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Slashdot Asks: What's the Worst Review You Ever Saw on Amazon? (slashdot.org) 176

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared his story about the worst tech book review he found on Amazon in 2019. Stephen Few is a respected author and speaker whose books on data visualization and analysis are well-received. But when it comes to Amazon reviews, you simply can't make everyone happy, a particularly good example of which is a one-star review he received for The Data Loom: Weaving Understanding by Thinking Critically and Scientifically with Data.

So, what is it that the reviewer didn't like about Few's latest book? "THIS IS NOT A BOOK ON WEAVING TECHNIQUES," complains P. Dennis in her 1-star review, "Was not paying attention, I guess. Very disappointed."

Amazon shows potential buyers that 5 people found Ms. Dennis's 1-star review helpful, while hiding 6 comments that complain about Amazon's allowance of the 'ridiculous' review [including two from the frustrated author, who asks, "Would you give J. D. Salinger's book 'The Catcher in the Rye' a 1-star review because it is not about baseball?"].

And that kids, can be the difference between a 4 and a 5 rating on Amazon if your book is lightly-reviewed!

I still remember when Amazon shared their own favorite fake customer reviews, posting on the front page of Amazon in big orange letters, "You guys are really funny," and adding that "occasionally customer creativity goes off the charts in the best possible way."

But sometimes their reviewers are just stupid.

Leave your own favorite examples in the comments. What's the worst review you ever saw on Amazon?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashdot Asks: What's the Worst Review You Ever Saw on Amazon?

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  • THIS IS NOT A BOOK ON WEAVING TECHNIQUES

    This may not be fair, but, at least, it is still a marginally-useful review. It is bad, but not the worst.

    The worst is when some aspect of the sale the criticized — like "package was damaged" or "it arrived late" — these are completely useless. Amazon offers a separate place to review sellers, but still some people would stick it in the review of the product.

    And it works both ways — not just lowering, but also unfairly upping the score of a product for it arriving quickly...

    • Its pretty useful as most people who will find the book are searching for loom and etc related weaving hobby books. The author of the book named the book in a "cute" way but its a dumb way in the seas of data. He should have expected it. Leads me to believe the book is just s bunch of bs and the guy will complain that you werent paying attention if you say that his poetic writing style is in there just to hide that its all just a bunch of bs

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The worst are "only used it once but worked great" reviews.

      There's usually another that says "been using for 6 months and my penis is still only 8cm NOT RECOMMEND" if you scroll down a bit.

      Amazon should block reviews for the first week at least.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

        The worst are "only used it once but worked great" reviews.

        Online reviews are essentially shit for determining if a product is going to last. Most people don’t bother writing a negative follow-up, and those who do get drowned out by all the “Just plugged it in and it works great!” 5 star reviews.

        I bought one of those electric tankless water heaters from Amazon a few years ago, and it sprung a leak after 2 years. I went on there to bitch about it, and noticed the bulk of the reviews still are positive ones from recent customers. Well, yeah, it d

      • The worst are "only used it once but worked great" reviews.

        No, the worst are the "haven't tried it yet but it looks OK" reviews.

        • ...or the "Only one star because it got broken in the post and the seller had to replace it" reviews.

    • And it works both ways -- not just lowering, but also unfairly upping the score of a product for it arriving quickly...

      The hope is that the stupidity goes equally in both directions (which statistically is probably true). And the positive stupid reviews will cancel out the negative stupid reviews. If all products get a similar proportion of stupid reviews, a product's overall review score is not preserved, but its ranking relative to other product reviews is.

      This also gives you a way to tell if a revi

    • Absolutely. There should be some kind of Slashdot like voting: negative voting (1,2) requires to choose from "broken package / slow delivery / product did not meet my expectations".
      • by stevel ( 64802 )

        Amazon used to allow one to rate a review as "not helpful", known in the reviewer world as "negging". While this was useful at times, most often it was used to punish a reviewer whose opinion you didn't agree with, and that option was removed.

        Amazon, like many other retailers, doesn't care about the quality of reviews, only the quantity. And I say this as a "Top 1000" (used to be Top 500) Amazon reviewer and "Vine Voice", who takes care to write useful reviews for everything I can.

    • Apparently you can change the name and all the properties of a product and keep the old reviews, which can skew your scores. This is why reviews may suddenly change half-way down. This sometimes shows up as a rating distribution with two peaks. You can also get this if something works on some computers but not on others, or breaks easily for some users. Or if one product has been substituted for another. Or if all the friends and relations of the seller gave it five stars. All these give the same distribut

    • Also whether the item arrives late or early isn’t under the control of the seller sometimes. I remember ordering something in which the seller was 3 hours away by car. Seller shipped it next day. UPS took a week to deliver it. I could have driven to the seller’s house and gotten it if I’d known UPS would hold it in one of their transit center in my town for 6 days.
  • by Flexagon ( 740643 ) on Saturday January 04, 2020 @11:50PM (#59587974)

    For ratings, one of the worst for me is a reviewer who gave the product a low review because they used it for a purpose that it was clearly, and statedly, not designed for, and it failed for said purpose.

    For Amazon's more recent Q&A feature, the most annoying questions are dupes, including the ones that ask questions that are answered directly in the long-standing product description. And the most annoying answers, all too plentiful, are the ones that say some form of "I don't know.".

    • Say you are one of those sad souls still using an analog TV and you need to replace your DTV converter box.

      A heavily reviewed model has a lot of 5-star ratings, but it has lots of 1-star ratings. I never know if the stuff is really cheap Mainland Chinese junk or if there is a selection effect that mainly malcontents and the technically inept write the reviews.

      I found one product for which the reviews are accurate -- oil catch cans for a gasoline automobile.

      As a gas engine ages, it may start ingestin

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        So read them. Identify whether there are common themes within them regarding product quality and flaws, or whether they're being written by clowns that shouldn't be allowed on the Internet without supervision.

        "Delivered to my neighbour", "I needed a smaller one", "It said purple but this is puce" and "Instructions didn't say I had to plug it in" are reviews you can safely disregard.

        "In the second week of use the handle snapped while it was only half full, spilling hot oil over the cat and starting a fire th

      • I never know, however, if 1-star ratings are just "noise" or if they are a warning to be heeded.

        It's often more useful to read the 2-star reviews. A lot of 1-star reviews are just people venting because it arrived a bit late or they misread the description before clicking Buy or something, while 2-star are more likely to be people who have found a genuine problem with the item, they'd like to like it but found a serious issue with it.

  • Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WhiteKnight07 ( 521975 ) on Saturday January 04, 2020 @11:52PM (#59587984)
    XKCD [xkcd.com]
    • by STRICQ ( 634164 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @12:55AM (#59588104)

      This is better.

      https://xkcd.com/325/ [xkcd.com]

    • Amazon should weight the average based on how many (found useful - found useless) there is for a review. People prefer a click "useful/not" than to write a full review, thus the rating would be more accurate (more voting).

      E.g. for two reviews, one is 1* and one is 5*, the current rating is (1+5)/2 = 3. Now, say that the 1* is found useful by 1 person and the 5* by 6. including the reviewers (the reviewer counts as 1 "useful", of course).

      The weighted average comes as ((1 x 1) + (6 x 5)) / (1 + 6) = 4.4, in
      • (would not be helpful for the Stephen Few negative review case (6 people found the review "useful"!), but usually it would).
      • You're looking at this from somewhat the wrong angle: The biggest problem isn't bad reviews, it's gaming of the reviewing system, which makes things like "Amazon's choice" and similar totally useless since many/most of the top picks are based on gaming the system. You want to design it for gaming resistance as the #1 priority, and everything else to follow behind that.
    • https://www.amazon.com/review/RFWM0CFO0UMWY

      A mother praises a tissue manufacturer for the availability of bulk packages of their product. Not the worst review, but maybe a little TMI?

  • Are the one(s) that is/are a lie
    • by kerashi ( 917149 )

      Indeed, I bought a cookbook for my mom's birthday once based on its excellent Amazon reviews. What I received was a cheap print-on-demand book, with no organization, just a bunch of recipes in no particular order. Mom wound up donating it to Goodwill, and I picked her up a nice book at Barnes & Noble.

  • I've seen some unhelpful, ignorant, unfair, and downright stupid reviews but the funniest [amazonfunnyreviews.com] review I've ever read left me crying in my office for almost an hour.
  • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Sunday January 05, 2020 @12:16AM (#59588026)

    And that kids, can be the difference between a 4 and a 5 rating on Amazon if your book is lightly-reviewed!

    And that only matters if you are a totally anal author, because most humans realize that there must be something completely fake about a perfect 5.0 review, and most of them will end up as 4 point something even for a perfect product...

  • Would not buy again

  • Not on Amazon, but on NewEgg, I saw a review for a monitor that stated it ran World of Warcraft at "native resolution"

    • That reminds me of an xkcd famous: "Someone is wrong on the Internet".
    • Have you never met a World of Warcraft native? It sounds like you need to get to more cosplay events.
    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      Given that you could buy monitors that weren't able to run World of Warcraft at their native resolution, I can understnad the reviewer thinking this may be helpful information for prospective purchasers.

      Shit, even these days many games struggle to run properly at the native resolution of (e.g.) a Microsoft Surface tablet. Slay the Spire for example works just fine unless you have desktop scaling enabled (which you likely would, to make text readable) in which case it's an unholy mess.

  • are about as useful as Yahoo answers.

  • One of my books was reviewed as "really funny, but too long." I guess having more to look forward to doesn't work for some people.

    • "Too many words!". You're the Mozart of literature, aren't you?
    • by thomst ( 1640045 )

      Quirkz confessed:

      One of my books was reviewed as "really funny, but too long." I guess having more to look forward to doesn't work for some people.

      I've got you beat there, friend.

      <RANT>

      One of the reviews for my book was posted by a woman who complained about the fact that the main story didn't reach a conclusion in the first volume, and that readers would have to buy additional books to find out how it resolves. This, despite the fact that the book's subtitle is "Book One of American Sulla."

      She gave it 3 stars - which, on Amazon, because of the enormous number of paid-for, 5-star reviews (if that's what you're looking for, y

  • Wait. What? (Score:4, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @01:23AM (#59588134)

    Would you give J. D. Salinger's book 'The Catcher in the Rye' a 1-star review because it is not about baseball?

    I thought it was about bread.

  • Off-Topic (Score:3, Insightful)

    by drkshadow ( 6277460 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @01:49AM (#59588162)

    I was looking at reviews for a silicone o-ring, and I was reading a review about a chainsaw. I scrolled back to the top.. o-ring. I scrolled back to the bottom.. chainsaw.

    I see this not infrequently. Either their servers have had some considerable memory corruption leading to randomization of some reviews, or, more likely, they have a habbit of throwing a review for an item that someone ordered onto other items that Amazon detects as similar.

    Time and time again I see "verified purchaser" reviews reviewing a different product. It's incredibly frustrating -- enough so that I can't trust Amazon reviews at all. For anything. At all. I have no way of knowing if the review is actually for the given item.

    Separately, when I post reviews now I post the amazon item ID in the review.

    • This is a known strategy. If you have a successful product that you no longer sell, then you can change the name and the description and all the settings until the product has completely changed, but still keep all the old ratings. According to some people, Amazon themselves suggest you can do this if you are a good customer.
    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      This tends to happen when the product listing changes, or someone mislinks multiple products.

      Buying things like hard drives or a skirt that comes in 17 colours, you'll get a review for one size or colour that references design features just not present in the one you want.

      Or maybe there's a genuine issue. Could it be the inclusion of reviews from Amazon's international sites?

  • by quanminoan ( 812306 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @02:14AM (#59588180)

    I can't really trust Amazon reviews anymore. Seems like a number of things happen frequently:

    1) Paid reviews, farmed out to India etc. This even works for "verified purchases" for cheap items.
    2) Like (1), but to attack and lower the rating of a competitor.
    3) Sell a high volume cheap product then switch the title and image to a new more expensive product to capitalize on the reviews (yes, it happens - check the description of the reviews and you'll see it eventually).

    I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I've noticed. I purchased a grill cover that rapidly deteriorated from the sun and frayed in the wind after a few weeks, and am still harassed by the seller to this day due to my negative review. They have offered to more than return the money for a five star review. I won't do it out of principle, but I imagine others would be happy to accept.

    As far as I can tell Amazon isn't doing anything to fix this.

    • They're not. I got a letter in the mail offering to pay me for a review, I mean that literally, offering money. I took twenty minutes to talk to about it with Amazon. It's still up, with three thousand glowing ecstatic reviews and a few handfuls of people who said they'd gotten letters. One even posted a photo of his letter. Amazon is not helplessly besieged by fake reviews, they do nothing even when customers turn down the payment and report it.

      • Yep. I get a few emails a day for months soliciting for Amazon review scams from Chinese Marketplace vendors. All of 'em get reported to Amazon WITH SCREEN SHOTS, and they've yet to do a thing about 'em.
        It's made me avoid any marketplace sellers. They're all now guilty until proven innocent.

    • It's a hobby of mine to find fake reviews and start interrogating the seller while hurling racial slurs and threats.
  • NSFW- You've been warned

    Review for a buttplug : "It got stuck". Naturally, it was one star. Probably would have qualified for zero stars but Amazon doesn't allow that...

    I was looking at a link a friend sent! :P
  • Not a specific comment, but these sorts have always bothered me:

    "Product works great but arrived late... 1 star"

    "I ordered the wrong part, admit as much, and got a refund, but still... 1 star"

    "I damaged the product through blatant misuse and returned it for a replacement, but of course, 1 star"
    • This is good and necessary because Amazon makes it nearly impossible to review a seller in a way that users will see.
      It's a problem because Amazon makes it nearly impossible to tell which variation/color/model/flavor a person is reviewing (when there are multiple on a single product page) and actually impossible to see what seller they ordered from. (Amazon will actively police reviews and nuke them if they notice you mentioning the seller by name.)

  • Q&A is worse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @03:59AM (#59588286) Homepage

    The reviews don't bother me much. Unless there's a long list of negative reviews, I tend to assume good faith on the seller's part, and I don't recall that ever ending in calamity.

    On the other hand, Amazon's Q&A section is often the most disheartening section of the product page:

    Q: Does this product support $STANDARD for $TASK with $WIDGIT?

    A: I don't know. I didn't buy this product, and I've never heard of $STANDARD.

    Thank you, you insufferable muppet. You have the intelligence of a dead hamster, and appear to be most useful as an object lesson in the importance of birth control.

    I'm not aware of any profit motive behind posting answers, so I just don't understand why someone would waste their time. Sure, I've seen some obvious bots posting "This product doesn't do $BASIC_FUNCTION, so I bought $UNRELATED_PRODUCT instead and it worked great!", but these aren't even spam... they're just useless answers.

    • Re:Q&A is worse (Score:5, Informative)

      by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @04:15AM (#59588314)

      It happens because Amazon spams you with emails asking you unanswered questions from other users.
      People reply with those answers because Amazon begs them to answer the question.
      Amazon then doesn't understand the response, and includes it in the Q&A section.

      This is all on Amazon.

    • by novakyu ( 636495 )

      I just don't understand why someone would waste their time.

      Simple---Amazon sends them email asking "Can you answer this question ..." and most people are nice and answer saying that they can't answer that question.

      At the rate they spam their customers for those "crowdsourced" content, they ought to pay someone to remove at least ones like what you are describing.

  • Sounds like that's a good review to me. The book has a bad title and the review provides useful information about that. Many people will be glad to see that information.

  • ""THIS IS NOT A BOOK ON WEAVING TECHNIQUES," complains P. Dennis in her 1-star review, "Was not paying attention, I guess. Very disappointed."

    OMG, if a rope-maker buys a book about string theory and he is not entertained, it's the book's problem?

    If you can't read, perhaps you shouldn't buy books.

  • Positively skew the reviews for a prduct with your bots all day long, and nobody bats an eye.
    But oh no, if people keep disagreeing ... simply call it "review bombing", and ban them.

    Because PROTIP: All de-facto anonymous reviews are FAKETY-FAKE FAKE! Everybody but us naive users uses bots. All the time! YouTube, Amazon, you name it.
    Hell, we did it back in 2005 for our officially biggest site of the continent!

    And with the site maintainer being interested in maximum sales, guess where they are skewed towards.

    T

  • Great book gets 1 star review because it was badly packaged and a corner damaged. I know it is annoying, but the issue is unrelated to the book.
  • by nagora ( 177841 )

    The UK tax authority's review of how much Amazon owed on their billions of income is easily the worst one I've seen.

  • https://www.amazon.com/Baar-50... [amazon.com] This has 4.5 stars and is completely fraudulent. So, you really need to examine these reviews critically and even then completely disregard them.
  • I once posted a review not based on the product but on the service (or lack thereof) provided. The seller was furious and it was two months before I stopped getting e-mails from him demanding a change. This was after multiple messages and contacting eBay several times on the matter. The product was some power strips which also had USB ports Which brought up my review (paraphrasing)...

    "Product not received. Paid with debit card and gave seller my address. He didn't use this address but a very old one attache

  • by mark_reh ( 2015546 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @06:41AM (#59588526) Journal

    I was really into insects so I went looking for books about them. I found a book that looked perfect and took it home. It was called "Advice for Young Mothers". There was no mention of moths in it at all. I was so disappointed I took the book back and never went to the library again. If there had been a review system back then I would have given the book and the library a bad review.

    • That's nothing....

      I was looking for a gentle introduction to courting and got a book "How to Hug" ... it was volume 6 of a dictionary!!

  • at fakespot.com

    It seems to be pretty reliable at figuring out the quality of the reviews.

  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @09:09AM (#59588692)

    Before I buy anything online, I start by looking at the one-star reviews. If they all represent crankery or total misunderstandings of the product or book, I can safely move on to the five-star folk, who I can then filter to find out who really likes this item." I can then move on to the three-stars for the opinions of the more discriminating buyers,

    But if the one-stars include a pile of citations for one show stopping bug, that's a No Sale.

  • My favorite review was for what was a very a clearly labeled Asian chili sauce. The reviewer gave it a one star review because it didn't taste like sweet and sour sauce. They even stated in their review that they knew the product labeled itself chili sauce, they just hoped that chili sauce tasted like sweet and sour (which of course it doesn't) and left a negative review because they were disappointing that it didn't

    I wish I could find it on Amazon but after a few minutes of searching I've come up dry.

  • by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @09:56AM (#59588762) Homepage

    Amazon reviews used to be useful. After the flurry of Chinese manufacturers who create "review groups", they are pretty useless. As an amateur astronomer I know optics so when I saw questionable binoculars being the top sellers on Amazon with glowing reviews, I bought some pairs and did some quite rigorous reviewing, complete with calculating effective/true aperture, comparison images with other sets etc. I did post on my blog at the time: https://astro.ecuadors.net/amazon-best-seller-binoculars-30x60-ruby-lens-and-more/ [ecuadors.net] but also posted directly on Amazon. As a top-500 reviewer, my reviews got posted on top, which caused the wrath of the Chinese sellers. They reported me on Amazon as a malicious competitor, they had their armies of reviewers downvote me so that my reviews disappeared from the front page and I got demoted below top-1000 voter. They even responded to my reviews accusing me of being the "owner" of "Agena Astro", which is a big, quality US telescope retailer (and I am just a UK-based software engineer). Amazon sided with them largely, for example they let this one star review [amazon.co.uk] stand, but with 96 upvotes it still doesn't make the first page - only 5 star reviews do. But, they deleted and banned me from reviewing this bestseller set [amazon.co.uk] on which I had a 3 star review! They changed the name to BRIGENIUS, although it is the SkyGenius set from my blog post. It is not a useless set, but it is nowhere near the quality it is purported to be, or near to how much it costs, but Amazon does not want the people to know since they are fine with getting their cut...

  • Here is the Advanced Praise section of a book called, "In the Wake of the Willows". It is a sequel to "The Wind in the Willows" set in New England and many of the characters did not seem to appreciate the author (Frederick Thurber): “A squid could have inked a better book, and it would have smelled a whole lot better.” -- Haggis McBadger “You are sure to see this book in the newspapers, literally, after it has been pulped and turned into newsprint.” -- The Tidewater Beacon
  • Not terrible, but funny...

    "
    Itâ(TM)s wood.
    ?????? this hard drive is a piece of wood. I am not comparing it to a piece of wood. I actually opened the box and a piece of wood slides out. I donâ(TM)t know what to say I am just laughing. Wood not recommend. Tree-mendous effort went into this scam. If you are looking to branch out into carpentry this is a good place to start. Good riddance.
    "

    • by clovis ( 4684 )

      I've seen a number of reviews like that where the order was fulfilled with a piece of trash. It seems to involve vendors that specialize in sending the order to a wrong address. I suspect they ship something like a piece of wood so that the wrong-address recipient will throw it away and the actual purchaser's complaint order goes into a limbo of "we shipped it. not our fault you live in wrong place". But every once in a while they goof and the trash gets shipped to the correct address.

  • "Amazon shows potential buyers that 5 people found Ms. Dennis's 1-star review helpful, while hiding 6 comments that complain about Amazon's allowance of the 'ridiculous' review [including two from the frustrated author, who asks, "Would you give J. D. Salinger's book 'The Catcher in the Rye' a 1-star review because it is not about baseball?"]. "

    Duh. Everyone knows it's about whiskey.

  • I'm learning to read Japanese, mostly just for fun. "Fun", yea. Any way, I've seen so many reviews of various language learning books that got 1 star reviews (would have been zero stars if possible), not because the book was bad or unhelpful, but simply because the book was written *in the target language*! I buy a nice technical Japanese dictionary, it had a couple of one star reviews only because the damn dictionary is in Japanese. Which they could have determined from the "preview book" feature of the Am

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