Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/21/one-star-ratings-have-worse-gr.html
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What? No. Fuck, no! Maybe in a single sentence medium like a text or tweet but not in a freaking paragraph. I love run-on sentences as much as the next guy but we can’t all be e e cummings crossed with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Maybe less positive reviews have spelling and grammar errors because the reviewer is angry or upset over the performance of the product.
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This reort suck’s
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Another reason to avoid user reviews like the plague. Noted.
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maybe people just don’t give a damn when they’re reviewing something that sux.
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I think it would be more interesting to note whether or not negative reviews are actually reviews of the product and not reviews of how the product got to them. I see so many “it came to me broken” one star reviews. Which is nice to know on some level but not what I’m looking for in a product review.
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As far as I can tell, they did not bother to check if the differences among the review categories are statistically significant, so it would be rash to conclude much from this data. Are we really seeing a trend here, or is this just noise that looks like a trend? Given that the third-star reviews are the actually the worst in spelling and grammar, I think that it’s likely to be the latter case. If they were concerned at all with rigor, they would have at least looked at whether the trend is consistent across each year’s set of reviews.
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I think it’s wonderful and appropriate for negative reviews to be longer and more detailed. If you are going to tear something apart, I want to know why. It’s not very helpful when positive reviews don’t give any specifics. The longer a review is, the more opportunities for a mistake to creep in. Especially if the reviewer goes back to edit the text and makes a mistake in the editing process.
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I’d like to see a study regarding RT reviewers
$100 on “entitled white men” for the single stars
(because I couldn’t decide between a laughing emoji and a crying emoji)
Damn, forgot my periods 
This post sucks! 
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Unnngh… my current employment has my user reviews baked into my performance metrics, and while I’ve been lucky to avoid the worst of this by being fairly decent at my job, I think we all know sometimes that doesn’t really matter to a reviewer…
Fortunately my boss can disappear the blatantly capricious reviews, but he does it cuz he’s a decent human. He’s leaving in two months. Will my next boss be so decent?
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One star Rotten Tomato reviews have poor punctuation because privileged white men don’t “get” periods!
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Not really a surprise that the 4 star reviews are the most grammatical. That’s the rating for someone who is actually considering a product and likes it but acknowledges its flaws. So many 1 and 5 star reviews are knee-jerk or bot generated that they tend to drown out the legitimate reviews.
I think most people can agree that 1 star reviews are where the incoherent or utterly retarded are most often found.
It would be interesting if Amazon had an option to reduce the weight of a review if it is too short or too incoherent. It’s probably too AI to eliminate the ones that don’t make sense like:
1 Star: UPS lost the package!
Or:
1 Star: This Hamilton Beach Toaster is incapable of repairing my shoelaces!
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One of the big problems these days is that of spammers trying to game the system. Just on that alone, I take user reviews with a huge grain of salt.
★☆☆☆☆ Blog thingy didnt tell me stuff i wanted to konw
omg when i dont liek something why would i bother w /editing? your stupid
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I’d expect five star reviews to have fewer grammar problems, because they’re often written by the manufacturer’s PR folks, who have degrees in communications.
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Admit it Clive, how tempted were you to leave the full stop off the end of that last sentence?
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tell us how u rly feel tho
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Negative reviews tend to be impulsive… this thing hurt me so I’m going to hurt it now. I bet most are written on phones.
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