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Comment by juujian | Hacker News Reader

At this point, aren't sellers gaming the system enough that the overall rating has become effectively meaningless? Individual reviews, maybe useful. But its not like the olden days where you could scour amazon for good products, ideally you would have a good idea what you want before even visiting the site.

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I still find them useful. I use rating volume + ensuring rating is above 4 + checking whether the brand has a legit amazon store/landing page mostly to try and avoid duds. Individual reviews are useful for specific questions. As much as it sucks these days it's still better than going to your local durable goods retailer, having only one option to choose from with no ratings at all.

For me rating volume can be a red flag. Any product that has over 1,000 reviews and isn’t something has been on the market for years, I automatically deduct a star or two in my mind. People just don’t leave legitimate reviews at that kind of rate

It usually means their product is cheap, not terrible enough to get <4 stars, and they paid for a high search position.

I wish this were true but my purchasing experiences tell me otherwise. There's a lot of awful products with a high volume of good reviews. To the point where for common household products, the decision of the Walmart or Target purchaser is usually better than me picking between a dozen generic Chinese products with 4.5 stars. And it's easier!

One hundred percent. Not to mention the possibility of receiving counterfeit goods even when purchasing name brand on Amazon.

There are plenty of items that have been replaced with a different one but maintain the previous product's high review volume. Also there are those with a huge number of fake reviews. I look at the 1-2 star reviews. If they are dumb ones like box was damaged or shipping slow, that is good. If there are 4000 reviews saying "Great product" and 30 saying it went up in smoke with pictures, I am not buying it.

That's my take.

I do my research elsewhere (which has it's own problems), and then check Amazon for specific products (and these days, they often aren't any less expensive for name-brand items).

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