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Yup, and the most common usage is product ratings on Amazon, which I find a complete waste of time, even before they became corrupted by massive rating-spamming. The metric I find useful is the ratio of negative (1-2 star) reviews to positive, in the product category (some categories seem to have higher usage failure rates, or POd users or something).

The average is a waste of time

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It's still possible to get somewhat of an accurate understanding of what you're buying if you read some reviews.

I read ~10 two star reviews, ~10 four star reviews, much more depending on price. One stars tend to be full of stuff like "product hasn't arrived", "garboage", user errors. Five stars are plagued by spam and paid reviews, and also a lack of details. Three stars seem to be split between very picky buyers (esp. hate the "I paid $3.50 for this and it's not the omega particle!") and people afraid to leave lower ratings for reasons.

Agree for sure, and some good notes there! (My comment was merely limited to scope of the averages issue.)

Definitely must read a decent sampling to see if there's a common problem, or it's mostly just malcontents, delivery issues, or misunderstanding the product or instructions, or just random issues. I've found in doing this that I'm usually surprised on the good side.

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