"recent social research into how these sites work reveals that they may fall short of providing a representative sample of broad opinion. This is due to how the sites display comments or choose not to, how businesses influence what’s written about them, and the fact that only a small fraction of customers write reviews. Says Duncan Simester, a professor of management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has studied the impact of online feedback, “We worry that to the extent that customers are using these reviews, they’re not making good decisions.”...
while getting instant access to unlimited opinions can be a valuable asset, its drawbacks are becoming exposed. For one thing, the sheer volume of reviews can transform a simple purchase into a research project. Buying something as basic as a water bottle online now involves surveying a dozen brands, winnowing them down based on star rankings or popularity statistics, and reading a handful of reviews about the attributes of each model (leakiness? ease of cleaning?), and weighing the conflicting opinions (“Best water bottle ever!” “Do not under any circumstances buy this piece of garbage!”)."
http://nautil.us/issue/12/feedback/one-percenters-control-online-reviews
(The title is a little deceiving, it just means that only 1% of consumers writ reviews)
Hm. I wonder if there is going to start to be a trend of rejecting this maximizing-mindset and practices and just choosing whatever is the first thing you encounter. Like, yeah, it is totally exhausting to decide to buy something; I am planning to buy a humidifier and I know that's going to be hours - when, really, it's just a thing that makes steam and it's hard for that to go wrong.
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