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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  2719 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How important is crowdsourced feedback to you?

I've done a lot of research into reviews (because I was tasked once with designing an infallible reviewing system), and, conservatively speaking, 70% of all the reviews you see on the major sites are fake. (Where "fake" means purchased, biased, trade-for-product, etc., anything where it isn't someone spending their own money, trying the product out, and then reviewing it.)

And honestly, the entire model of crowd-sourced reviews is completely fucked anyway.

How many beds will you own in your lifetime? 5? 6? And the store has 30 models that are renewed every 2-3 years? Your review means less than nothing because you do not have the wide range of experience necessary to make an accurate assessment of the actual features of any bed.

Now, if you are a professional car or motorcycle reviewer, your opinion is also worth exactly nothing. Because all you ever do is drive new cars, and - at the absolute best - only 50% of car sales in the US are new cars, so your entire skillset is completely worthless for half of the people buying cars. (And that's best case. The real number seems to be more like only 15-20% of car sales are new cars. All the other 30+ million vehicles sold every year are used.)

Go through any 25 Amazon products quickly. Scroll down to the reviews section. Scan the first 10 reviews. Jump to the next product. Scan the first 10 reviews. Repeat.

You will see the pattern pop out pretty quickly. There will be one genuine review for each product (probably) and all the others will be fake. Over-general, vague, or even say in the copy "I got the product for free so I would write this review, but I don't care! I'd still buy it!"

Anyone who reads the comments/reviews for any reason other than entertainment, is simply fooling themselves.