It’s a common saying that one should not trust everything one reads on the internet. This is just as true about reviews of products / books / restaurants and hotels as it is about anything else. At worst, they are outright false, at best, they are written by reviewers who have no business reviewing the products they write about.
Why does this happen, however? After all, when the great review-aggregator sites like Yelp, Zomato and TripAdvisor came into being, and even from before, it meant that the consumers were no longer at the mercy of overpaid, snooty critics hired by newspapers. There was an increasing belief that restaurants, publishers and the like could easily compromise the integrity of a newspaper or magazine by advertising in it, and that made such media reluctant to publish negative reviews. But on the democratic internet, a reviewer was really just a concerned citizen, so that criticism no longer held.
But in reality, it has only changed the game a little. For a company, it is always in its best interest to boost its online profile with positive reviews. So it is a no-brainer that they would want to do anything possible to ensure this result. So don’t be surprised to learn that:
a) There are websites which operate as marketplaces for review writing. Companies are willing to pay freelance writers to write favourable reviews and give five star ratings for their products.
b) Some companies offer free products in exchange for favourable reviews.
c) Very often, the reviewer works for the company that makes the product. This is in fact a strategy used by tech companies to get their apps rated well.
So from a system where a company had to commit advertising money to get favourable reviews, they are now able to get the same favourable reviews without committing a fraction of that money.
But it is not just favourable reviews that are a problem. In fact, so are negative reviews. For these, often, can be just as irrelevant as favourable ones.
a) Some reviewers give negative reviews for factors unrelated to the product itself. The most famous case, of course, being of the book that got a 1-star rating because the publisher did not include a free bookmark.
b) Not all reviewers are qualified to comment on the thing they review. You would not want a vegetarian’s review of a restaurant famous for its mutton dishes to influence your decision.
c) There are always reviewers who attack a product because they have a problem at a different level altogether. You might remember recent incidents where books were subjected to a barrage of negative reviews, which appeared to be more due to a political divide than the content of the books themselves.
So what is a user to do to? Well, there are a few ways to identify against such fake reviews. It’s impossible to spot each and every one, of course, but here’s what you should look for:
1. Reviews that do not articulate the opinion.
If a product is rated highly, what makes it good. Conversely, if it has been rated poorly, what makes it bad? If a review does not actually bring this out, it’s not worth paying too much attention to.
2. Reviews that read like the product catalogue.
Some paid reviewers just re-hash the content from the product description. If you spot that it just describes features with the attention of a marketing professional, it’s probably a paid review.
3. No review history
Check the reviewer profiles – if this is the only review, or if the reviewer has been exclusively giving favourable reviews only, it’s like s/he is a paid reviewer.
4. Look for products with at least 30 reviews
While this is hardly fool-proof, from a statistical viewpoint, 30 users is a decent sample size that should give a fair result. Look for products that have a substantial number of reviews, since the more there are, the less likely all of them are paid-for, or written by biased reviewers.
The world of online reviewing has become very murky indeed, and falsehoods and doubts are common across product categories and websites. Be careful, be aware, and most of all, contribute reviews yourself! It is through contributions of honest reviewers that the levels of trust in online reviewing can be restored.
Happy shopping!
