Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedbrooke | Hacker News Reader

tangentially related: I’ve been apartment hunting recently and it reminds me of a common occurrence for apartment reviews:

5 star reviews are all: “I did the tour and the agent was friendly/place looked nice”

meanwhile the 1 star reviews: “I actually live here and this place is terrible.”

no doubt they ask you to review 5 stars on the tour…

View on HN

Whenever I look at reviews for something, e.g. a restaurant, I always sort by worst and see what they say. If it's some dealbreaker like "I found a rat in my food", then I'm outta there. If it's "the service was slow this one time", I can live with it.

I don't pay any attention to the positive reviews at all, except just for the number of them.

yes, I’ve found a pretty reliable approach for apartments is if people are complaining about the fees in the 1 star reviews, it’s probably a pretty good apartment.

Other places have 1 star reviews mentioning mold, pests, break-ins, etc.

I use a similar approach for amazon reviews. If all the 1 star reviews are telling the same story then it’s bad. If there’s not much consistency then it’s probably fine. That and the percentage of 1 star reviews. generally I aim for <5%

Many places I toured offered $5 starbucks gift-cards for a review.

True. One more thing we just found out: only about 15% of what reviewers say is negative, compare to 56% for owners.

>"reviewers say is negative, compare to 56% for owners"

This is likely a misleading statistic, as dissatisfied owners are more likely to write and submit reviews than satisfied users.

Owners also have a lot more time to notice all of the stuff that's not quite right. The cars with touchscreens for example all have an absurd number of weird, sometimes very annoying, software bugs that come up in edge cases or only occur intermittently that you probably wouldn't notice if just taking a test drive.

Few car owners spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff their car didn't screw up or have a good basis for comparing those to a wide range of comparable vehicles.

Reviewers are also usually biased towards reviewing products that are good and/or interesting, and while that's also true of consumers, you'd expect reviewers to be more informed.

Familiarity breeds contempt?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com