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97 points healsdata | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. rsync ◴[] No.44380149[source]
"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."

Strongly disagree.

IF there were a generally decent and functional and efficient review forum and IF it were painless and friction-free to leave a review, then I think reviewing a product insightfully is something that adds real value and makes the world a (slightly) better place.

Unfortunately, the fora for this kind of activity are either nonexistent or laden with pathological baggage. Reviews at Amazon are unusable at best, fraudulent at worst, and I hear nothing but bad things about "goodreads".