I have serious doubts about taking the user ratings of products and services at their face value. If you’ve lived in an apartment that you really loved there’s not enough motivation for you to go out and write a review than the case if the apartment you lived in was really crappy — You had drug addicts as your neighbors and cops showed up on numerous occasions at 4:00 in the morning for information about them. In the latter case, you’d be frustrated and by writing a review you would get something back in the form of mental satisfaction. Given this, I am not quite sure how the reviews that I see online should be interpreted. Do you agree with me, or do I just not get the whole reviews thing?
Advertisement
Posted in: theWeb
Neel
May 13, 2006
Yes, people write online reviews more often when they are kinda frustrated just for the mental satifsfaction. Less when they really like something and very -2 less when they have a neutral feedback.
I do use online reviews to see the number negative feedbacks and to see how bad negative feedbacks are. well it helps -:)
Sid
May 13, 2006
So you agree with me that ranking products by the ratio of the number of positive recommendations to the total number of recommendations isn't useful, right? But look around and you'll see that's what most websites are doing.
-w
May 13, 2006
I think it totally depends on the attitude. most ‘white-hats’ would post good reviews too because, well, they’re ‘white-hats’ and I find that they really make an effort to improve the community in any way possible. So now, I guess the question is ‘what’s the ratio of white-hats to other-colored-hats out there?’, eh?
Sid
May 13, 2006
Let's say you live in XYZ Apartments and you wish to write a review for them. First you need to find an apartment reviews website, so you do a Google Search and probably pick the first result. You look at the website, create an account at the website you just found, figure out the user-interface, write a review and publish it. I think that's too much work. Most people are selfish so only the people who have had a real bad experience with an apartment would be motivated enough to go through this process to leave a review. The white-hats that you talk about, people who are concerned about presenting the correct picture, do exist but are very rare in the real world.
Now look at the apartment reviews at http://www.apartmentratings.com. Some of the reviews that are positive are like "The new management of the apartment absolutely rocks" and "Things are really starting to change now", etc. all of which seem to give a strong indication to me to have been written by someone from the apartment mangement itself. Now bring this factor into the equation and you'd realize that even some of the positive reviews are not really worth considering while interpreting the user ratings.
What is the most efficient way to interpret user reviews then?
-w
May 14, 2006
Agreed that, in the scenario you described, one has to go through a painful ordeal to fill in a positive review, and so might not do it. But I thought your original post was addressing “products and services” in general, and not just apartments.
So, if you consider a person who bought a product off amazon, most of the troubles you mentioned in your comment above don’t exist, right? There’s no need to search for a reviews website (because it’s amazon itself), no need to create an account (as (s)he already has one) and no need to figure out the interface. In fact, a regular shopper/browser would probably ‘piggy-back’ his/her review by sparing a minute during the next visit to amazon, right? If you haven’t already noticed in the past, maybe you should pick a few articles at random and check out the reviews.
So I guess (y)our conclusion should be that user reviews, positive or negative, are to be interpreted based on the product/service that they’re related to. what say?
Siddharth
May 19, 2006
Well, its like advice. You don’t neccessarily have to waht someone tells you, but that does not mean that yuo do not take their advice.
So also with reviews, you read them, and wether or not you be influenced by them is up to you.