Dear Lifehacker, I know a lot of online reviews can be fake, and others are just written by angry people. How can I separate useful reviews from crappy ones? I don’t want to avoid something good because someone lied, but I don’t want to throw my money away either. Thanks, Concerned Consumer
Title photo made using jesadaphorn (Shutterstock). Additional photos by Linda Tanner and Yi Chen.
Dear Concerned Consumer,
You’re right, online reviews can be tricky to navigate. However, there’s a lot you can learn from the general tone of online reviews. Scanning for commonalities across time or complaints is key. There are some places where reviews are useful, and other places you should expect to find fake reviews by the dozen. Let’s break it all down, and bring your salt with you — you’ll need several grains of it for everything you read.
Learn To Quickly Spot Fake Reviews
Whether they’re bad reviews from angry people (or competitors), or glowing reviews from a company’s management, fake reviews skew the truth. If you’re going to derive any use from the online reviews you read, the first thing to learn is how to spot the fake ones. We’ve offered some detailed tips before that can help you, and the big tells remain constant:
- No review history, or newly created, anonymous accounts
- An all-negative or all-positive review with no caveats
- A review full of empty adjectives and either pure glowing praise or seemingly unsubstantiated anger
- Exact, to the letter, details and proper names of products and services (to the point where only someone affiliated with the company would use specific nouns and trademarks)
- A review history that consists entirely of overly negative or overly positive reviews — an indicator of a troll account, someone who only reviews to vent, or conversely employees or PR for a company
Fake reviews can be more complicated and there’s no foolproof way to detect them, but the important thing is to turn your BS detector to high while you read. You usually have dozens to read through, so if any particular one seems fishy, toss it out. One thing to remember: Ignore outliers. If a review is overly glowing with nothing but great things to say, or overly negative with nothing but hate and vitriol, ignore it. You’re better off reading more measured and even-handed replies.
Be Careful With Reviews On Specialty Sites
Whether you’re looking for a doctor, a rental apartment, or a great university class, there’s a review site that caters to you. Sites that offer reviews on specific categories or products can be helpful, but they suffer from self-selection bias. In other words, the only people who submit reviews are often people there solely to complain, because they feel like it’s the only place to air their grievances.
Often the only reason anyone has to “review” their doctor or apartment complex is if they have a complaint they want others to hear. Happy people often don’t take to the internet to write paragraphs about their experience — even if they should to balance the scales a bit. Again, none of that is to say the reviews there aren’t useful or worth reading. You should just go in with both eyes open.
Read The General Tone, And Note Common Complaints
If you’re going to pick up anything useful from online reviews, you’ll need to learn to identify their general tone and pick up on common threads across reviews quickly. A single review is less valuable than hundreds that all seem to trend positive, or a dozen that all note the same complaint. A quick scan the user reviews and getting a feeling for their overall tone will give you lots of useful information.
Once you get a feel for what the general experiences of customers or buyers looked like, you can make good call for yourself. Too often we perceive a four-or-five star review as “OK” and anything less as unacceptable, but some of my favourite restaurants average 2.5 or 3 stars on Yelp. If I’d focused on star reviews only, I may have avoided them, but a scan of their reviews reveals that no one thought there was anything wrong — they just weren’t blown away.
Similarly, if you do see common complaints crop up in multiple reviews, make a note. If everyone reviewing an apartment complex complains about being able to hear their neighbours, you can safely assume that the place has thin walls. You can also use those common complaints to inform your experience and buck the trend. For example, if everyone reviews a pair of headphones poorly for being “too bassy” but everything you listen to is bassy and you like your headphones that way, they may be the cans for you, no matter what the reviews say. Keep an open mind, and remember, online reviews almost never tell the whole story.
Check For Updated Reviews Or Feedback
Some of the most interesting and enlightening reviews I’ve seen are on sites where companies are allowed to respond to reviews left on their businesses. Newegg is a good example of this. Comparing motherboards feature-by-feature is helpful, but there’s something great about seeing a company rep responding to reviews and offering to help people who have had issues. One of my favourite neighbourhood liquor stores has a manager who’s well-known for taking customers to task in Yelp reviews who reviewed them poorly for a problem of their own making, or outright lied. That honesty and passion for their business is one reason I love the place.
In both cases, you can learn a lot from the responses, and the subsequently updated reviews. Whether they reach out and offer to help, go the extra mile for their customer, or just clear the air, sometimes you find someone you want to do business with, regardless of what the actual customer reviews say.
Stay Skeptical, and Contribute Your Own Reviews
It’s important to take whatever you read with a grain of salt, positive or negative. Every review you see will come filtered through the lens of the internet. In some cases that means reviewers forget that a real person, a lot like you, is on the other side of the screen. Similarly, anonymity does strange things to otherwise normal, honest people. With luck, you’ll have enough reviews for whatever you buy or wherever you plan to go that you can pick and choose what’s useful. Even if you can’t, sentiment is what’s really important.
Many people say they just read the negatives and look for commonalities, or just read the positives and look for balanced experiences. You can go that route, but doing either blinds you to the validity of the others. A smart reading (or smart speed reading) or everything will serve you better on most sites.
Finally, when you do visit that restaurant, or buy that product, make sure to come back and leave your own review. The only way to make online reviews legitimate and useful is to contribute the good ones that you and other people actually want to read. Remember, the internet is what we make it.
Cheers
Lifehacker
Got your own question you want to put to Lifehacker? Send it using our [contact text=”contact form”].
Comments
8 responses to “Ask LH: When Should I Trust Online Reviews?”
As a general guide, ignore all reviews that rank as either 1 or 5 stars. These people contribute very little. Only focus on reviews that are 2-4 stars as these will generally have points validating their point of view.
I think with online reviews I personally trust those that have the person’s picture and also as to whether they’ve made more reviews. A one off review by one person does not really hold much of a ground in my book. However from a business point of view no matter if the review is fake or not its best to respond to them as soon as possible because our response is not neccesarily targeted for that person but to the enteire world. The problem is how fast we respond to them. Unfortualenly most of us busy and don’t really have the time to troll around to find out about our own business. I’ve come up with an idea that I think will help businees. Its called SayBack (www.sayback.com.au) where people like myself could quickly receive and respond to online reviews whehter its positive or negative and I think this could help us to bettter engage with our cusotmers no matter if its fake or not.
“I’m too stupid to work out how to use your service/product/app/game, so I’m only rating 1 star until you fix it.”
Generally I consider that for every bad review there are about 100 happy customers who didn’t feel the need to share the fact that there expectations were met.
I’ve found certain industries or services are more likely to have overwhelmingly bad online reviews. Eg: Airlines or car rental
People love to write reviews of restaurants and hotels because they like to think of themselves as experts and its fun. On the other hand, did you flight turn up on time after an easy check-in process? No-one is rushing to the internet to tell the world about that.
Always check the complaints, they will give you the best indication of shoddiness, and the Whirlpool forums are a priceless resource, always check them out
+1 for checking Whirlpool, as that site has everything I could ever want when it comes to researching info on stuff to buy.
I looked at some bluetooth tracking devices (the Trackr specifically) and found some reviews on Amazon. I was able to quickly tell what was a genuine review and what was bogus or an angry jerk, as I went in knowing roughly what to expect out of the product.
Most of the 1-star reviews were from people who expected too much out of the device (one person expected a range 3x larger than what it actually said on the box), most of the 5 star reviews were rather scarce (“Works well. No problems”) and seemed to be written shortly after the device was unboxed, while the most useful reviews were 3-4 stars, as they included positive and negative aspects (“Tracks fine, unit died after 2 weeks, spoke to support, got a replacement, new unit works well, but range is sometimes flaky”)
So look for reviews that have good and bad points, and know a bit about the product you’re looking at buying. If you’re looking for a new Smart TV, know what features a smart TV might have, what features you’d use and then compare, as you’ll be able to see who didn’t plug their device into the wall and got angry because it didn’t work, who expected 900 hours out of a mobile phone and was disappointed that it got 10, who was paid by company X to write a good / bad review and who actually paid attention to what was going on and wrote a good review.
Hey if you are going to recycle articles from 2 years ago at least clear out the comments, instead of you know fudging the dates and times, as you can change the users post dates, but you cant change the upvote/downvote dates, and comments still appear in the correct chronological order in your profile, even though feb 8 2016 doesnt come between 18 july 2014 and july 21 2104
FOR SHAME LIFEHACKER FOR SHAME
Language can be a giveaway.
An actual user can be expected to communicate some details, about specific features, in their own language.