The spam posts here are better than your troll, Scott.

I use online reviews only to detect potential flaws in a product. According to my experience many people are easy to please and are either happy with crap or have completely different priorities than I have. A positive review doesn't help me.

I'm not sure how reviews wipe out millions of jobs. If I want to take my family out to eat, and the local reviews steer me to one restaurant over the other, how does this destroy jobs? No matter how I select a restaurant, one business is going to benefit while all the other will not.

Restaurants with consistently bad reviews may go out of business, eliminating jobs, but the surviving restaurants should benefit from the extra business, thus protecting their jobs, and maybe creating more jobs and the opening of more restaurants to satisfy the demand of the people to eat out.

I see RATBERT writing reviews. We don't see RATBERT nearly enough.

Your assertion that there is no way to measure if online reviews are actually helpful is patently ridiculous. If we wanted to, we could.

Certainly, for my part, I know online reviews have been useful. Not so much for the personal opinions embodied in them (you can usually pretty clearly see those aspects in a review) but for the additional information the product manufacturer either does not or will not provide. (Particularly, I'm talking about reviews of products versus services, which is how I see your restuarant). Simply put, reviews often contain information about product usage or features or shape or size or whatever that just are not present elsewhere.

Yes, there are astroturfers who will go out and flatten out critical reviews under a wave of euphoric ones and there are some services that will delete negative reviews. The latter I don't frequent and the former are usually easily defeated by making a point to sort by most negative or lowest rating. If a low rating review is written with a high degree of thought, that generally evident.

Most hacks (offensive paid reviewers, let us say) write in a fashion that you can recognize an agenda or a predisposition in. Most boosters (defensive paid reviewers) have a similar but opposite flavour.

But if someone tells you 'this DVD player does not come with an HDMI cable' (and this is something the manufacturer 'forgot' to mention as did the retailers), then that's a useful piece of information. If you see the same thing on a number of diverse forums, it seems fairly likely to be the case (no gaurantee, but a good chance).

So, online reviews are useful to me and they help shape my buying.

Let's take their absence as the other case: Without them, there are many things I would not have bought. Yes, the reviews may have shaped my purchase choice (doing someone a benefit and another a harm) but they also increased the net amount of purchasing of discretionary products significantly. Net gain for the economy there. Without at least some basis to choose, I would have opted not to choose because to me the annoyance of having made a poor purchase is so large that I would avoid that. I just would not buy. Now, sure, some critical things I'd have to buy, but most purchases seem discretionary and in those instance, I would not buy.

So your argument about reviews costing millions of dollars is, at least in my case, stood on its head.

Scott, you seem to think you can't assess the value of reviews but someohow (oddly and in a very non-parallel fashion) seem to think that you can assess the degree of damage to the economy and that negative reviews translates to negative impacts on business. That seems to presume you don't then take your business somewhere else that had a different review. If that's the case, then who gets the money changes, but there is no net loss to the economy.

So we have possibility of no net loss (money just goes to different vendours) along with the upside of reviews existing leading to more sales and their absence leading to fewer.... summary: NET BENFIT TO HAVE REVIEWS.

And that's before we even consider the crazily expensive negative aspects of your theory of restricting product and service reviews in law. That would cost piles of money, probably get blown out of the water in the Courts, cost piles more money in legal cases, and you'd end up back where you started. Except your government would have dished out a pile of money. That's good for who, other than lawyers?

And then there is the issue of freedom to speak from a personal perspective. I may not have free will, but I will defend my illusion of same vociferously. So will many others.

I don't think there is a huge net cost for negative reviews (overall) or you certainly have been unconvincing in advancing any actual data to support that. The 'trust me, I own a business' argument says nothing much about the broader economy and if you can't measure how reviews are useful, you surely can't measure how they are damaging. You just fail to convince on every level and ignore the possibilities reviews lead to more money in the economy which is my equally unsubstantiated argument.

I give this thought experiment a C-. Your initial thesis just isn't backed up and ignores obvious contrary possibilities.

Then again, they can't all be gems. And if you had your way (assuming I believe for one moment you want the regime you've sort of suggested - which I don't), I couldn't even pan your theory because that would be a negative review.

Talk about a tyranny of bad ideas made sacrosanct....

Scott I have made a decision based on both your blog, and the interesting, appalling, amusing, and sometimes helpful comments of your other readers (i give your blog a 4.5 and the comments a 2.0).
I am going to SOLICIT honest online reviews from my customers. I will print up 1000 3x5 cards which ask the riding customers of my company to honestly rate us on Google or Yahoo Local.
I will tell you why this will work; Nearly100% of the reviews that pan my company are from non customers whom couldn't work within our system of policies...A.K.A. they didn't like our guidelines or wait time, so argued with dispatch then panned us online.
Nearly 100% of the customers that actually ride with us love us! It simply never dawned on them to give us an online review.
Based on less than $100.00 worth of costs I feel my company will have an honest star rating system on both Google and Yahoo Local within 90 days.
You will be seen as " Online Marketing Shill".

Scott you are so right.
As the owner of a company that gets most of our customers from the web, online reviews are both the boon and bane of my life!
I wouldn't mind the bad reviews so much if there were more caring, honest customers whom I happen to KNOW love my companies A LOT whom would simply take five minutes to give a good review regarding the personal and excellent service they have received over the past four years.
Nine times out of ten, a bad review is from a customer whom we couldn't service due to our small size. Our old regular customers know that as a boutique company they need to order airport transfers sometimes a day or two in advance in order to get picked up at the desired time.
I recall one bad review where I was dispatching going on 15 hours (this is normal in small business) and when the customer called and asked for immediate service I answered "sorry we are backed up 90 minutes" and terminated the call due to other calls coming into the switchboard. The potential customer called right back and said "you were rude and terminated the call early-therefore I have no choice but to give you a poor online review". No choice? I attempted an apology for my brevity but as promised, bad review showed up on Yahoo the next morning.
Scott, I call this the "New Fascism' in the western world. Didn't get what you want? Pan it.
By the way, your "Anti-Yelp Team" is a survival tool. The online review process is anonymous and instant and there is no recourse or accountability in a system which is ambivalent towards electronic anonymity. My "Anti-Yelp Team" allows my business to keep its stars above water. I know for a fact that my competitors load up their reviews by hand close to 100%!
You will be seen as "Anonymous Online business owner" :)

hey scott adams... it's time to wonder about something new.

I certainly agree with this. Reviews have become unable to trust, because it's 'anonymous' who knows the agenda of the person behind the review. The more reviews the better, but as far as things with less than 5 reviews I am super skeptical of them. I end up going back to reviews of multiple products of that type and hope I don't get bitten.
The same goes for comments on news stories. Here in Minnesota we've had a very close senate race and we also have a congress person for my district who every story on generates a lot of news story comments. Well, it made me curious, so I made a list of comments and the user name on comments I felt weren't personal opinions, but rather made me feel like I was reading marketing material horribly skewed by the seller. Unfortunately to much of my job involves being the victim of marketing.

I did research based on user names, catch phrases and general style. Some of the comments were exactly the same, except the names were changed to protect the political figure. I want the say slimeball, but it's so non-scientific. Anyway, the comments are both positive and negative and involve people of the two major and some of the other parties. At least 40% of the comments met my guidelines of people who were not from the pool of voters for the state race. At least 60% of the comments on the congressional race in my district were not from my district. I would say in both cases about 20% were, leaving a good sized gap of I am not sure. It goes

It also made me look at commentary on hot topics like global climate change. Far to often reading comments by 'readers' of a publication I don't feel like I am getting an opinion, but rather marketed to about a point of view on it.

Anyway, my response is to ignore the comments, because I don't feel I can trust them. However, it's frustrating to hear people refer to comments in conversations, email, or other comments to these questionable comments as a fact to back up their point of view.

Hmmmm. Online reviews are the devil, eh?

What are you thoughts about reviews published in "traditional" print media? Isn't a negative review in newspaper or magazine just as evil as one on the Internet?

It seems to be either side of the razor....

The worst thing that happens is that people don't use them. Hardly worth installing an unenforceable censorship of internet reviews.

Even negative reviews can help me make a more informed choice: all he did was pick the very best and funniest and put it in a book - gee, sounds awful - NOT

Sorry but this simply sounds like a vendor talking, and too many vendors are strangely silent when the inequities aren't affecting their sales and/or reputations or, indeed, enhance them! I don't believe this of Scott but to propose any universal approach to the problem of crooked reviewing certainly demands that the whole concept of advertising be blown apart and reassembled 'fairly', as if if that were possible.
I think it's not too hard to pick a stacked forum or review site. I also have a love of words and, to me, 'un-honest' approaches to opinion-giving always seem to carry the taint of the advertising industry with every phrase, no matter how hard they try to play the innocent.

@language - I meant to thumb you up. Wireless mouse, you know...

@jonmalone

classifying all lying as unprotected speech is too far.
malicious intentional lying is wrong, but other forms of falsehood are due to mental errors, erroneous assumptions, pigheadedness.

i would defend someones right to willfully reject truth about evolution/god. who is to say which side is telling the truth? peoples sincere best efforts, even if wrong, should be respected forms of speech.

I'm a little concerned here. Some of you are lambasting Scott for suggesting that we should ban reviews as if he is calling for an abolition of the First Amendment. As someone who has come close to being a victim of slander and libelous behavior, as far as I'm concerned, freedom of speach ends when someone lies. Even from the very beginning it's been the case. The country wasn't even a decade old before John Adams signed the Sedition Act to try to stop the libelous crap that was being spread by the country's newspapers. Stifling a person's speech isn't right but lies can have an even bigger negative impact if they are allowed to persist. You have every right to say anything you want so long as it's truth. Anything else had better be just an opinion and clearly labeled as such. It you're lying, no law should protect you from the consequences.



Sedition Act

Maybe we should, while we're at it, discuss the merits of eliminating all forms of "community participation" which might be unfairly manipulated by businesses and wealthy individuals and which might be motivated or influenced by unfair perspectives. I think we should start by ending democratic elections and religion. We can then work our way down to more-personal choices like sex and friendship when we've eliminated the bigger "systematic" problems.

You mean like your comment rating system, where the numbers posted are usually nowhere near reflective of the comment itself, and some of them are spam?

Remember the List of the Day? Where you could vote your own comment to the top of the list if you had a few hours to spare and nothing better to do?

Sigh, I still miss it.