Anyone feel like there's a hefty misrepresentation of product quality on reviews/user generated replies these days?

[Tech_Dreamer]

What do you have to say ? Post Your thoughts & comments down below..

 

#Rep'Lies'

For much of the time, we rely on the good oll comment section & visual reviews(Youtube) & written reviews of a hardware product for our research purpose before we commit to buying a product,  when you reserve your research criteria to  "certain specifics" (first/best rated comment/popular reviewer/brand badge/site popularity & ranking) it seems to be always on the plus side mostly when it comes to certain popular companies (not naming any here & i'm not talking about a specific hardware) , Now i'm not talking about specifics , i mean as if a brand(new or old) product or a new hardware like a PC case is being pushed out as favorable by the majority (which in real world performance fails to reach that level of standard on what you saw or heard)

 

When you broaden your research circle you get a lot more info that can be rather negative to what you've heard from the products earlier from the mainstream sometimes

 

(example image of )

 

5 star replies example

 

feel as if the review reply sections are teeming with false reassurance of the product by seemingly "random" commenters from the internet , i feel like there's a legit foul play taking place when it comes to these areas , could be fixed review by an industry affiliate or company fed/payed reviewers , but if they even get a hold of 30-40%(rough estimate) of the entire reply as in representation of the product , it tends to mislead genuine buyers/researchers

 

Samsung was caught up in a similar predicament last year or so when they hired people to write positive reviews for their phones who were being payed who had no experiences with the product , common sense will tell yo it's happening loosely, but these days the overall competition is tight & sellers would take any measures to sell their products & i feel as if most of the reviews which supposed to seem genuine might not be genuine at all . don't take it wrong , there are genuine people who are writing things that are often truthful & less exaggerated on a neutral tone , if huge companies take measure like these , pretty sure most of the companies who have nothing to loose use the reviews for basic marketing purposes , What do you think ?

 

Reply Rules:

Please don't discuss based on a specific brand as an example excessively on the discussions,

Please don't be biased on a certain individual brand

don't feed the trolls & or the fanboys on their shoulders!

[Noirgheos]

35 minutes ago, Tech_Dreamer said:

-snip-

It's been like this for a while now. Never take reviews on retailer sites too seriously. If there's anything wrong with the product you're looking at buying, official and reputable sites would have reported it.

Edited August 27, 2016 by GoodBytes
Shrunked massive quote

[Hero7750]

Not gunna lie thats pretty funny

[Curufinwe_wins]

In fairness, both Amazon and Newegg allow you to sort for "verified purchases". You just can't take the stupid crap aggregation at face value.

[manikyath]

my general means of digging around custommer reviews goes the following way:

- find the 5 star comments, see why they praise the product so. (ignoring the ones with useless garbage)

- find the 4 star ones: what was wrong with their product that lost it one star.

- find the bad ones: who was really dissatisfied and why.

 

based on those 3 factors, you usually get a fairly good representation of the product.

 

- the 5 star commenters are the ones who wholy love the product and tell you all its upsides

- the 4 star ones will point out tiny flaws, or shortcomings that do not completely "kill" the product.

- the bad ones are either self-entitled idiots, or had a seriously bad experience worth reading.

 

example out of reviews about replacedirect.be, a local webstore for replacement parts for laptops and vareous othter devices: (one of the rare moments you'll see me name and shame, you'll see why in a bit)

- 90% 5 star reviews

- all 5 star reviews say "product arrived and works 5/5"

- 4 star reviews point out the flaws, like i mentioned

 

- literally every single baddie was this, slightly paraphrased:

Quote

i ordered X on replacedirect, and it arrived broken/was the wrong part/is not what is advertised. custommer support is rude and unhelpful, every reply email comes from a seemingly different employee, after the fifth reply you realise it's just a random footer stuck below their message, which comes from india for all you know.

i'll never purchase anything from replacedirect again for the following reasons: -all that went wrong-

i was one of those people where it went wrong, and to be honest... there's a reason every negative comment was the same: if it goes wrong, it goes wrong in the same way every darn time.

[Marinatall_Ironside]

Just now, Curufinwe_wins said:

In fairness, both Amazon and Newegg allow you to sort for "verified purchases". You just can't take the stupid crap aggregation at face value.

Yeah I would agree. That's why I really don't take the customer's reviews too seriously, as most of the time they're biased and/or they didn't thoroughly test the product in question. I'm right now in the process of writing a review for the Corsair 900D, as I've owned it for over six months and I've had a good time playing around with it and testing it out for myself. I have given myself an extensive amount of time to do so. It's almost finished. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RrDdg6B8LFHhTxZQnu4h-O1ERS1dY9L-_FcUQuCYwM0/edit?usp=sharing

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 minute ago, JurunceNK said:

Yeah I would agree. That's why I really don't take the customer's reviews too seriously, as most of the time they're biased and/or they didn't thoroughly test the product in question. I'm right now in the process of writing a review for the Corsair 900D, as I've owned it for over six months and I've had a good time playing around with it and testing it out for myself. I have given myself an extensive amount of time to do so. It's almost finished. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RrDdg6B8LFHhTxZQnu4h-O1ERS1dY9L-_FcUQuCYwM0/edit?usp=sharing

You should throw that in the forums as well... So many people recommend the 900D without ever having used it and man I wouldn't buy it for half the price...

 

Also this is just me, but modern motherboards rarely have enough usb 2.0 headers to allow you to actually plug in all 4 front ones AND a pump and a wireless card... I'm actually glad in this way my case doesn't have any (because then I would HAVE to plug it in you know... and then I wouldn't be able to use something else... Or would need to buy a 3.0 to 2.0 header adapter...)

[Marinatall_Ironside]

Just now, Curufinwe_wins said:

You should throw that in the forums as well... So many people recommend the 900D without ever having used it and man I wouldn't buy it for half the price...

 

Also this is just me, but modern motherboards rarely have enough usb 2.0 headers to allow you to actually plug in all 4 front ones AND a pump and a wireless card... I'm actually glad in this way my case doesn't have any (because then I would HAVE to plug it in you know... and then I wouldn't be able to use something else... Or would need to buy a 3.0 to 2.0 header adapter...)

Thanks. I have to refine it, finish it up, and get some pictures of it. What's your advice on it?

[Curufinwe_wins]

Just now, JurunceNK said:

Thanks. I have to refine it, finish it up, and get some pictures of it. What's your advice on it?

Seems good to me. You might want pictures, and commenting on your impression of hardware dwarfism in the case would be good (if or if not you think it is an issue.)

[Marinatall_Ironside]

7 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Seems good to me. You might want pictures, and commenting on your impression of hardware dwarfism in the case would be good (if or if not you think it is an issue.)

I have no issue covering hardware dwarfism. Hell I even said it for what it is.

[BrightCandle]

There are two problems that are making reviews a bit problematic and its why gamergate happened.

 

1) The primary sources of reviews, the review sites we read and "trust" are mostly not trustworthy. They have a basic conflict of interest driven by needing free gear to drive content for their site and they can't bite the hand that feeds them. Companies can always find someone else so typically reviews are all positive. Its not even as bad as just being directly paid and sponsored without declaration (which also happens, Linus has done that a few times) which is illegal but very common but just a simple business conflict of interest. The company might also be sponsoring adverts on your site and you need those to survive.

 

Sometimes its as simple as reviewers not wanting to bash on a product that isn't final, this happens a lot with games. If you come across a bug and you are on pre release code you report it to the devs who assure you it will be fixed for release do you put it in the review (and be wrong on release day) or not (and its still there in the game). Its a bad situation so typically reviewers don't antagonise pre-emptively, which is why launch day reviews are usually missing important technical problems and those videos come later if the problem is bad enough. So waiting for the day 1 reviews isn't as good a strategy as many think it is.

 

The professional reviews we read aren't truthful for a variety of fundamental reasons and its the norm.

 

2) Amateur reviewers don't know what they are doing. They either have nothing to compare it to (most likely) but also they tend to review it too early in the purchase and rarely update the review unless something goes really badly wrong. A lot of reviewers have no idea what they are writing and so they just talk about fast shipping and being well wrapped but not about the product, so the grand majority of amateur reviews are kind of awful and don't get you anywhere. It isn't their fault, they don't have much to compare it with so if it works then they are happy but it might very well be the worst example in the marketplace and on Amazon that might make it 4.1 stars instead of 4.2 for the best.

 

Amateur reviews are also quite often paid for, I have been offered money multiple times to adjust reviews and get the product cheaper/free if only I could say a nice thing about it. I always insist that my initial issue still be in the review and also the subsequent review had been paid for (as is legally required) and hence I have never actually ended up adjusting it but I bet a lot of others have. Worse than that you have companies that do reviews for products to get them going on places like Amazon and so quite a large chunk of initial product reviews could very well just be fake. On other less ideal marketplaces you may even find the comments moderated to remove negative comments entirely.

 

So amateur reviews are usually garbage and when they aren't they are often fake or sponsored in some way and you can't trust the place publishing the comments as they choose what is on there. That makes good reviews with important details the minority overall.

 

 

We have never had it as bad for getting quality reviews as we do today. The move from print to the internet for reviews has been extremely problematic, with the customers now not funding the site at all and all the money coming from advertisers the model has changed and the review sites are basically just an extension of the marketing of the companies that make the products, only a handful of sites don't appear to do this regularly in one form or another (and I'll laugh if you think LTT is one of them because they got warned by the Canadian advertising standards agency just over a year ago). Amateurs are well amateurs and they are just as corruptible in different ways but usually don't know what to say.

[ForumTryhard]

Want to know where to find quality/no bs reviews? LinusTechTips!!! (Not a sponsor) !!!

[Canada EH]

Quote

Its not even as bad as just being directly paid and sponsored without declaration (which also happens, Linus has done that a few times)

This is perfectly legal. But the laws are changing. But I know what you mean.

[BrightCandle]

14 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

This is perfectly legal. But the laws are changing. But I know what you mean.

It isn't in most of the world, although it currently is in Canada. But Europe and the USA definitely illegal.

[Canada EH]

No its not currently legal in Canada. They are changing the laws on that for next year.