One of my favorite things about the internet, is how often people buy things based on the reviews. “Five thousand people have reviewed it and it is four stars! I am going to buy it.” Here is the thing, those reviews are bullshit. Even if some aren’t fake, they are not a good measure for a product. Reviews are a strategy to tell you that a thing is great! Except, is it? When was the last time you saw something with a thousand reviews and a 1 star rating? You won’t, cause the second the first set of ratings appear, they will be five to four stars. The reason is simple, anything that has 1 star will never be purchased. So manufacturers are compelled to buy their own product and rate it high to initiate a purchasing spree.
Now, it is important to note that there are many reasons that reviews are garbage. I plan to break down a lot of those over a multipart series. While reviews do help us choose a product, it isn’t necessary. In my mind, the reviews help you with satisfaction of a product. They let you be confident in a purchase; however, the ten major products on the webpage that all have similar reviews are all going to work just fine. That’s the trick, reviews don’t help you find a super amazing product, they help you be satisfied with the one product you ended up choosing.
Over the next couple of posts, I will go over why reviews are useless (except for customer satisfaction):
- Reviews are bought (maybe not directly, but just giving a person a product to review will drive certain behaviors)
- Updating reviews allow companies to respond to defective stock easier (if the product breaks, they replace it, you move review up based on how you are handled)
- Products are purchased in higher volumes if they are advertised by the manufacturer (Game of probability – more purchased, the better the reviews will go)
- People buy products based on their price point (aka, reviews are subjective – what is 4 stars for you is not the same as what is 4 stars for someone else)
- How many people buy multiple large items (no one buys 10 vacuums and then reviews them – they buy one, it works well, it gets 5 stars)
- New products will feel superior to old products (what we were using, are being replaced for a reason)
- ??? who knows, by the time I hit number six, I will probably have some ideas to hammer on
So, after I break down all the points above, I will hopefully have explained why reviews are useless. Even if I do that, I doubt it will matter. The reason is simple, humanity needs order to survive. That means, when faced with thousands of options, we need to be prepared to make an appropriate selection. In order to do that, we need to choose some criteria to narrow the options down. In the past, it was going into a store and touching the tangible object until we found defects or benefits that made one standout more than the rest. Instead, we now rely on other people’s tangible experiences with products to guide us to a selection. Which is silly, I am trusting someone I don’t know to make a recommendation to me. And it is insane that I accept that recommendation over my own mother. Yet, we all do it, we trust strangers on the internet to help us buy commodities instead of going and touching the real thing in person. So, if I can get one person to take back control, I will count this project a success.