[smoe]

What has helped me a lot making better purchasing decisions on sites with a ranking system ala Amazon is only reading the 3 star reviews (or whatever is in the middle)

The 5 stars are somewhere between suspicious and just not that useful because of people being overly excited and the 1 star reviews is often people just having bad luck or not understanding what the product is and for whom.

Meanwhile the 3 stars I feel are the most sober ones, often pointing out flaws (and every product/service has them), that I can then make a more informed decision whether those flaws are going to affect me at all or going to be a show stopper.

That's why I'm a bit skeptical about the use of sentiment analysis or similar, independently of how well they work. I'm not necessarily convinced that excitement is actually that good a signal. E.g. there are many movies, books, etc that are generally well received but I don't like them at all. Doesn't make the other people or me wrong, I just have different expectations and preferences.

Similarly for tech services I would prefer having a much, much easier time being able to map the systems capabilities and limitations to my use case and budget than knowing whether other people like or dislike it.

[y4mi]

Honestly I don't see a 5 star rating as being euphoric/excited about the product.

The 5 stars are basically baseline if the product is good enough for the price it's sold at. Giving anything besides a 5 star is a massive FU to the vendor, as dropping below 4 is basically a death sentence for the listing. That can be warranted for sure, but only if there was something very wrong.

The biggest issue I'd see with your approach is how hard it's going to be to separate bots talking to each other from actual people writing these messages.

Most research on the matter seems to conclude that anything between 25 and 70% are written by bots.

The high range is because it's actually quite hard to confidently assess wherever a message is written by a human. Surprisingly not because it's hard to classify bots, but because people often write borderline incoherent messages too.

[smoe]

I don't disagree with you, and I should have written better that I use them as part of an overall evaluation process.

As an example how I use them. Some time ago I was looking into buying a audio hardware unit for music production (advanced hobbyist use I guess). Superficially, from the marketing copy and some reviews I have skimmed it had everything I wanted, like Midi in/out connectors.

Then I went to the 3 stars section and one of the first comments said:

"Great device, but had to return it, because it doesn't support part X of the MIDI protocol."

Whether this is written by a human or a bot is irrelevant. What matters is, if it is true and if it affects me. In this specific case it simply didn't matter to me, so ignored the comment. In case it would have, the comment would have served as a red flag to do further investigation to see if the claim is true.

I don't do an elaborate process on everything I buy, especially not low cost every day dispensable items (just buy different brands over time until I stumble upon one I like), but the more specialized the use case and the bigger the buy in and cost of reversing decision, the more I wish I had better tools to figure out whether a product/service actually matches my use case.

[Ntrails]

> The 5 stars are basically baseline if the product is good enough for the price it's sold at

That is absolutely not my interpretation of such a scale. I would naturally map 5 stars to "exceeds expectations". If the best a product can do is meet expectations, how do you disambiguate from the truly excellent?

One of a multutude of issues with reviews is our differing interpretations of what a score represents

[y4mi]

So, would you ever consider buying a product that has less then 4 stars?

Very few would, which means that giving anything but a 5 star effectively means "I don't want you to ever sell this product again"

[wanderingstan]

In the early days of the “sharing economy” I gave a Taskrabbit cleaner 4 stars, thinking “they did a really good job!” But they called me nearly in tears asking what they had missed to get five stars.