🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:51:44 GMT, Warewolf <warewol...@shaw.ca>
wrote:

>Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> wrote in
>news:6ce15095-f3ef-4...@googlegroups.com: 
>
>> On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 8:55:01 PM UTC-7, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>> 
>>> But things are not what they used to be, that much is certain.
>> 
>> I generally agree, but you need a large number of non-professional
>> reviewers.  It works for computer games as there are enough people
>> reviewing things.  It seems to work fairly well with amazon if there's
>> enough reviews.  I find the same on rotten tomatoes, you have to look
>> at audience scores, the reviewer's scores are not to be trusted.  
>
>With Amazon, I tend to check the negative reviews as well as the positive 
>ones.
>
>All-too-often, the positive reviews are damage control by corporate shills. 
>>_<
>
>> However I keep trying to use Yelp, and have been repeatedly burned by
>> places that have high reviews, even with mid 30 numbers of reviewers.
>> Horrible burger places, chinese food, and repair shops that get very
>> high reviews.  Still trying to find a better way for the local stuff,
>> but doesn't seem to be possible, there just aren't enough people
>> able/willing to review to overcome the astroturf. 
>
>For a while, Yelp was deleting reviews that were posted my 'Non-Members' 
>and this hurt the sales of many businesses in my area.
>
>Nowadays, I can only assume that they're deleting reviews that bash their 
>(paying?) members and bolster the non-member 'riff-raff'. -_-
>
>It's why word of mouth is better overall. 9_9


The problem is that the damage control situation you mentioned above
is usually outsourced to marketing agencies that do a number of
things, from writing positive reviews to generating positive word of
mouth about their product or service, to writing biased articles.  

It goes back to what I was saying about honest journalism versus what
has happened in the online marketing space.  You can't trust word of
mouth any more than you can trust online reviews.

You might say "well I know these guys who have been on the CSIPG* NG
for years aren't paid authors" and yes that's true but its such a
miniscule sample size of opinions, that the only way you're going to
find useful info here is by finding someone in the last remaining of
the usenet community whose opinion aligns with your own 100% of the
time.  A unicorn I'm sure.

What I find most useful are reviews on places like Amazon and Steam
where there are such huge numbers of actual user ratings that the paid
marketing damage control shills have very little power to influence
the numbers.

I order stuff from Amazon all the time -- not so much games, but just
general products like tools to do something around the house or
whatever.  What I've found over the years is if it has a few thousand
reviews and a 4 or 4.5 star rating, it is unconditionally going to be
a great product.

Part of the reason that works is that Amazon indicates verified
purchases, and I don't think Steam even allows a user to rate the game
if they haven't bought it.  You can also look at the user at how many
games are in their library -- most marketing shills are not going to
build a library of 500 Steam games and spend 20 hours a week playing
them just to get one positive review in for one of their clients.