I see your point. I hardly ever navigate to the page you describe. After I get the product or book, if I go back at all, it’s usually to the product page to look at comments.
But you’re right. The place you’re taking about should say “Feedback about the vendor or transaction.” “Feedback” should be distinguished from “Product Review.” But you know what? Most people won’t bother to read or notice. Unfortunately.
Actually, many reader reviews are long, detailed, well-written, and extremely helpful.
Reviews are meant to share overall product impressions, though, and to help you decided which of several options you might want to purchase. While “trashing” something with one star might not be appropriate, it’s certainly appropriate to compare a product that you’re reviewing against another product of the same type.
I remember that article. After it came out, Amazon got clogged with lame attempts at humorous reviews by people trying to get into part two of the article.
I’d like to see Amazon and other sites go to a weighted rating system. Specifically where once a review gets a certain number of helpful/not votes and a low enough helpful rating it’s no longer included in the average. Sure there will be abuses of that, but the current system is also subject to paid recommendations skewing the numbers. That just gives the code monkeys another project to figure out how to filter out the bad review ratings.
Or have the option in the drop-down menu “most ratings.” Then you can choose that and go to the left side of the window and select 4 stars and up. That way you don’t have something with 3 5-star ratings positioned above (superior to) something with 2,750 4-star ratings.