Bad Reviews
Mar 10 2026
You see a product online and find it has 15 reviews and an average rating of 3.2/5 stars, pretty bad right? looks like a product to avoid. But let's not dismiss it too quick, as these reviews are made by people, and not all people are alike.
Firstly, a single star rating (without a written review) does not tell you much. What exactly was bad about the product? It's delivery? It's quality? Maybe its a book with too much detail (but maybe you like detail!). Without knowing this quite vital information, there is not much useful data here. Okay, so filtering out the reviews that tell us nothing about the product, maybe now our average rating is 3.9/5, getting better!
Now lets focus on rating with reviews! I find, similar to Graham's hierarchy of disagreement, that there can be a lot of variety in the quality of people's reviews. Take the following:
- "Had to return. Didn’t work."
- "Boring"
- "This book is not good."
- "Don’t recommend - it doesn’t work."
The above are genuine reviews found on the web. Why didn't it work? was it a faulty product or did the user not know how to operate it? Why was the book boring? Something fundamental about the writing/story or just the user not being compatible with the material? Without any of this context this information is useless. Ignoring badly written reviews, the average rating is now 4.3/5, pretty good!
Basic filtering like this is incredibly useful to actually understand the quality of the products, you'd be surprised by how many reviews are like this. And its not to say those bad reviews don't reflect the quality of the product, but I simply have no way of knowing. Its also important to note that positive reviews can be the same, and can be scrutinised with the same filtering.
Don't write reviews like the above, if you don't want to write a detailed review, then don't leave a review at all. If your going to write a good review, ensure you cover all the points, positive and negative. Ensure that any negative points are well detailed, so readers can determine if your issue will affect them. A well thought out, and well written review signals to me that your not an idiot and your experience and thoughts are worth considering.