I wasnt planning to start with this, but I had noticed that nobody responded to it when I used it as a reply in the other group, yet I have now noticed that the thread has resumed since I removed it, which I did because at that stage I intended to shut down my Facebook account. Creating this group was a last-gasp decision on my part. I am therefore starting with this 28-point list in the hope of getting some responses. A lot of people want to abolish unhelpful votes altogether, but nobody has come up with a workable alternative that would allow product pages to be presented in a usable most helpful order as well as newest first, and my list (points to 19) explains why abolishing unhelpful votes would not achieve this. One idea is lexical analysis, which I dont fully understand but involves assessing the quality and relevance of a review. The relevance would involve looking to see if key words in the product description are used in the review. I suspect that lexical analysis might be useful in refining the most helpful algorithm, but I cant see it as a replacement. I am open to ideas on this as on all issues. I dont want people to be scared of my posts. I have made suggestions to Amazon about improvements to the anti-campaign software and it remains to be seen if anything happens. Those suggestions regarding unhelpful votes are 1. The vote sweeps to clear up campaign votes work quite well, but if somebody votes against more than one review by the same reviewer on the same day, the second and subsequent votes are likely to be spite votes. Quite often, somebody will vote NO then go to the reviewers profile page and vote NO to one or more other reviews. A limit of one unhelpful vote per day by one customer for one reviewer would alleviate the problem somewhat. Some people would learn to spread their votes out, but a good nights sleep would mean that most wouldnt, and it would be easy for the updated software to look at the history. 2. The other major issue is people voting against rival reviews of the same product, particularly on Vine products. I understand the problem, but there is one case where it is always legitimate - when somebody buys something and its not what they thought based on the reviews they read. In this case, they may want to vote NO to the reviews that deceived them while also writing their own review. My solution to the conundrum is to allow somebody to vote against another review of the same product if the reviews are given star ratings at least 2 stars apart, so if somebody writes a 3 star review, they can vote against the 1 or 5 stars. 3. A lesser issue is people campaign voting on all reviews of a product. It might be an idea for Amazon to limit the number of reviews of a product that a customer can vote on, just as we are already limited in how many votes can be cast against a particular reviewer. We are not so limited in how many votes we can cast for a particular reviewer, because reviews without helpful votes are exempt from restrictions. This sometimes leads to accusations of people voting for themselves and Amazon should consider abandoning the idea that the first helpful vote on a review can be cast by anybody. If Amazon were to implement those three idea, a lot of the problems would go away. There would still be an issue with controversial products, and I reviewed one such product in 2009 to study the problem. I think that it may be possible to do something here too, if Amazon were willing to classify particular products and use another method of assessing such products, but it would be messy. If Amazon wont address the points above, which ought to be relatively simple, they definitely wont contemplate dealing with controversial products. So heres the list that people are (at best) reluctant to respond to. Those Unhelpful Votes I Think Amazon Would Be More Likely To Abolish Reviews Than Get Rid Of Unhelpful Votes My thoughts on whether they should be abolished or not can be summarized as follows :- 1. Voting buttons are abused, period. 2. For every method of abusing the NO button, there is an equal but opposite method of abusing the YES button. 3. Plenty of people complain bitterly and publicly as well as to Amazon about abuse of the unhelpful NO button on their own reviews. 4. Plenty of people complain bitterly and publicly as well as to Amazon about abuse of the helpful YES button on other peoples reviews. 5. I am one of the very few people who ever complained bitterly and publicly as well as to Amazon about abuse of the helpful YES button on their own reviews. I was ecstatic when the excess votes (a majority of my UK votes at the time) were finally wiped out, about 5 years after I started complaining in 2005, although I doubt whether my complaints had any impact. 6. If the NO button is abolished, the YES button would have to be abolished too in the interests of fairness. 7. There is plenty of cheating on Amazon, as well as plenty of things that are within the rules but which are widely regarded as unethical. Abuse of voting buttons is unethical, but like so many things in life, abolition is not the answer. For example, would you abolish political elections because politicians are corruptible? Would you abolish traffic lights to stop motorists jumping red lights? 8. Amazons software detects the worst abuses but it aint perfect and could be improved. 9. Most people get upset when Amazon improve their abuse detection software (more commonly called anti-campaign software), because they lose YES votes as well as NO votes. Abuse is abuse, whatever voting button is involved. 10. Amazons software attempts to sort reviews by helpfulness, so that customers seeing a product page are presented, as far as possible, with the most helpful reviews in the spotlight positions on the main product page. 11. It would be too expensive to employ staff to sort product pages, so a computer has to do the work, and that means an algorithm that by its nature is imperfect. 12. The algorithm that Amazon use to sort reviews is contentious, and certainly has plenty of room for improvement, but the basic idea is sound. 13. Despite whatever flaws the sorting algorithm has, products with plenty of reviews invariably end up with three decent reviews being spotlighted as most helpful. 14. Without those NO votes, it would not be possible to sort reviews effectively; see next three points. 15. Nobody who supports abolition of the NO button has come up with a credible alternative method of identifying the most helpful reviews without them. 10 out of 500 and 10 out of 10 would both become just 10 in the aftermath of abolition of the NO button, if the YES button were retained. 16. Abolition of all votes would likely mean the end of spotlighting reviews at all. We would be left with looking at reviews in the order of most recently posted, with no alternative option. 17. You have the option to sort reviews by newest first as things are. This is a useful option, especially for stuff that is subject to wear and tear, but if you compare the three most recent reviews with the three reviews currently spotlighted as most helpful, youll find in most cases that the three spotlighted reviews are better. (Yes, there will be exceptions.) 18. Generally, the earliest reviews for each product get the most votes. While there are exceptions, those exceptions would be far fewer if customers could only vote YES, since it would be much more difficult for customers to push unhelpful reviews off the main product page. 19. Early reviews are not always the best, especially as people who take time to assess a product dont often post early reviews. This is particularly significant with products that are subject to wear and tear, such as toys and gadgets, where some faults only become obvious after extensive usage. 20. If the NO button were abolished, the YES button would still be abused if it werent abolished. 21. If the NO button were abolished, customers would be more likely than they are now to use Report abuse in an attempt to delete reviews they dont like. 22. If the NO button is changed to require a comment, the YES button would have to be changed to require a comment too in the interests of fairness. The result would be far fewer votes all round. 23. Identification of voters (whether directly or by enforced comments) would create a whole other set of problems. 24. If the NO button were abolished, newly posted reviews would make their debut near the bottom of the most helpful order, being placed only above other voteless reviews, rather than somewhere in the middle of the order as they do now. 25. If the NO button were abolished, it would remove the only safeguard there is against the proliferation of placeholder reviews. 26. If the NO button were abolished, the biggest beneficiaries would be bad reviewers who naturally attract and deserve plenty of NO votes. This would be at the expense of both customers and good reviewers. 27. If the NO button were abolished, there is a chance that Harriet Klausner, the most infamous bad reviewer of them all, would again become the #1 reviewer in America, though it is more likely that she would have to settle for a high ranking short of #1. 28. Finally, please remember that the reviewing system is there to serve customers. The vast majority of customers either dont post reviews at all or dont take reviewing seriously. These customers use reviews to make buying decisions. The system as it is serves that purpose. Amazon arent likely to make changes unless they improve the experience of most customers.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 14:50:05 +0000
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