customers probably didn’t try both product A and product B, and therefore does nothing to help me figure out whether A or B is better.
Besides what you said, I’ve noticed some reviewers will take the price into account in their review. As in "The robot did a good job… for a $29.99 robot. If the more expensive robot is enough better than the cheap robot, I might be willing to pay more to get the better one. But if both the cheap and expensive one have 4 out of 5 stars, that doesn’t help me.
Most good product review sites will recommend several different products at different price points, which I like. E.g. America’s Test Kitchen might find the absolute best Dutch oven based on their testing criteria is a Le Creuset that retails for $250. But if that’s outside your budget, this other one is the best sub-$100 one they tested, and it’s also very good.
If I was to buy a consumer electronics item only in the event there were few one-star reviews then I’d never make a purchase. There are always multiple reports of godawful terrible experiences (item was defective from day one, customer service cursed them out, product eventually burned their house down etc.).
There are consumers who firmly reject all five-star and one-star reviews as suspect, which makes little to no sense. I once had a commenter on one of my one-star book reviews claim I was reviewing in bad faith, since even the worst book should never get less than a two-star rating. 
I have no faith in Amazon cracking down on sleazy companies that manipulate ratings. I once bought a room humidifier on Amazon. It worked OK, but there was a note in the box from the company offering an Amazon gift card if I’d give them a five-star review. I gave them (as I recall) three stars, pointing out in the review the sleaziness of the offer and that they were dragging Amazon into their scheme. Amazon responded by pulling the review and suspending my review “privileges” for a few months.
I put little stock in restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor and to a slightly lesser extent, Yelp. Way too many times we’ve gone to places with excellent reviews, and from the ensuing semi-disasters concluded that the five-star reviewers were either high or had never eaten out before.
So yes, the system is broken, or at least leaking oil.
*I give the Atlantic three stars as a magazine. Occasionally some decent articles, but not good enough to subscribe to it.
Oh wow, i give the Atlantic 4 stars. Not so overwhelming good that it’s worth subscribing, but i often like the articles when i read them. Honestly, i wish there were a way to pay per article.
I like trip advisor reviews, although I’ve never used them for restaurants. But I’ve used them a lot for hotels and some for “attractions”. I like that they require a longish review, so there’s often useful detail. Is the place handicapped accessible? Does the neighborhood feel safe? How noisy is the bar next to the lower windows? How can i get to it from the train station? I’ve seen all those discussed in the reviews. Just one person’s opinion, but still valuable info.
I think that if you’re in a small enough community, reviews are going to be more useful than a broader-based sample. Basically my thinking is that in a smaller community, you’re more likely to have common interests, common experiences, etc… that would make the review more relevant.
ATK’s reviews are almost always reliable. I don’t always agree with their findings, but if nothing else they’re a pretty well-reasoned good place to start.
The thing about most of those companies is that, while the average user might think of five stars as “absolutely perfect in every way”, the company considers it to be the default rating that a driver/landlord should have. Giving your Uber driver four stars means they did something wrong. Giving them three means they will never pair you with that driver again.
It was the same when I worked in fast food years ago - our customer surveys asked people to rate us on a scale of 1-7, but the only thing that counted towards our performance scores were how many people rated us a perfect 7. You could have 98 6’s and two 7’s and as far as corporate was concerned your satisfaction rating was 2%.
Yeah, I’ve increased my ratings of anything that reflects on people because of that. Did the eBay item arrive on time? Was it what it claimed to be? 5 stars. Did the Uber driver get me to the correct destination without anything scary or nasty happening? 5 stars.
That’s another reason why I’m generally not supplying ratings at all.
There might be a chicken and egg problem here, but I think it’s the opposite. 5 stars is considered the minimum acceptable rating by those companies. If you let your average rating drop to like 4.6 (which is possible if you have mostly 5 stars with some 4 stars, and in a sane world that would actually be good), then you get fired/no longer contracted. So if you give them anything but a 5 star rating, you’re saying “This person should be fired.” That’s an insane standard for the gig job companies to set, and at that point, if they’re not actually using the 1 through 4 stars because they all mean the same thing, they should just have a thumbs up or thumbs down rating.
In fact, I often don’t rate anything because I don’t feel like it deserves 5 stars, but I know what it does deserve - when it’s a fine 3 or a perfectly good 4 - would be a significant blemish on our “5 star or it’s garbage” rating culture. So I’ll get an AirBnB room and it’ll be fine, not great, but acceptable, and want to rate it 3 stars, but I know the owner would consider that to be a shockingly bad rating that would jeopardize their standing and I just avoid rating it at all. I guess I’m probably contributing to the problem of polarized reviews by doing this. The whole thing sucks.
I seem to be in the minority, but I find anonymous internet reviews very helpful. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the number of stars, I read the details. Especially when I want to use something for not-exactly-standard purposes, I can often find the detail I need to know whether the item will work for me in the reviews.
There’s another effect we see with review distortions that is more common with media reviews but bleeds into other domains too. People think they’re important and that therefore their opinions must be important. Their reviews shouldn’t just be lost in the crowd as if it were merely equal to everyone else, they’re special.
So they think they should make their opinion “louder”, to sway the rating more, by giving a more extreme version of their rating. For example, let’s say there’s a hyped movie that’s expected to be really good but just ends up being okay. Maybe a fair rating is a 6/10. But this person bought into the hype and posted about this movie on social media. They feel like it’s a huge disappointment that it wasn’t as good as they hoped. To register their displeasure, and to register how important their opinion is, they give it a 0/10 instead of the 5 or 6 it deserves. Or on the flip side, there are people who decide that being fans of something is part of their identity, and therefore they can boost themselves up by boosting that thing, so they give it a 10/10 even though it really only deserves a 5 or a 6. This sort of idiocy is super common in something like IMDB ratings, but I think they “I’m important and my opinion should be louder!” effect creeps over into other ratings too.
These are services where the real rating should be Pass / Fail. An eBay seller (or Uber driver) either does a professional job, or is dangerously incompetent. There isn’t a lot of interesting nuance there because it’s supposed to be boring and uneventful.
It’s extremely common in video game ratings. That’s a mess to tease apart because whenever something doesn’t fit exactly to their expectations, many gaming fans will review bomb the shit out of games. I most recently saw this with Diablo 4, which is currently having some development problems because they released a game before it was fully realized. For what it is, it’s fine, it’s a moderately entertaining way to pass the time, it is not at this time an excellent game, but the potential is there with further development. Lord you would think Blizzard shot these people’s dogs with how they carry on about it and how they downvote the game into oblivion. Just give it 5/10 and go play something else.
An unsung hero of retail used to be the ‘buyer’ - the person responsible for determing if a product should be sold in their store. They were the real reviewers. Walmart or Target or Nordstrom don’t want to sell substandard products that aren’t worth their price, and they don’t want to give precious shelf space to products people don’t want. Back in the day, getting a buyer from a big chain to even look at your product was a big win for a lot of companies, and an order from a big retailer would make or break you.
Now it looks like Amazon and other online retailers will sell any piece of crap people want to push, because they aren’t taking up valuable customer-facing shelf space and don’t incur inventory costs. So they push all decision-making down to the reviewers, making them very powerful. And where there is power and money, there is corruption.
Facebook is even more insidious, because advertiers push garbage products and then botnets fill the post with glowing comments about how awesome the product is. One caught my eye a while ago - a phone charging ‘battery bank’ the size of a phone, with a 2" X 6" solar cell on the back. The company claimed that the bank could be fully recharged in a day, and would provide two full charges of an iPhone.
The math shows this is flatly impossible*, but there were hundreds of glowing comments about how awesome it was to be able to charge with solar power, and it could indeed fully recharge in a day. Sprinkled through them were the occasional real reviews stating that the product did not work as advertised and actually took more like a week to fully charge in the sun, if it worked at all. But they were completely drowned out by the shills/bots.
People have learned to treat formal reviews with a grain of salt but it’s more insidious to have hundreds of fake users discussing how awesome the product is.
The same thing happened with the ‘Archer’ TV show. It is absolute dreck now, but the official facebook posts are just filled with people saying, “This is the best, most hilarious season ever! LOVE IT!” again, sprinkled with the occasional, “Are we watching the same show? This is hot garbage and a pale imitation of what it used to be.” But the ratio of glowing comments to negative ones is about 10-1.
Strangely, on Rotten Tomatoes the new season of Archer has a 100% critics score, but a 40% audience score. Something tells me it’s not just user reviews being gamed… We are being spun, nudged and gaslit everywhere we look these days.
- Average solar flux is 15 Watts per square foot, for a peak average of 4.5 hours per day. A 2" by 6" solar cell is 1/12 of a square foot, so it will receive at best about 1.5 Watts, and in 4.5 hours of peak sunlight would be exposed to 6.75 Wh of energy. At 20% efficiency, that’s about 1.4 Wh being pushed into the battery. An iPhone battery is about 12.4 Wh. So count on about 10 days to fully charge a phone, or 45 hours of direct sunlight. In the real world, the power bank isn’t perfectly angled to the sun, and there are few perfectly sunny days. So real world performance will be less. Don’t buy one of these, unless you want to trickle-charge your phone or don’t care about the solar aspect since it’s almost useless.
Huh. I can, in fact, charge my iPad with solar power; via a Sunjack.
That requires a fold-out setup of 4 panels, each about 5 1/2" by 9", which, given a reasonably sunny day in upstate New York, will give me about 3/4 of a full charge for the iPad, or something better than a full charge for my flip phone. Granted, the setup is now several years old. But they’d have had to improve a lot for a single panel 2" x 6" to do anything much.
Yeah, there are battery chargers out there with decent folding solar panels that will charge in a reasonable time.
I’m talking about one of these:
First review: “Solar charging is a joke. It took 10 full days for the charging to move from the second LED blinking to the third one. So roughly 10 days in the sun for 25% increase in the charge level.”
The same basic device on facebook had hundreds of comments stating that solar charging was awesome and charged the thing in less than a day.
In the Amazon case, the ad is just misleading, but not an outright lie.