The mind-numbing stupidity of Amazon reviews

Like the mind-numbing stupidity of your posts, OP?

Pointless bitchery, indeed.

OP, yes to all of this.

And it pisses off the authors when the ratings for the book go down because the book was delivered damaged.

Agreed. I hate it when people review Amazon's service rather than the product.

I find you can only really go off the average rating. If something is truly bad, enough people will downvote it, but no matter how good any product is you'll always find one star reviews. I sometimes think they're left by competitors.

When it comes to books, Amazon reviews should be reserved for delivery experience, packaging issues, material quality issues etc. If you want to read what people thought of the book itself, go to Goodreads.

My favorite review is "I don't know. I didn't receive it/it was a gift."

Reviews on Amazon have become impossible. As someone said no matter how high a product’s score is with 1000’s of reviewsthere are always one star reviews that insist the product is horrible.

I reviewed a cell phone tripod (for when you want to take pictures.) It had over 1000 positive reviews. Was cheap and unstable. Gave it 2 stars and explained why I found it a hassle to use. I was contacted by the company by email offering me 25$ to remove my review. They contacted me 3 times before I finally responded saying my review was fair and I wasn’t interested. I doubt I would have gotten the money so yeah, fake as shit.

I agree it’s not fair to ding the author with a poor review of a book unrelated to the content, but where else can you post a public review of Amazon’s crappy service? And as R7 points out the site is flooded with third party sellers perpetuating their own scams that Amazon does nothing about.

Enjoy.

Sometimes it takes three or four clicks to get to the review, only to read "I don't know I never used this product".

It's enshittification. Amazon has suffered from it for years.

FYI, here's what I think happens:

1. Someone posts a question about a product.

2. Amazon contacts someone else, asking that person to answer the question.

3. The person that Amazon contacted answers the question and it gets posted as a review. (E.g., "Not sure, I haven't tried it yet.")

I don't like the reviews that go like this:

"I bought this for my granddaughter and she loves it."

I'd rather hear from the granddaughter to see how much she really likes the product. Or doesn't like it.

R7 That's shady! I've been contacted repeatedly to leave reviews for products I've bought from certain Amazon sellers.

These days I only like buying from Amazon direct. There's a lot of really cheap shit from third party sellers.

“Much smaller than I thought it would be” = did not read description or doesn’t understand metric. Sellers take advantage of this by making the product seem larger in the photo and listing the measurements in centimeters. The strangest reviews I’ve seen were for a tiny mop bucket that could not fit a mop.

People are really dumb

Another bad thing about Amazon reviews is that they have never, despite this being a problem for years, been able to attribute reviews of physical media to the correct version of the product. For example, you could be looking at reviews of a movie and they won't be for the actual edition you are looking at, either because the system lumps everything under the title or something else. They tried to fix this years ago by adding a way to indicate what version you were submitting a review for, but it still seems to be an issue. You can't really be sure what a review pertains to most of the time.

And, yes, with physical media dying out this isn't probably at the top of the list of things to finally fix.

I don’t do this with Amazon reviews, but the ones I read under recipes on cooking blogs can induce seizures with the eye rolling it causes. It’s very evident with healthy recipes, where someone posts that they added 2 cans of cream of something soup and 2 cups of cheese. Or the recipe calls for a squeeze of a fresh half of a lemon, and they don’t know what to do with the other half. (That one is a favorite of mine).

I recently wrote a review that got rejected because I wrote the price that I paid for the item.

And conversely, there are books that get lots and lots of five -star reviews that seem suspicious.

Fakespot can be very useful for detecting fake reviews r20

Some people who leave Amazon video reviews get paid if someone watches their clip and buys the product. It’s a real “side hustle” for many.

I love Amazon reviews! So funny.