Consumer reviews can definitely be helpful as they provide a way for anyone to give feedback on their experience with a product or company without having to have a platform (i.e. PCMech) to share it. Unfortunately, this system can be easily "gamed". Because of this, you have to always be wary of fake reviews which are possibly written by those who have a direct interest in what is being reviewed.
For some general guidelines on how to spot a fake review, this article summaries the signs quite nicely. Some of the things to look for (which are elaborated on in the article) include:
- Reviewer’s name
- Number of previous reviews
- Date of the review as compared to when the product was released
- Number of similar reviews posted in a short time span
- Text of the review (is it written like an advertisement?)
- Tone and exaggeration used in the review text
- Use of "odd" phrases
One thing you can look at as well, if the reviewing site makes this available, is the IP address of the reviewer. If you notice the same IP address or a very similar pattern (only the last two numbers are different), among a lot of the reviewers, this can be a sign that the same person is posting multiple reviews.
Do you have any tips or tricks you use to spot fake reviews? If so, please share.
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No tips that you haven’t mentioned, but I laugh when someone uses incorrect technical jargon when bashing a product by giving it a low review, posts complaints about lacking features the product was never intended to have, but declaring themselves a “technical expert”.
Read low motherboard reviews, you’ll come across a technical expert that gave a product 1/5 “BECAUSE THIS POS USES DDR3 AND I ONLY BOUGHT DDR2! STUPID MOTHERBOARD”
This is good, as even though I work in the tech field I have caught myself reading something and about halfway through it starts to seem a bit…fishy. To my eye, it’s usually the exaggeration or superlatives that give it away. Nevertheless, I can see how a lot of these types of things can fool people. I guess the more modern verions of “don’t believe everything you hear” would be “don’t believe everything you read online”.