[mech422]

that just means the reviews skew lower, not that they need to be 'corrected for'...

If a good product has 1K 'bad reviews', and a crap product has 10K 'bad reviews' - the system it working.

Anything else is just gaming the system to inflate review scores across the board.

[mike00632]

When I shop for products on Amazon the problem is such that more or less all reviews are negative. In that case it doesn't matter if it's 1k or 10k, they simply drown out the positive/neutral reviews, even though I'm pretty safe to ignore the "this product was DOA" reviews. The review incentive structure is fundamentally broken.

[mech422]

eh - you can actually read all the reviews by rating...

if you feel only 3 star reviews are valuable, amazon lets you read just the 3 star reviews. If stuff is being 'drowned out' its because your trying to read all 500 pages of reviews?

To me, a much bigger problem is the fact that reviews on amazon are for totally different products then whats being sold (Sellers 'recycle' pages and change the product being sold - allowing them to keep the reviews and ratings)

So basically - I have to read the reviews 'most recent' first anyway..