Attitudes to Amazon reviews and reviewers

---

Some customers think reviewers are sad people

We all have our hobbies and interests. Some people support a football team throughout their life. Some of them support teams whose chance of winning anything except (where applicable) promotion and relegation is, quite frankly, remote to say the least. Just occasionally, their team might have a good cup run, which they enjoy knowing that it'll end in glorious failure. Yet they continue supporting their team through the bad times, sustained by dreams of the good times that they hope will come their way one day. And when they do come, however briefly, it will be at the expense of supporters of the teams that they beat during the good times. So it could be said that these supporters are really sad people for supporting mediocre teams that just occasionally shake off their mediocrity for a while before sinking back into another long spell of mediocrity. But they don't consider themselves sad. However bizarre it may appear from the outside, these people enjoy supporting their team. It is what they live for. I don't support a club, but I do follow football with interest. I sometimes wonder what pleasure those supporters get, but not being what they call a true football fan, I can never expect to fully understand. Nevertheless, I know that they do get a lot of pleasure out of their hobby, otherwise they wouldn't bother.

In the same way, I get a lot of pleasure out of writing reviews. Sometimes I go through phases of not being particularly interested while at other times I review prolifically. That's part of the fun. I can do as much or as little as I like, with no pressure from anybody and no time limitations. Unlike those football supporters, I don't have a fixture list or any other schedule to worry about. I started reviewing seriously in June 2002, so although I've written a lot of reviews, they're spread over a period of several years. Just think how much time you've spent on your hobby, or drinking in a bar with your friends while discussing the same old topics over and over (and I've done that too), in the same time. You might still think I'm sad, but I'm not. I just happen to enjoy doing something that some people can't imagine anybody enjoying. Wouldn't it be a dull world if everybody enjoyed the same things in life?

The professionals sneer

Some people like to sneer at the reviews appearing on Amazon. I noticed an extreme example in an article on the LA Times website some years ago. Personally, I don’t like all the reviews I see on Amazon either but I realize that everybody has to start somewhere. You never know, but maybe some people who start out writing very short reviews that say nothing useful may one day take it more seriously and become outstanding reviewers. I know that such cases will be rare, but every oak tree grows from a small acorn. Maybe an Amazon reviewer might end up writing reviews for the LA Times. I wonder what their editor will say then?

Most Amazon reviewers don't take it seriously

Even though reviewing on Amazon has increased in popularity through the years, those who take reviewing seriously are often regarded as sad people. This may be in part because, at the serious end, it is an intellectual hobby. Anybody from any walk of life who is an Amazon customer can post as many reviews as they like, and do so, but the vast majority don't take it seriously and just post the occasional review. Of course, those occasional reviews from such a vast number of people account for a lot of reviews. The serious reviewers may each post a lot of reviews, but they probably only account for a minority of the reviews to be found on Amazon. A lot of people who post occasional reviews don't see why anybody would take reviewing seriously.

Trivial compared to real world issues

Maybe so, but we all indulge in some trivial matters. Millions of people watch banal TV shows that serve no real purpose beyond entertaining the masses and earning money for the suppliers of those programs. Reviewers help other customers make better buying decisions, which can never be a bad thing.

As for the world issues like war, famine, financial crises, natural disasters and whatever else people care to name, I can't do anything about those even though I like to know what is happening in the world. I therefore concern myself with things that I can do something about. If other people don't like it, so be it. We are all different, with different interests, different attitudes and different priorities. Live and let live.

Image damaged by cheating

Cheating on Amazon by some reviewers doesn't help the image. I described this subject in Cheating or reviewing unethically on Amazon. However, some critics are so contemptuous of the reviewing system (even though, in some cases, they buy stuff from Amazon using Amazon reviews to help in their decisions) that they find cheating where none exists. I'll co-operate with anybody to help weed out the genuine cheaters but not with those who go beyond that. I give such people no credibility whatsoever.

Quality of reviews

With few exceptions, the people who post reviews on Amazon are all amateurs, and I am one such amateur, but some reviewers are more amateur than others. The few professionals include people who write reviews for magazines then post on Amazon after that edition has gone out of circulation, so a review appearing in an August magazine might appear in October on Amazon, satisfying both the magazine publishers and the reviewer. (It may be that some magazine reviewers are allowed to publish their reviews on Amazon while the magazine is still current, but I'd be surprised.)

Because the overwhelming majority of reviewers are amateur, the quality of the reviews they post varies considerably. The best reviewers, who aren't necessarily those with the highest rankings, take a professional approach to reviewing. Nevertheless, I resent those customers who think that top Amazon reviews should provide reviews comparable to professional writers. I've seen bad supposedly professional reviews, but the overall standard of reviews by professional writers is way in excess of that achieved by mere amateurs. Occasionally, I may write reviews that might not be out of place in a magazine or newspaper, but those are rare.

UK Vine Stazi (with a z)

The Vine™ systems in Britain and America are notorous for nastiness, but arguably the nastiest episode so far occurred when somebody updated the Wikipedia Amazon Vine page with a piece about the UK Vine Stazi (wrongly spelt with a z). The page was quickly updated to remove the offending comments, but the archived Wikipedia page remains.

Knowledge

In the pre-internet age, people who were knowledgeable in a particular area were classed as experts. Now that so much of that expertise has been posted on the internet, those who show their expertise are accused of copying and pasting, perhaps modifying and / or rearranging things to disguise their sources. Sadly, there are people who do just that, but I built up my knowledge over several decades from a variety of sources, although I continually add to that knowledge and some of the new knowledge comes from the internet. I actually prefer to write reviews offline without reference to other reviews or anything else on the internet. Even when I need to refer to the net, I avoid plagiarism. But some people are quick to condemn and that's life.

Star ratings

This is another bone of contention, which I assess in Star ratings on Amazon reviews. That post says at least as much about attitudes to reviews and reviewers as anything I've said in this post.

---