As someone who worked for a third party used bookseller, this was 8 months ago, we would always and I mean always dispute anything below a 3 star review. Many get thrown out. It was generally in the 40-50% range that we could get removed. Not much rhyme or reason...just dispute all of them.

Why? Isn't that a little dishonest?

More than a little, but I think the "why" is obvious.

Cause people have to sell to eat in our culture of step on the next guy to have a life.

And it encourages and even facilitates shady shit.

>Cause people have to sell to eat in our culture of step on the next guy to have a life.

A bit hyperbolic, but also applies to pretty much every culture which has ever existed.

Wait... living organisms have to get food in order to eat? Next you are going to tell me that they are in competition for finite resources.

Not only that, but if they don't eat, they starve.

You forgot to switch accounts.

Ok, I'll accept that, but you have to admit it looks like you're responding to your comment there. If you want to engage in constructive conversation you have a bit of work to do. Start with A) realizing you probably don't know as much as you think you do, and B) don't get so emotional when someone disagrees with you.

Because people write crappy reviews. I remember seeing a 1 start review for a video card that was basically "I ordered the wrong one and it didnt fit my system" reviews should be taken with a grain of salt.

Sometimes the reviews also don't match the rating. I see this happen all the time, not only on Amazon: "Great service, great product. No complaints." 1 star

I confronted someone who left this sort of my review on my mobile app to ask why they gave me one star if they were so pleased. It was the only review under five stars.

They said that they wanted their review to appear in the "top negative review" column since it didn't have a shot at the "top positive review" column.

I was dumbfounded.

I had a similar story - user said that even though their review is wrong, "I'll let it stay because I don't feel like changing it".

Really makes you question what is going on in the heads of people around you.

I noticed my ex-girlfriend rating our Uber driver 3/5 stars once we arrived at the airport. I asked her what was wrong with him. She said he was fine but it was just an average ride, nothing exceptional. And that she's only given out one 4/5 and zero 5/5's.

Not her fault. What choice do you have but to assign your own arbitrary meanings to each star, and how aren't those going to vary from person to person?

I never looked at 5-star rating systems the same.

I agree it's frustrating that most sites leave it up to each individual user to decide what each star rating means.

On the other hand, I don't think it's really a problem as long as users are consistent. It doesn't matter how "harsh" they are as long as everyone has similar odds of getting a harsh reviewer.

I do tend to leave slightly below-average ratings because I like leaving room for truly exceptional products/experiences to get a higher rating.

I used to see this very commonly on a site with a dropdown rating system. I believe people were selecting 5 stars and then trying to scroll down the page. Since they'd be focused on the dropdown it'd change their rating to 1 star. That was my hypothesis anyway.

Just because some people write crappy reviews is not an excuse for challenging all of the bad reviews.

Race to the bottom. Who will win?

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless?

Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans".

So if you leave a review for Batch A, but the product being sold is now Batch C, should the review still be displayed?

Even if there are some charitable explanations possible, the least courtesy would be to warn you that your comment had been removed and why. You could mark the comment as "outdated", it won't bother me (assuming something has really changed).

Here, it creates the impression that my comment was swept under the rug for some dubious reasons. And this is probably the last time I ever comment on Amazon. That does not really create a great trust in the system.

Steam does this to an extent with game reviews. Old reviews aren't removed, but they show separate ratings of "Recent Reviews" and "All Reviews", effectively reducing the potency of old reviews.

That said, video games these days can change a lot from one year to another, whereas almost all of the products on Amazon will not do so.

They actually have quite powerful tools, with a graph of reviews over time, the ability to select a custom time range from that, ..., I quite like their system.

I believe that got added to help people recognize and filter out review-bombing.

To others' point it could be in Amazons interest to have completely fake but real-looking reviews to promote their preferred products so this would then feed into that dark pattern.

Sure they can, but what about some of the products on Amazon which are mostly immutable like for example: Books.

A bad book is a bad book. Batch B of the said book is mostly a new "product" listing on Amazon with its own set of reviews and ratings.

Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something

This is OT but books can vary in quality too - specifically the paper used and the print quality. I was looking at "Physically Based Rendering" (http://a.co/bL8bjUw) after seeing the post here about rendering a scene from Moana and was disappointed to see comments about bad print quality. Hopefully this is fixed in a later print run.

>Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something

That is a good idea, but that still does not fix the aggregate data. When someone searches for "Coffee", the aggregate number of reviews is still considering that low-star review. So the "Seattle Coffee Beans" overall rating for Batch C could be a 4.5 / 5, but for all batches is a 2.5 / 5.

The easiest way to fix this is to remove old, out-of-date reviews. This should apply to positive reviews too, but I have no idea if Amazon is doing this.

Another approach is what Steam did - have a long-term rating and a "recent" rating. See "No Man's Sky" as an example [1] - a product that started poor, but improved over time. This helps prevent product brigading and gives vendors an opportunity to bounce back from negative reviews.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/

Not necessarily. The album Pinkerton by Weezer was critically panned at release but now regarded as perhaps their best album.

Tastes change. That said, you can still find those old reviews. Not so in all cases on Amazon...

Steam handles this by displaying the average from strictly recent reviews and the average over all.

For example, No Man's Sky was one of the biggest letdowns in recent gaming releases. It was later patched to be much better.

Check out the reviews here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/

I don't know if Amazon has this feature, but I've seen sites that let the seller answer back to reviews - for cases where the seller has addressed a reviewer's feedback, they could reply and say that this has been fixed.

Or make a new listing, and in the description mention what has been fixed.

Amazon has that feature.

This happened to a Firefox extension I wote. I wrote the extension and published it to the FF extension store and got valid criticism in reviews pretty quickly. I addressed the issues and uploaded a new version of the extension. There was nothing I could do other than reply to the reviews to show I had addressed the issue. This doesn't get reflected in the overall rating. After the reviews nobody seemed to want to try the extension. Maybe it was because of the bad reviews, maybe not.

I was doing this for free, so I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on. I'm not gonna fight the system, but there is money involved I could see how someone would.

Deleting older reviews isn't the only mechanism for handling stale reviews. They could add a decay function to the weighting in average review rating and leave the contents of the original review in place, for example. New versions of products could be treated as unique products, and thus reviews could be forked.

If Batch C is different enough from Batch A that the reviews don't apply, then should it even be the same product?

In some cases, yes.

Books for example. Some print runs are terrible. So even if the content is great, terrible print quality or construction can lead to bad reviews.

Some books have numbered editions. But if the content is unchanged, should they be different products?

i think the point is that had the review been 5 stars it would still be there...

I think they could do like ebay does: reviews in the last 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, ...etc. Or a similar mechanism. Sometimes I am not interested to old reviews, esp. technical books, as they become very quickly outdated. Deleting them implies deleted forever, though. Such information will be always lost, while it might still apply. I would simply give it a different weight.

Aren't those time limits on reviews only for reviews of sellers, though? Does Ebay also time-limit products reviews, reviews that are divorced from a seller? Do they even host those kind of reviews?

Uh maybe you are right. It's been a long time since I've stopped using ebay.

However, I am quite sure I have seen elsewhere this feature. It's not bad. It allows to have more recent opinions about the item.

the google play store does this -- reviews left on older versions of applications will be denoted as such. the developer response to comments is also made public, so a bad review on a 1.0 release could have the dev apologizing and saying it's fixed for 1.1, with the current version being 1.1.5, and one could infer (with enough faith in the developer) that the issue is resolved.

If a batch is different enough to warrant new reviews, it's a different product and should be sold as such. Consider beer and wine. Industrially manufactured beer doesn't vary much from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand. Wine varies a lot from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand and year.

Amazon already accounts for the date of the review to some extent. If you hover over the overall rating for a product you can read:

"Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases."

The App Store does a good job with this, showing reviews for a new version while maintaining old reviews. Of course products aren’t often “versioned” so this might requiring revisiting how products are posted/managed.

Its a serious issue if Amazon does not have this feature and still deletes reviews.

Yes. Because it represents how you've chosen to run your business. You are allowed to judge the business based on their previous behavior.

You can pick a cut off date. Like only reviews in the last 18 months used to calculate score and are shown.

Only verified purchases should count as well. A lot of people review stuff just out of spite or PR reasons.

Same for me. I wrote a 1-star review about Shelly Walling's book "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together". It simply disappeared.

Not only Amazon does that. Few times I wrote a review of a restaurant on TripAdvisor, and all of them are removed :( Good ones are still there. If they can't do that, what is the point of having user reviews.

> what is the point of having user reviews

Selling a marketing tool for businesses and products.

This happened to me directly on Logitech's website. It's why I'll never buy their products again. I received a wireless headset that didn't keep a full day charge longer than 30 minutes. I had to use it plugged in (powering) 24/7. I submitted a 1 star review stating my problem and they removed my feedback without even telling me. It was just gone a few weeks later when I checked it, hoping they hadn't removed it.