I recently read a very interesting post by Andrew Leonard (http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/the_hive_mind_goes_shopping/) about online reviews, and attempts by software companies to (as we say in the high tech world) "productize" them. The question is valid: In an online world with an overwhelming wealth of information about almost everything, how do you weigh reviews and make a buying decision?
Certainly the online world is swamped in reviews; we've gone from an era where there was often a paucity of data to one where there's so much filtering it is harder than finding it. But in my view, there’s a huge problem with reviews on the Web. There are almost always just two types: The rave, and the pan. That is, either you see posts that say the item is the greatest thing since sliced bread, something you absolutely can’t live without, something you should buy NOW NOW NOW! Or it’s the worst thing ever, you should avoid it at all costs, and the reviewer can't believe he or she was stupid enough to buy this, wants their money back plus some compensation for the pain and suffering caused by this awful product, and wishes he or she had the time to go to company headquarters and burn it to the ground.
Not a lot of middle ground there. Seriously, think about it: When was the last time you saw a 3-star review on Amazon, or a middlin' review on Yelp? Rants or raves; that's what the Web reviewing universe seems limited to.
In the first case, some portion of the 5-star reviews are by company marketing or sales people, puffing up their product and artificially ramping up their average review score. The rest are written by random people who love the item, but rarely give you any good info on whether you might love it. "LOVE THIS!" "GET IT IMMEDIATELY!" "CAN'T WAIT FOR THE SEQUAL!" (Both types of reviews are rife with misspellings and all-caps, in case you hadn't noticed.) A 5-star review from Random Guy is often just as useless as asking a random guy in the store.
In the second case, the case of "the rant", it's almost always because the person is mad simply because of one problem, that sometimes only they had. The controls don’t work like they want them to; they had a bad support experience; they didn't read the "required hardware section", and the app crashes on their hardware, and they're angry about that; their cat spilled iced tea on their tablet and now the app doesn't work right, plus he had to take the cat to the doctor because of her hypoallergenic reaction to the tea, and I want my money back!; or something of that ilk. Again, they frequently don’t have any solid information, and don’t give you an idea why the item is only a 1-star product.
So what is the careful consumer to do? Over time–and I’ve been online reading reviews since the CLI/USENET era, so I’ve had some practice–I’ve found that there seem to be a couple options that work. The first one is pretty old-school: Find a web site and/or reviewers you trust (such as my friends at Gear Diary, www.geardiary.com), and read their reviews of whatever product it is you’re considering. For this method, consider how you poll movie reviews as a model: How often do you go to Rotten Tomatoes to see what the score is? And why is that? Because the reviews that they aggregate are from professional reviewers! How often do you check to see what your favorite reviewer said? Because you trust their reviews to be thorough and informative. This is what I do most of the time for high tech; I search “gear diary review [item]” to see if we’ve reviewed it because I trust those folks. You can do something similar.
If not, it's on to option two:
This might seem a little counter-intuitive: Just read the most negative reviews. Yes, most of them are poorly written, with bad spelling and sometimes barely-concealed explicatives. Often, they are focused on a single problem–in iTunes, it’s often that a reviewer had an early version of the app that crashed, or they have an old iPhone or iPod touch and the app doesn’t work on old hardware, or something of that nature. But at least in the negative reviews you can find out about bugs and problems with the item. If there's a large number of rave reviews, and every 1-star review talks about the same app crashing problem that was fixed in the more recent versions, well, you have a pretty good idea of the app, don't you think? Certainly you get more data this way than man of those glowing, five-star reviews, which almost always fail to give you any data at all and are thus useless.
So read those negative reviews, grab the data, and start buyin'. Because you don't want to be stuck in the situation as the poor folks in this XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/1036/
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