Hey Ben, I think the idea of other people flagging reviews is interesting. Could be ripe for malfeasance, but maybe there are some controls that could be put in.

Not sure how what you are suggesting is simpler really; it actually seems more detailed (but I might be misunderstanding it). My thought was that if you aggregated all of the “non-product” scores as a group, it would at least get us closer to a pure product score. To your first point, I would be concerned that even that yes/no single option would confuse some.

Thanks so much for commenting! Good stuff.

To go one step further, I’d like to see the ability for other users to flag another person’s review as not being a “pure” review.

Perhaps a slightly simpler approach would be if the review required you to specify what you’re actually commenting on – e.g. product, delivery, customer service – and then not only would we have clearer aggregate scores, we’d also be able to filter out the non-products reviews themselves (rather than just the scores) when reading people’s comments.

The good news with Amazon is that there is such a culture of reviewing that you tend to get a more balanced set of reviews than say, the local coffee shop. Often with those stores, you get the people that love you and the people that hate you, but not the many people who like you a lot.

I do agree that it could be tweaked because there could be many, many more perfectly satisfied customers who don’t take the time to rate something. Therefore it could be skewed but the unsatisfied few who are probably the people who always send their food back too.

Just sayin’…