An ad that showed up as I was browsing through the news. Bloody ridiculous…
I used to be part of Amazon’s program where you get free items to review. It’s even worse than people think.
I left negative or neutral reviews that just don’t appear on the listing, or the seller will contact you directly offering you more free things to upgrade your review, or they’ll just relist their crappy broken product and hope the reviewers write positive reviews (a lot of reviewers would just get free stuff and then write something positive without actually testing it).
Amazon reviews are totally unreliable, and even those sites and extensions that try to determine if a product’s reviews are legitimate aren’t very effective.
I just ask people directly to share their experiences now or create a post on Lemmy because it’s so bad.
Also what they’ll do is the product listing switcheroo, where they’ll sell some commodity item that’s not necessarily crap and get a ton of positive reviews generated for it, legitimate or otherwise. Then the seller will update the product listing to refer to a completely different item, but all the reviews from the old product are remain attached to it.
A lot of online retailers also filter out negative reviews for things. Sometimes this is because they’re shyster bastards, but sometimes it’s because the manufacturer(s) of said items bully them into doing it. Two I have personal experience with are Cyclegear/Revzilla, and Rocky Mountan ATVMC. Both of these retailers will refuse to publish negative or middling reviews for their private label “bands” in order to make themselves look better. That’s Tusk for Rocky Mountain, and Bilt/Sedici for Cyclegear/Revzilla.
One of the reasons I order almost nothing online anymore
So, everyone else finds a product with only 5 star reviews to be suspicious, right?
My strategy is to skim the 1-2 star reviews to see if they have any legitimate complaints or if its just personal bullshit.
Removed by mod
