What I'd like to see is an integration of reviews with identity like Facebook. Something where the person has to offer not just an avatar name, but a picture and a link back to a circle of Friends. It should be pretty easy to then vet the review from the person's Facebook, and see whether the account was created yesterday, or if it only has two posts and no Friends (or thousands of Friends...also suspicious).
Over time something like a Facebook identity can become established as much as a person's reputation in real life!
@Ariella - Amazon does need to refine its algorithm, but its on the right track. User reviews are an important part of what makes Amazon a good place to buy things. They need to safeguard the integrity of their reviewing system ... maybe they went a little overboard this time.
@Russell - Interesting produt. Definitely fills a need. It would be nice if I could go on Yelp and be sure that the reviews are real. I would like to see something like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for sites with verified reviews.
Now if you could only figure out how to keep headhunter spammers out of my college alumni association page on LinkedIn ....
I'm one of those people who like to read user reviews. Seeing low ratings will give me pause, but I prefer to read about what they liked or didin't like rather than just seeing a star rating.
An interesting question about reviews now arises as Amazon indicates its policies allow it to remolve author reviews of books:
Amazon sent author Steve Weddle the following email:
"We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product," Amazon repeated. The company added a new closing: "We have removed your reviews as they are in violation of our guidelines. We will not be able to go into further detail about our research."
Well I understand your point that you shouldn't put stock in the review becuase someone has a bad day, but what if that person was the one that wrote the review as well. The establishment did everything right but the customer that is writing the review thought they did something wrong somply becuase they were having a bad day. Now it seems the establishment was at fault when in reality they did nothing wrong. The customer is always right is not always true if you know what I mean. Some times the customer is having a bad day and results end up them having a bad experience.
I'm like you. I read the reviews but I am a comparison shopper so I pay more attention to the pros and cons and how the product or service meet my needs. So online reviews don't weigh very much for me. And after reading this article, it does not appear I can trust the comments anyway so I will stick with word of mouth from reliable sources or my gut feeling if it is a major purchase.
I read the reviews but I could not say it effects my buying decision, at least it does not seem so. What I value is a comparison chart that gives me idea on different options and pros and cons. Also I know social medial is a big player in buying power. If my friend has it I would at least ask myself why wouldn't I?
Re: "If you see a really good or really bad review, and there are only two or three reviews on that user ID, you can usually bet they're a shill or a competitor and safely discard anything they have to say."
This is certainly the theory Yelp operates under, auto-filtering these kinds of reviews from ever being seen in most cases.
These days, however, I'm not so sure it's an accurate assessment. Yelp's filtration system is pretty well known to businesses these days. What's more, as pointed out here in the comments and in the article itself, there are people who make livings writing reviews for people -- so the biggest shills and liars may have hundreds of reviews to their names!
It's probably more useful with positive reviews. Contrary to what criticized small businesses would have you believe, I am really not convinced that there is much going on for fake negative reviews out there because so little is gained by them and one can get in even more trouble for those.
Also, remember this: What is the reviwer's motivation? If they're on Yelp or TripAdivsor or whatever all the time, have a zillion reviews, and especially if they're "Yelp Elite," then they can probably be blindly trusted as non-shills (although, as I identifed in earlier comments, their reviews may be problematic for other reasons). Otherwise, you have to look deeper.
If the review is negative and the reviewer is CLEARLY ticked off, well, that's motivation enough. If a business ticks a person off, it's been estimated that that person will tell as many as five times as many people as if that same business pleased that same person. A person gets mad. A person wants to use their social influence to wreak vengeance upon the entity that wronged them.
If the review is positive, then there may be different motivators, and you really have to read the review for context.
I totally get not wanting to put much stock in reviews because of the differences between people and their life experiences.
While I completely disagree with the notion that we shouldn't put stock in reviews because a point of contact person may have been having "a bad day" (because ultimately the why doesn't change what a customer experiences; if I'm going to spend time and money on something, I don't want someone else's bad day to become my bad day as well).
But your overall point holds water with me. "The service sucked" is a far less helpful comment than comments like, "The waitress did this. The waitress did not do this." "The service sucked" could, as you suggest, mean almost anything. I place little to no weight in reviews like that. Instead, I look for reviews that explicitly describe things that happened -- and then judge for myself the likelihood of something like that bothering me and the likelihood of it reoccurring.
As soon as retailers figured out just how much influence reviews had on other consumers, they jumped. And that's when the whole idea of 'unbiased' reviews went down the drain. I've seen a number of listings looking for reviewers to give their 'honest' opinions on a certain product. If it was four stars and up, they were instructed to post it. For three star ratings and below, they were asked to email their reviews.
Everyone still gets paid but only the good reviews get posted. I don't really see any fairness or absence of bias in that. I put more weight into the specific/text part of the review rather than the stars or rating as well. That's where you can tell if they really used the product or not.
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