Whenever I'm looking to see if I'll like a product, book, movie or whatever before I buy it, I always read reviews of said product on some webpage like Amazon.com. I wonder if everyone else reads the reviews like I do. I always read the lowest rated reviews first if not only when looking at reviews. On Amazon, I might actually read a two star review every once in a while, but I usually stick to the 1 stars.
Why? It's simple. I assume people will like a product for a variety of reasons, none of which necessarilly have anything to do with the merits of the product. But people often get pretty specific with their hatreds.
With books, sometimes they just hate the author, but often there are those people that try to completely tear down a work page by page. I find this useful, as it's very easy to get blinded by the arguments going on in a book or movie if you're focused on only the information provided to you by the author/director/etc. This is especially true when reading wonkish material on any given subject. How the hell am I supposed to know that some guy's listing of intricate physics was way off the mark? But a reviewer that is skilled in physics that spots such egregious errors can better inform me. That's a far cry from one in a long line of uncritical douches that gush over a work.
I've done a couple of reviews of books I've read for amazon, and they were both high ratings. I noted at the end, that someone wondering whether or not to read the book would likely not get much out of it other than the thought that they might like it, but then, they probably already thought that they might like it since they decided to look at reviews.
Finally, one advantage to paying attention to the negative reviews is that you can often suss out what's a good work by the douche commentary of the preponderance of negative reviews. If all the negative reviews seems to be coming from knuckledragging douchenozzles, then you can safely bet it might well be something you're into.
My only question is how many other people out there do the same thing. I suspect the percentage is quite high.
Friday, March 13, 2009
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1 comments:
earlier in my life i had no use for this philosophy i.e taking anyone's word for anything without trying it myself. i am now at a point where i find this practice to be completely useful in certain situations, such as buying guitar effects or ps2 games. in these areas i have found reviewers to be dead on (i recently ignored a review of Legends of Wrestling II and purchased that shyte anyway). i also find that knowing generally what you are looking for or having the right questions, depending on what you are looking for to lead you to reviews of products or ideas, can be quite useful. i guess it could still be the luck of the draw if you are looking for something really obscure that you truly do not have any idea how to do good research on. good post; i like your comment about people being more specific about things that they hate. do you realize that this is my first reply to one of your blogs that is 98% sarcasm free? we're finally growing up!
-Matt
PS specifically, i hate you. die.
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