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97 points healsdata | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.405s | source
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mrweasel ◴[] No.44376983[source]
Online reviews in general are pretty useless these days. We know that sites like Trustpilot will take down negative reviews if you pay them, Amazon reviews are mostly bots and some sites have weird incentives for users to write reviews.

E.g. take reviews of business on Google, there's no link to actual purchases, but you get a star and a "Local guide level 4" or something if you do enough reviews. A family member runs a consulting business, he has a 2-star review, the only review. It's not made by a customer, just some random dude. What it looks like is that this dude just walked around reviewing business after business, based on look of their office perhaps. He's not customer of ANY of them. So now multiple business are trying to have these negative reviews removed, Google doesn't give a shit, so what are these reviews actually worth?

Most people who write reviews aren't exactly the most mentally stable people either. If you're not getting something in return, most people won't write a review, that just leave the nut jobs.

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1. dinfinity ◴[] No.44377202[source]
> Online reviews in general are pretty useless these days.

It depends on the contents and the number of them. If multiple/many negative reviews for something all mention a similar defect, you can be pretty sure it is an actual issue with the thing. It is then up to you to determine if the thing is still worth your time/money.

I will say that for some things the motivations of the reviewers are something to take into account especially. For book reviews on Goodreads I've found that animosity towards the author causes heavy overstating of the 'defects' of a book.