The billion dollar per year fake review industry makes it harder and harder to trust reviews on Amazon or other shopping sites.
intercst
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It’s true. Most published reviews, either by pros or by regular customers, either print/online media or social media, are BS to a large extent. That’s for a few reasons, only one of which is “fake” reviews. Other reasons include - pro reviews are done by pros who use lots and lots of products, but only use them each for a short time (except for perhaps CR that sometimes does long-term product use, but only for certain products). When you only use a product for a short time, and only really for review purposes, by definition, you aren’t a typical consumer with typical consumer use. Another reason why even consumer reviews are not very useful is because consumers tend to post their reviews right away (because the item is top of mind near the time of purchase, not months later). I’ve rarely seen a consumer go back in their Amazon history a few months or years to review something (and even if they do, the listing likely has changed by then, Amazon has weird ways of allowing listing of items to morph very widely).
So perhaps a real-time discussion, with real people (not bots) discussing the item may be the best “review”. But, beware, very soon (maybe even now), AI bots will be able to take part in the real-time discussion and we may never know. If the AI bots are trained by the people who can profit from sales of an item, they will likely tend to only say things that can improve sales. And then … those conversations will be similarly useless.
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