Why You Shouldn't Trust Internet Comments

sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that all the reviews you read on Yelp and Amazon are easily manipulated. It's not that companies are stacking the deck, necessarily, it's that a few positive comments early on can influence future commenters. In fact, when researchers gamed the system on a real news aggregation site, the items received fake positive votes from the researchers were 32% more likely to receive more positive votes compared with a control (abstract). And those comments were no more likely than the control to be down-voted by the next viewer to see them. By the end of the study, positively manipulated comments got an overall boost of about 25%. However, the same did not hold true for negative manipulation. The ratings of comments that got a fake down vote were usually negated by an up vote by the next user to see them."

Yeah maybe subtle differences but not important.

[captaindomon]

I trust the article that there may be subtle changes in future comments due to past comments. However, there is still a very valid difference between a 5-star item with 2,000 comments and a 1-star item with three or four comments, and that is good enough for me.

Re:This slashdot thread

[camperdave]

Five stars [xkcd.com]!

Pressured by vendors

[stevegee58]

My wife has posted negative reviews on a certain vendor's website (from real product experience, not trolling) when a product she bought was unsatisfactory.
This elicited an immediate email from customer service offering various deals to bribe/entice her to change or withdraw the review. Companies are free to do what they wish on their website but that still struck me as disingenuous.

Re:Pressured by vendors

[neminem]

I actually have no problem with that - if done right. If the response was "I'll give you free stuff, but only if you remove your review", then yes, that is super sketchy. But a lot of times it's more just "I'm sorry that happened. Would you like to give us another shot on us? It was probably a fluke." And that is exactly what customer service *should* be like. If you go back and it was a fluke, then you change your review, and everyone's happy. If you go back and it happens again, then that company clearly needs to pay their other departments as much as their customer service department, but I'd still rather that than a response of "tough luck, go away."

Re:Pressured by vendors

[mwvdlee]

This is the way companies work these days.

Have a problem with a product? Don't navigate through dozens of useless pages on a support site, don't wait for an hour trying to get through to their helpdesk; post a complaint on twitter, wait a few minutes and they will contact you.

I wish this was a joke, but this is honestly how I deal with some companies nowadays.