That brings up another big Amazon issue. Reviews for related but not identical products hey thrown in together. It's supposedly the same product in this case, but different vendors. So the product reviews aren't the right place in this case. Sometimes these get grouped in the same listing and you can see vendor ratings under purchase options (clicking "new & used"). I feel I've seen this not frequently with books though. Talking about books. Here Amazon throws all versions together. Kindle version has typos from bad OCR? That review is now going to be for all versions. A foreign language book has multiple translations? All get the same review. I recently wanted to buy a particular translation of The Brothers Kamazorov. That was a incredibly frustrating experience. Several versions available didn't list the translator in the description. One I found the right one and clicked on Kindle version I'm surprised to see a totally different translation. On top of that the bulk of the reviews are talking about how a particular translation is bad. It's just a giant cluster fuck.

I get the sense that there’s something wrong with reviews, too. It’s as if it’s far too restrictive to be able to write a negative review or the seller has far too much freedom to prevent negative ones from posting.

My anecdotal case was buying a lamp for a DLP TV. The seller claimed to provide a 1 year warranty and mine burn out after 11 months. However, there was absolutely no means to contact the seller. I tried reached out to Amazon to get it, but to no avail. Finally, I resorted to leaving a negative review about the product and seller. Within a day I was sent an email saying my review violated some rules that state I’m not allowed to be critical of the seller, only the product. I was flabbergasted. So I rewrote it without any direct mention of the seller and the same thing happened. At that point, I just gave up. The seller is still there, selling non-existing one year warranties.

There are item reviews and seller reviews - they are entirely separate. In this situation I would definitely agree that it is too restrictive, because seller reviews are limited to 90 days after purchase.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=aw/...

I bet part of Amazon’s motive is the fact that people are more likely to buy something if the reviews are good, and there’s a lot of them.

Maybe. Funny enough though I looked into buying The Brothers Kamazorov a year ago or so and have up because I didn't know what translation to buy and the reviews all being mixed together just fed my confusion and I have up. I only came back to it because someone on a podcast recommended a particular translation.

Could you name the podcast and the translation?

As almost everything I talk about it happened on econtalk: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/02/jordan_peterson.htm...

The translation is by Constance Garnett. They only mention the book in passing. If I wouldn't have been wanting to read the book since years and called Russ Roberts highly the podcast wouldn't have made me want to read the book. It was in no way the topic of the episode or even close.