# Do you trust 5 star reviews? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 8, 2016, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156 "2016-12-08T00:43:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2016, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/41 "2016-12-09T16:52:10Z")
> [@kayT](#): > > 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 gave a five-star review to a place that has Cafetería right in the name. There was a 1-star review which said “this place was more like a cafeteria than a restaurant”… hmmmm-k then? Which reviews I look at depends on how many there are; I don’t give them more or less credit based on the number of stars but based on whether the writer can string a sentence and seems to know what are they talking about. Downgrading a restaurant because they didn’t have allergens information available - thank you, with my allergies I’d rather avoid it. Downgrading a Japanese restaurant because a lot of dishes had soy - if you wanted noodles and no soy, try an Italian next time. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2016, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/42 "2016-12-09T16:53:54Z")
[QUOTE=Staggerlee] And my favourite responses to 1 star reviews on there are from the Balmer Lawn Hotel in Brockenhurst, which rather than apologising, accuse the reviewers of dirty tricks and lying. Marvellous. [/QUOTE] Some of those manager’s replies are hilarious. I especially enjoyed the attack on a reviewer who found his room substandard (cracks in the wall, nonfunctioning toilet etc.). Why was the guest so focused on the _room_, instead of complimenting the lounge and restaurant? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2016, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/43 "2016-12-09T16:58:20Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > My biggest gripe against the star rating system is that all products start life with a very high or very low star rating, and there is no way to filter out that noise when searching for a good widget. > > For example, if I am searching for a guitar tuner on Amazon, I will sort by star rating high-to-low, but that just means that there are 500 weird quirky one-off gadgets with three reviews cluttering the good end of the spectrum. I have to click through a dozen pages of flaky obscure sellers with questionable merchandise before I find the item I really want. > I don’t want to see the gizmo with 3 five-star ratings…I want to see the solid performer with 453 ratings that averages 4.8 stars. > > But I suspect that a weighting system for sorting reviews is not in Amazon’s best interests, otherwise they would have created such a system long ago. I’d be happy with merely being able to specify to only show me items with a certain minimum number of reviews. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2016, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/44 "2016-12-09T17:08:16Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > … > I don’t want to see the gizmo with 3 five-star ratings…I want to see the solid performer with 453 ratings that averages 4.8 stars. > > But I suspect that a weighting system for sorting reviews is not in Amazon’s best interests, otherwise they would have created such a system long ago. > … OTOH, that’s pretty much exactly what iTunes and Google’s app store do. You see results presented in order of total reviews with some small weighting for favorability of reviews. The result is the first couple products in any niche take off and the rest of the hundreds (thousands?) of products in the same niche garner just a couple percent of total sales collectively. The top two or four products are 90-95% of sales. For a place selling data bits that are cheap to store and that somebody else paid to make that’s a good model. For somebody running a brick and mortar warehouse & logistics system trying to become ubiquitous that’d be ruinous. ---
**Author:** ![TBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c89c15/32.png) [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2016, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/45 "2016-12-09T19:42:41Z")
I read a few at either end, to get a general idea, then look at how many are at either end. If something has 500 5\* reviews, that means more than if it has 4 5\*'s and likely means more than the content of any of those individual reviews. Likewise the 1\* or 0\* reviews. (and fuck sites that 1 is the lowest instead of 0) Just judging by the ones I’ve read, I come across many more 1/0\*'s that come off as crackpots, than 5\*'s coming off as shills. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2016, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/46 "2016-12-09T19:46:25Z")
I can’t remember where I read this advice, but I saw a magazine article once recommending basically the same method as the OP’s. It said that when looking at the little “Customer Reviews” bar graph you just ignore the 5-star and 1-star bars and look at the middle three. The idea was that 5 and 1-star reviews are often written by shrills, cranks, and idiots, while 4, 3, and 2-star reviews are more likely to be by honest and reasonable people. If a product skews towards 4s it’s probably good, and if it skews towards 2s it’s probably bad. ---
**Author:** ![Staggerlee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/staggerlee/32/3134_2.png) [@Staggerlee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Staggerlee)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2016, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/47 "2016-12-10T22:49:41Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > Some of those manager’s replies are hilarious. I especially enjoyed the attack on a reviewer who found his room substandard (cracks in the wall, nonfunctioning toilet etc.). Why was the guest so focused on the _room_, instead of complimenting the lounge and restaurant? 🙂 The reason I saw those reviews was that my wife won a night’s stay and high-brow dinner at the hotel - so I asked around and met the manager who’d written those responses in person, after quaffing some fine wine. It is actually a ridiculously nice hotel, so I think he was right to defend it (I encouraged him to carry on in that vein). ---
**Author:** ![Randolph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Randolph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Randolph)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2016, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/48 "2016-12-10T23:13:15Z")
I received this thread at a discounted rate in exchange for my unbiased review. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2016, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/49 "2016-12-11T17:37:10Z")
I’m more wary of 5-star reviews if there are only a handful of reviews for something all together. If there are hundreds of reviews a lot of the 50 5-star ones are probably people who actually liked the product. If there are 7 reviews and 3 or 4 are 5-star…I’m going to see if someone else is selling it and has more reviews to read before I decide. > [@kayT](#): > > 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. We read a 1-star review of our current dryer. The person’s **only** complaint was that they didn’t like the 15 second “song” that plays when the load finishes. Even the product description on the store’s website notes it can easily be turned off. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2016, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/50 "2016-12-11T22:46:08Z")
> [@TBG](#): > > Just judging by the ones I’ve read, I come across many more 1/0\*'s that come off as crackpots, than 5\*'s coming off as shills. Same here. Either they’re disproportionately angry about a minor feature/bug like elfkin’s example (often one that’s a plus for me), or they’re only explicable as someone with a general grudge against the creator of whatever’s being reviewed. I do tend to mentally ‘downgrade’ 5 stars a bit, but they generally read as ‘someone who liked it was a bit over-enthusiastic’. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2016, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/51 "2016-12-11T23:10:32Z")
[Another XKCD](https://xkcd.com/937/) Which coincidentally highlights my point: I don’t pay any attention to the numerical ratings; I look at what people are saying. The Google app store, I think, handles this pretty well: Using their patented Google-fu, they go through the review and see when a whole lot of people are saying basically the same thing, in slightly different words, and then tell you what those things are that they’re saying. And then you can judge for yourself how important those things are. ---
**Author:** ![Anny\_Middon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/bc79bd/32.png) [@Anny\_Middon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anny_Middon)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2016, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/52 "2016-12-12T05:16:25Z")
I looked at reviews for restaurants when we were going on vacation. One place had a handful of 5-star reviews and a handful of 1-star reviews, nothing in between. All the reviews were pretty generic – “Great food! Wonderful service!” or “Bad food. Poor service.” I figured the 5-star reviews were owners or staff, while the 1-star reviews were owners or staff of competing restaurants. I guess I often take the 1-star reviews as being just as biased as the 5-star ones. The reviews that crack me up are the ones for recipes. I’ve got a bazillion cookbooks, but if I get the urge to try something new, it’s a lot easier and faster to look online. It’s amazing to me how often someone will give a recipe 5 stars, but the review will say, “I plan on trying this recipe soon – it sounds delicious!” Or a 3-star review will say, “I thought this was just OK. I didn’t have any limes, so I substituted lemons. I left out the cilantro and cumin because I don’t like them. I don’t have am 8-inch pan, so I used a 9-inch one. The dish was I thought bland and a bit dry.” Very helpful, that. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2016, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/53 "2016-12-12T06:12:02Z")
> [@Anny\_Middon](#): > > The reviews that crack me up are the ones for recipes. I’ve got a bazillion cookbooks, but if I get the urge to try something new, it’s a lot easier and faster to look online. > > It’s amazing to me how often someone will give a recipe 5 stars, but the review will say, “I plan on trying this recipe soon – it sounds delicious!” > > Or a 3-star review will say, “I thought this was just OK. I didn’t have any limes, so I substituted lemons. I left out the cilantro and cumin because I don’t like them. I don’t have am 8-inch pan, so I used a 9-inch one. The dish was I thought bland and a bit dry.” Very helpful, that. [The 908 Funniest Comments on Our How to Boil Water Recipe …](http://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/we-tried-to-tell-you-how-to-boil-water-then-some-funny-stuff-happened-article) > [@](#): > > “Not being very religious, I made the ULTIMATE mistake when preparing this for the parents of my sons Jewish girlfriend! Seriously?!? Sea Salt is NOT the same as Kosher Salt!?!?! How was I to know??? My guests were horribly insulted and my son is no longer speaking to me. Tagging this with the religiously correct ingredients would have averted a nightmare for me. Thanks for nothing Epicurious.” > > “Wait, does the water need to be at a full rolling boil, or is it okay if it’s just simmering? And should I wait to add the salt until it’s boiling, or is it okay to add salt to cold water? Is iodized salt okay? I wish someone would fix the clarity and detail issues with this recipe. Clearly there are a lot of us out here with questions.” ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2016, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156/54 "2016-12-12T22:15:41Z")
Only tangentially related to the thread topic, but the one which annoyed me was our yearly performance reviews at my last job. Workers were supposed to fill out everything like it was a bell curve. They might be good at one or two things, but on the whole they should be average or just above average. About half the employees filled it out one way and the other half maxed everything out. Then the managers had to go through and fill out their review of their workers, but if there was a significant difference between the manager values and the employee values, then that would cause a review crisis because the two didn’t agree. The solution would seem to be that, as the manager, you would put the baseline about 3/4ths up the rating chart. But then you’re basically agreeing with the employees, whichever way they went. So if they went high, you’re accepting that they’re good. just not quite as good as they say. If they went medium, then you’re accepting that they’re mediocre, just not quite as mediocre as they say. So they employees who filled the thing out correctly end up getting boned by the math, and the employees who filled everything out incorrectly get a juicier bonus, because of the math. So I guess, hint for those of you out there doing score-based self-reviews…cheat! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-trust-5-star-reviews/774156.md?page=2)