[2mur]

My chief tech/gadget metric of recommendation is 'Would I purchase this $expensive_electronic again?' I'm a big shopper at Amazon, but I don't care about the exact breakdown of stars a certain product gets. My usual method is to look at the total number of reviews (as a metric of popularity/community etc), and then to read the 5 star and 1 star reviews (and any that get voted up as most helpful).

I would love to see Amazon go to a binary recommendation system (thumbs up/thumbs down) with a free text review.

[dhimes]

Sometimes, learning about the nuances is helpful, and they seem to be in the 4-star (and even 3-star) reviews, especially when there are many 5-star reviews. That is, the reviewer says things like, "I would have given it 5 stars except ___." I zero in on those reviews to try to understand any edge cases in usability or suitability.

EDITED for embarrassing grammar mistakes