Amazon reviews are bullshit. Whether honest, paid, incentivized, politically motivated or otherwise, they are bullshit. Not only that, they are bullshit with a semblance of objectivity, with an arbitrary numerical aggregate to suggest that they mean something. If you take a sample size of 7000 people, I doubt you’ll find 2 which have the same interpretation of what 3.5 stars means. Amazon knows they are bullshit, yet use it as a metric to decide on people’s livelihoods. Same is the case for Ebay, Uber, AirBNB, Steam, etc. This is localized as well; my realtor nagged me for weeks to rate him on a realtor rating website.
Remember a few months ago when the internet panicked about “people rating app”, not realizing that we use such apps every day.
