High bias found in Amazon reviews of low-cost or free samples

[StVincent]

@nungesser

I would dearly love one of those fancy Japanese Toto washlets with warm-water spray and air drying and all of that, but honestly, for thirty bucks, a cool water spritz is totally fine.

There are many things I miss about Japan; This is one.

[renke]

@nungesser

fancy Japanese Toto washlets

I am fascinated by the flush sound generator in some (many?) Japanese toilets. One of the two reasons I want to visit Japan*

Japanese Toilet...with extra flush sound!

* the other is all the romaing tentacle monsters on Tokyo’s streets**
** please let this be true

[muddi900]

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.

[Skeptic]

@boingboing

So if you see a review with a disclaimer that says something like “I got it at a reduced price for my honest and unbiased review,” caveat emptor!

So, if you get something for recommending a product on Amazon the recommendation is more likely to be biased…

This is pretty unsurprising given the psychology of reciprocity. If someone gives you something you get a reciprocal sense of obligation to return the favor. This is a built in human bias, and not something that we are necessarily even conscious of doing.

The big problem Amazon has in stamping out this sort of paid review system is that Amazon does it itself, through its Vine program which provides free, advance copies of books to top reviewers. So, it can’t very well prohibit other companies from providing freebies in exchange for “honest reviews”.

I’d say that Amazon needs to dump it’s Vine program and ban all incentivized reviews.

[Skeptic]

@Chesterfield

The shocking thing about this is how small the bias is.

That’s probably because they could only identify the reviews that were honest enough to admit to being incentivized. The less honest incentivized reviews weren’t included because they can’t be easily identified, and are likely even more biased.

@gadgetgirl02

All of those three star reviews got a terse “we appreciate your honesty” message from the review service… and then no further books for a long time.

I think this is one of the more interesting issues confronting Amazon, which is that companies can test for favoritism and then concentrate their efforts on getting those reviewers to post. The reviews can even be individually unbiased, but if you can get an unrepresentative sample of unbiased reviewers to post, you can artificially inflate your ratings. So, again Amazon needs to ban all incentivized reviews, including filtering for positive bias.

[Joe_Ventura]

My cousin participates in these “incentivized reviews”. She tells me that the companies request that she contact them directly if she is unable to give them a four or five star review.

[Ryuuga]

@Joe_Ventura

My cousin participates in these “incentivized reviews”. She tells me that the companies request that she contact them directly if she is unable to give them a four or five star review.

Yeah, this sounds fair and unbiased… utterly fair and unbiased.