Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Online marketplace Amazon has placed a limit on the number of reviews shoppers can leave on the site.
In a bid to put a stop to false feedback, people can now write only five reviews a week of items not bought via the online store.
The change applies to most products and is part of efforts to clamp down on people selling positive comments.
The change is Amazon's latest step in its battle to ensure users trust its listings.
Hopefully this won't stop the sarcastic reviews that some serious products have attracted. They may be fake but they can be tremendously entertaining.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Friday December 02 2016, @06:01AM
I always like to read reviews in reverse-rank order... that is I want to see the ones written by pissed-off people FIRST.
Then, I reserve the right to determine if the product or the reviewer is bad.
Generally, I find the bad reviews by far the most helpful ones.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Troll) by arslan on Friday December 02 2016, @06:36AM
Wow... you have a lot of time on your hands..
I find the Q&A utility in amazon quite helpful in asking past buyers direct questions. I usually reciprocate as well when I get questions on my past purchase.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday December 02 2016, @06:43AM
I find usually if a product sucks*, it will generate a trail of unhappy folks.
This is my modus operandi on Yelp.com. I always want to see the bad reviews first.
* in the event the product is a vacuum cleaner, the converse is true.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @08:43AM
I always like to read reviews in reverse-rank order... that is I want to see the ones written by pissed-off people FIRST.
This. I want to see if the complaints in the negative reviews are things that would apply to my need or want of the product. All the gushing and stroking in the good reviews may mention a plus that may make the difference if I'm comparing similar products but the complaints can mention something that's a deal breaker.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday December 02 2016, @02:15PM
Generally, I evaluate a product first by the number of reviews it has, but then weight the 5- and 1- star reviews a lot less than the 2-4 star reviews.
Because let's face it, very few products are perfect or terrible in every way, and most of the 5- and 1-star reviews are from people who have used it less than a week so can't legitimately tell me how it holds up over time.
I make exceptions for 1-star reviews that were originally higher when posted weeks or months earlier, because they tend to be after a product failure following some actual usage and/or poor customer service response to an issue the user had.
Myself, I never add a review to a product if I've used it less than a few weeks.