I don’t fully trust reviews for people, places or things if they are too “glowy” (ex: This blender changed my life! This burger is the bestest in the world!), which alot of 5 star reviews seem to be.
I’m more liable to read 4-2 star reviews, I’ll read 1 star reviews every so often, if they look to be coherent and actually about the product and not about something uncontrollable (weather, if the thing arrived)or the person’s fault (did not read description, delusional).
I just read the 1-star reviews, and see if the reviewer is addressing the kinds of things that I consider relevant.
I don’t bother with the 4 or 5 star reviews. I start with the 1-stars to see if anything worrisome and relevant shows up, and then go to the 2-star and 3-star reviews. By then I know the risks, and whether I’m willing to take them. I do look at the relative numbers of high-star reviews, just as background.
Yes, I read the 1 star reviews, they tell me more, and I am suspicious that the 5 star reviews are planted by the marketing team, anyway.
I stopped giving any kind of negative review myself, after I gave a 3 star review to a restaurant I had not been back to in years and they had changed the menu and I couldn’t get what I went there for. I wasn’t nasty about it, just said I was disappointed, and the chef came after me and argued with me relentlessly about it, made it out like I was just completely stupid if I didn’t like his new menu, and sheesh I got better things to do. I don’t think some places are really interested in true feedback.
On the other hand a lot of the 1-star reviews I’ve read seem to be written by people who don’t understand how the item is supposed to work or who didn’t use it correctly. It’s like all those recipe reviews that start out saying how they didn’t like the dish but they didn’t use cream because they had none so used skim milk instead, and they had no cinnamon so used black pepper. You get the idea. I tend to look at the 2s and 3s.
I needed an fan to replace one that had died, and I researched idiot reviews for the one I was looking at. Lady says (paraphrasing), this fan is terrible. It doesn’t cool the room at all. You have to be right in front of it for it to work… You know, like a fan.
Yes, you have a very good point, here. The best info is probably the 2-4 star range. It is harder to find true, thoughtful, constructive reviews anymore. A lot of times, you just see 1s, which are probably a good percentage of people who didn’t use the product correctly, and 5s, of which many are probably fake. Looks like people like me are part of the problem, since I said I stopped giving reviews! :o I guess I should reconsider that.
I don’t trust ANY individual review, although I give more weight to ones that are detailed, supported by evidence, and don’t seem to be written by complete nut jobs. I do trust patterns, and once a few reviews of an item have been posted it’s not usually hard to see what patterns are emerging.
XKCD guide to star reviews
Something like this. I don’t trust any of it, but the detailed reviews give can tell me what to consider, and then I just have to find out any information I can, take my chances, and remember in the end the caviar is empty.
The problem with anything like this - product reviews, customer satisfaction surveys - is always the same; the scores drift to perfect.
I call this the Boxing Problem. In boxing, the traitional professional scoring system is called “Ten Point Must.” The idea of Ten Point Must is the boxer who wins the round gets ten points no matter what. The loser is awarded nine points, unless he was knocked down once, and then he gets eight, or knocked down twice, in which case he gets seven, and so on. Theoretically a judge could decide no one won the round and they both get ten.
Eventually all ratings systems become a Ten Point Must system. Logically, if you think about it, the standard rating for a product should be the midpoint. If I buy a coffee maker and it works, I should give it three out of five stars. Four out of five stars should, logically, be a coffeemaker that is substantially superior to other coffee makers of comparable price. Five stars should be a coffee maker that is clearly and remarkably better, by a wide margin, than a good coffee maker. I really like my coffee maker; it is easily used, has some settings for small pots and dark brews, and it’s worked fine for over a year. But that is what I expected. It’s a 3/5. It makes nice coffee and has a timer, but that’s why I paid money for it. It isn’t better than I expected or paid for. Yet 90% of the reviews for it on Amazon are 4/5 or 5/5, which is ridiculous, it’s a budget level coffee maker. Unless you were previously making coffee with dirt and an old bedpan, this is not a perfect coffee maker.
But it never, ever works that way. All ratings systems will drift to perfect or near-perfect scores unless something is wrong, and then the ratings start taking a point off. I’ve read innumerable reviews scoring a product or service 4/5 or 9/10 when the product/service was, judging by the comments, clearly subpar.
You can expand this to almost any ratings system… hell, performance reviews. In my company, “Meets Expectations” is considered a profound disappointment. You expect “Exceeds expectations.” and yet, logically, that cannot actually be true; the vast majority of our employees would logically be rated as Meets Expectations. Very few would be Exceeds or we’d be rolling in money.
If a ratings system is not deliberately, periodically calibrated, this ALWAYS happens.
Good analogy with the 10 point must system. I’d prefer to see a binary rating, the product was liked or not, and only ratings that include details on why or why not would be shown. There’s still no way to tell if they’re faked though.
Missed the edit window:
What drives me up a wall are the medical questionnaires that ask you to rate pain on a scale of 1 to 5. How on earth does an individual’s personal numeric rating of their own pain provide any useful information? My 1s or 2s that I routinely ignore might send someone else to a hospital begging for painkillers. If I have a 5 I’ll probably hit you over the head with clipboard if you’re making me fill out a form instead of giving me drugs.
Sure, but you ignore the idiot reviews and only take account of the ones with actual sensible complaints, which you can find in the 1’s, 2’s and 3’s. 4’s are so-so for usefulness. 5’s are a waste of time, I never find out anything useful.
Sometimes I read hotel reviews just for amusement. Somebody downgrades a hotel because there was a thumb print on a mirror. They check into an airport hotel and complain about the loud planes flying over. There was no little plastic stirrer with the packet of Nescafe.
Last summer I spent a month in Asia, using Bangkok as a base, and checked in and out of the same airport hotel four times. I loved the place, they treated me like family. Users panned it, said it was in a poor neighborhood (in Bangkok!!).
When I read hotel reviews, I say to myself, I sure hope I never meet any of those assholes when I travel there.
I usually start with the 1s, and work my way up. Mostly what I’m looking for is repeated complaints. It’s not hard to figure out who was using it wrong, or had an irrational expectation. If I see the same issue over and over (say “the fan housing is cheap, and broke the second time I adjusted it”), then I start paying attention.
Steam user reviews do this and it works surprisingly well. There’s still a lot of stupid individual reviews but for any product with more than few users it tends to give a fairly accurate picture of how good the game is. For a 5-star system there’s no reason not to give the product 5 stars or 1 star if you want to influence the rating as much as you can but with the binary system everybody just gets one vote, yea or nay.
It depends on what’s being reviewed. If it’s a writer whose work I know, whose tastes and style I like, I’m more inclined to trust his opinion. In general, though, I put no faith whatsoever in reviews of a generic nature, by someone whose opinions I know nothing about. I also in general tend to be biased in favor of reviewers,–of anything–whom I like for some reason or another (and it needn’t be rational). Overall, I’m a caveat emptor type consumer. I’m most cautious about anything advertised on television and I supposed the Web, most likely to take a review seriously if it’s in print, but then I’m of a certain age…
I trust five-star reviews if they are detailed and adress the points that I care about. I don’t bother with suspiciously dithyrambic or one-sentence reviews like “Item arrived on time and works great”.
Wish to describe the situation from the other side. My store is graded by the parent corporation based on customer ratings, but the corporation ONLY considers the 5-point reviews on a 1-to-5 point system. If you the customer don’t give the store 5 points your review is ignored.
I think this is stupide for a number of reasons, from people who on general principle never ever give anyone a perfect score (because no one is perfect) to, as pointed out here, the 2-4 ratings often give better information.
^ I’ve been complaining about this one for decades.
On a related note, I’ve been having to do some research on doctors and medical conditions lately due to the spouse’s recent problems. The average patient reviewing a doctor or medical practice frequently turns into a trainwreck. Highlights so far:
A person complaining about the hospital my spouse was recently at, saying their loved one with throat cancer went there and they “burned her throat with radiation” and “she never ate again”. I read that and thought… are you sure that wasn’t the cancer at work?
From my dentist’s practice: a woman complained bitterly about wisdom tooth extractions and how cruel the dentist was. She also complained he didn’t supply her with a waterpik to “clean out the holes”. Huh. I was instructed NOT to do that because you don’t want to disturb the scabs. But she talked about repeatedly “cleaning out the holes”. Then she was in excruciating pain, because it sounds like she gave herself dry socket. She then stated the dentist packed some “gunk” into the holes, which she was upset about because she hadn’t asked for that and cleaned it out again as soon as she went home. She didn’t want the packing, she wanted better drugs and said the doctor wouldn’t give her any good ones, no matter how hard she cried, and no one there cared… all of which, I might add, was contrary to my experience where the staff were very reassuring, the doc gave me plenty of pain meds when he extracted my tooth… and oh yeah, I didn’t keep messing with the extraction site. Well, yeah, if you don’t follow aftercare instructions you’re likely to have problems!
So the ones and nones in the ratings often provide entertaining reading, but they aren’t any more useful than the OMG LIFECHANGING!!! reviews. IF a 5-star (or 1-star) review is detailed, coherent, and logical it can be useful, but too often the ones on the extremes are useless.