alt Hacker NewsProduct and service reviews are completely useless now too, and have been for a while. Restaurant ratings are pure noise, everything is 4 stars and there is absolutely no correlation to the quality of food or service. None of it is real.
It's bleak out there, on the internet.
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> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too
> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too
One relatively minor counterpoint: amazon has seemed to resolve their review squatting issue. Several years ago, there were companies selling one type of product and getting 4* reviews, then swapping all of the product details for a completely unrelated product, presumably with a huge markup. So you might think you were buying a 4* say, hot water thermos, but if you actually read the reviews, they would all be for a USB charger or something. All the recent reviews would be much lower.
I haven't seen this in a while now. Or maybe they're just better at it :/
Good riddance. Reviews are just other people telling you how to live your life. Beyond it being subjective to the reviewer, there's really no upside in engaging with reviews. If it's a bad review, now you feel bad about having wanted to engage with something with abysmal scores (think: liking a movie then finding out it has a 32% on rotten tomatoes), or if it's a good review, it's useless because you were already going to engage with the thing being reviewed. You chose the restaurant for a reason, right? It sounded good.
We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.