back in the day we didn't have much way of knowing if a restaurant hotel or
decorative singing fish was any good how long is this sauce
i don't know other than word of mouth
or some kind of vague brand reputation but here in 2019 everyone is tripping
over themselves to plaster their opinions all over the internet places
like amazon google maps and tripadvisor have literally
millions of reviews for just about anything you can think of and i mean
anything however at the end of the day you're
still relying on complete strangers while making potentially expensive
decisions like which resort to stay at which car to buy or even which school to
attend so exactly how much trust can you
put in these reviews now a good jumping off point is probably
the overall rating of a product or service so how many
stars dots or eggs it has out of five
but it's going to be worth your while to read through some of these reviews and
figure out if they're likely to be fake
you see the thing is it's pretty simple for sites to automatically delete
reviews that are posted by bots as good as artificial intelligence has gotten
these days it's still not easy for bots to write convincing reviews
the problem is that doesn't stop shady businesses from hiring small armies of
paid reviewers from places like freelance writing sites and giving them
a small amount of money to write short reviews for gadgets they've never used
or places they've never been in fact it's estimated that up to 30
percent of online reviews might be fabricated
so then here are some tips to help make fake reviews easier to spot from my
experience they're typically written in either overly formal language or at the
other end of the spectrum with atrocious spelling and grammar
not much lies in between and for positive reviews while they tend to
either lack specific details about what they did or didn't like or go into far
too much detail about features that probably wouldn't matter much to anyone
but the person who designed the product conversely a fake negative review these
are actually more common than you'd think they're often paid for by
competitors might read like straight up bashing of a
product or they might even ignore the product altogether and just hate on the
brand in order to try to damage it again usually without getting into any
specifics now we're not saying that someone with
bad grammar or who had a really bad experience and hates a brand doesn't
have a valid opinion we're just saying that in any case you want to keep an
eagle eye out for anything that smells fishy and then compare it against the
general consensus so once you've made sure that the
overall rating hasn't been artificially inflated or depressed by fake reviews
what's your next step well now we need to dig into the reviews
themselves and understand what is driving people's rating decisions
you see many reviews tend to be either very positive or very negative as people
who had either a really good or really bad time are the ones who are going to
be more motivated to put the effort into actually telling other people about it
compared to others who are like yeah man it was all right i guess but the things
that cause people to give either a glowing or a scathing review might be
quite different from the things that you care about for example a hotel might
have a bunch of low ratings giving it you know three stars out of five overall
because lots of people didn't like how noisy it
was but maybe you're just looking for a spot to host a bachelor party and then
to your pleasant surprise most of the five star reviews have nothing but good
things to say about the nightclub on the first floor
so by applying a little bit of common sense and knowing exactly what you're
looking for in whatever you purchase it's often not too hard to weed out the
fake reviews and to look beyond the bear
star rating except when it is you see
not only have there been controversies over review sites promoting certain
styles of reviews uh selling reviews or
even extorting businesses but some operations that pump out fake reviews
have become more sophisticated even going as far as to try to influence
conversations on huge sites like reddit
by taking care to maintain the appearance of a legitimate user while
steering the conversation around a product or a service in a certain
direction they can even manipulate the voting system in a way that makes detection
less likely sometimes it's also even more complicated than that and review
integrity can be damaged by legitimate
users on steam for example groups of
gamers have been known to review bomb titles by game developers who have made
unpopular decisions that are completely independent of the quality of the actual
game now some of the more reputable review sites have tried to combat such behavior
with actual human employees that can look for this type of subterfuge and
stop it but even if you're looking at reviews that are entirely honest
remember that less than two percent of consumers actually take the time to
write reviews and much like the people who show up at a
city council meeting they're not necessarily representative of the
opinions of the general population so with that in mind are we saying that
online reviews are worthless well of course not just remember to keep
your wits about you when you're reading them if you wouldn't take investment
advice from you know your bankrupt cousin over thanksgiving dinner then you probably
shouldn't take their advice on amazon.com either
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