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Comment by tobtoh | Hacker News Reader

The (edit: average) Amazon star rating has been such a poor indication of the quality of a product for a very long time - at best, it's a weak indicator of which products you might check out first.

For me personally, the most valuable bit of feedback are the negative (edit: 1 and 2-star written) reviews - they are pretty much the only review content I trust. I'm looking for patterns of issues that multiple reviewers raise about the product.

The positive reviews have so little value when anyone can post a review. So many shallow positive reviews from unverified 'buyers'.

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I'm not sure I agree with this. I always look for and at the 1 start reviews, and I find that to be more useful than reviews I find anywhere else.

4/5 star reviews are useless, but 2/1 star reviews reveal a great deal of useful information about a product.

A bunch of 1 star reviews of "UPS damaged my product" indicates a product that's as advertised and isn't astroturfed (much?).

No 1 star reviews, or 1 star reviews indicating misleading advertising tend to indicate astroturing.

1 star reviews indicating product failures, support failures, DOA etc... indicate to not purchase the product at all.

It's not a pure indicator, but I've found it to be more reliable than other review systems.

Am I crazy, or does the entirety of your comment except for the first sentence agree with the person you replied to?

The second and third paragraph were cut off when I replied on mobile. This was clearly my mistake.

Yes, and yes.

I think we are in agreement - I didn't word my comment well.

When I was referring to the star rating, I meant the overall average rating of the product (ie what Amazon is trying to promote now over star rating plus written reviews).

When I mentioned the negative reviews, I was referring to the 1 and 2-star written reviews. I use the negative written reviews exactly how you described - and it's what I find valuable.

I mistakenly did not see the whole OP comment when I replied. This was my fault as I'm unused to using HN on mobile and did not do my due diligence to see the full comment.

A useful heuristic that I also use, but it's good to be aware that fake reviews go in the other direction, too, of sabotaging competitors' product reviews.

plus with some of the low star reviews you can compare what they stated was wrong with your own expectations of what could go wrong with the product.

the only two considerations for me are the number of reviews and the quality of the low star reviews for the same. the dates of reviews is very useful as well, if a product doesn't have many recent good reviews it can offset the number of reviews in my view

The smart sellers realize this as well. Often the most "useful" review is also fake. Let's just create a 2 or 3 star review and list out the pros and (fake) cons and get people to upvote it.

Source: I'm an Amazon seller.

The downside of this approach is for sellers to use this as a weapon. Pay people to buy a competitor's product and give it a nasty 1 star review. It becomes an arms race.

It is also super annoying when there are reviews like "came in three days not two. 1 STAR!!!" that are not product related. This doesn't even get into the commingling of product which is the real problem.

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