[20after4]

When I'm buying a product on a site like amazon with 5 start rating scale, I find that all of the useful information is found in the 2, 3 and 4 star reviews.

1 star reviews are mostly people pissed off for some reason, people with unreasonable expectations, or competitors trying to hurt their competition. 5 stars reviews are either zero effort reviews from people with low expectations or they are outright fake reviews from people incentivized to inflate the rating.

The 3 star reviews identify key and serious problems with the product that the customer otherwise would have liked. Usually the most information is found here. 4 star reviews identify weaknesses in the product that the customer still liked despite the drawbacks. 2 stars often are the same as 1 star but from less critical people.

The only signal I pay attention to from 1 star and 5 star reviews is if there are too many of them it's a red flag. More than 10% 1 star usually indicates a serious problem with product defects. More than 80% 5 star indicates a product that's buying fake reviews.

[ipaddr]

Or that is just a simple theory that is easy for you to understand. 80% 5 stars might mean something else and 1 stars might mean as much as 2/5.

[20after4]

Of course it's a simple theory that's exactly the point. It has explaining power though and I find it useful YMMV. What I was trying to get across is that you learn more from the text of the reviewers who voted somewhere in the middle. The 5 star reviews rarely bother to say more than a sentence and they rarely include any useful criticism. The people giving 1 stars are often just pissed off for some reason that will not affect me. Stuff like "It wasn't what I ordered" or "they sent me a used product" - The signal is in the remaining reviews if you take the time to read them.