Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often
12 points by tsxng 52 minutes ago | 11 comments

arealaccount 23 minutes ago
Is this like Amazon where the reviewers are basically on a “get free stuff” list, and they are no longer selected once they leave a negative review?’
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tsxng 11 minutes ago
Probably part of it. A lot of reviewers get their units for free and it's easier to be happy with something you didn't pay for. We can't tell which reviews were sponsored, so we can't measure that directly.
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arealaccount 2 minutes ago
“Sponsored” is an interesting word to use
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CPUHall 6 minutes ago
Yeah well not many reviewers actually use them long enough before putting up a review - fair play, they review what they have on hand. Reviewers are mostly working a job too, the money boat is during a release of a product, not a year after they've well tinkered with it - assuming they even have the time to with multiple same-category products released constantly.

Anyway, all i'm saying is its not terrible. People who watch reviews on release should know there is no reliability to talk about unless the reviewer spends the effort to 'accelerate' these - e.g. Fold testing foldable phones and counting them.

Take a look at my country's (Singapore) arguably #1 e-commerce platform and you'll notice something even more mindblowing - platform-generated, ai-generated reviews. And no, its not the sellers, most of them have even voiced their frustrations that they dont even have an option to block these 'ai-generated reviews' on their products. Yes, there are ai-generated humans wearing ear0hones clipping through ears, on the complete opposite directions and telling you how awesome the product is. Truly dystopian.

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cwillu 5 minutes ago
> .bs-consent__sheet { … }

Couldn't have said it better myself

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jdw64 36 minutes ago
Because reviewers don’t use things for long, while owners usually do. So reviewers generally tend to fixate on new features by default.
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lstodd 34 minutes ago
Please don't normalize incompetence.
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florbo 21 minutes ago
I understand your point but I can't expect a single sample review for a new product to contain anything useful in regards to reliability.
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anigbrowl 20 minutes ago
Ridiculous argument. Reviewers' task is to evaluate new products to provide information to consumers in a timely fashion. There's a niche for 'long term reviews' but it's tiny by comparison, and mainly sought out by nerds who are unusually interested in that product category.

Most reviewers simply can't evaluate products over a sufficiently long term to make convincing judgements about reliability. Where the latter is important, it's better to consult a source like consumer Reports that specializes in that sort of longitudinal assessment at the price of narrow product focus and shallower review detail.

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tsxng 19 minutes ago
Lol. Fair, though most reviewers only get a unit for a few weeks.
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jdw64 24 minutes ago
Rather than taking incompetence for granted, it’s because—as the article also says—motivations differ, and it’s difficult to judge factors like warranty handling or updates. And fundamentally, “reliability” is broad. That’s even more the case for combined hardware-software products. Ultimately, Reddit is basically where people with complaints go, and reviewers themselves have bias too, but consumer complaints also largely come from people whose products broke, so it’s difficult to judge.

But ultimately, for reviewers, what matters is that they “make a living through reviews,” so they have to say things that fit the fanboy tier they’re targeting.

The problem is that fanboys are generally people who buy more devices to begin with, so they also judge reliability based on the existing product lineup, and reviewers are largely the same. As a result, they can’t help but judge mainly by new features.

To be precise, “reliability” requires predicting the future, and that’s not easy. How would you know if your computer might break tomorrow? There are serious hinge issues with the iPhone Duo right now—how would people buying it have predicted that?

Prediction is basically break-even even when you’re right, and easy to criticize when you’re wrong, so it’s a hard attribute for reviewers to review.

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