Yet another Hacker News

Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often

23 points tsxng 1 hour ago 29 comments

jdw64 1 hour ago | parent

Because reviewers don’t use things for long, while owners usually do. So reviewers generally tend to fixate on new features by default.

lstodd 1 hour ago | parent

Please don't normalize incompetence.

jdw64 1 hour ago | parent

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.

florbo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

anigbrowl 1 hour ago | parent

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.

tsxng 1 hour ago | parent

Lol. Fair, though most reviewers only get a unit for a few weeks.

jasonlotito 37 minutes ago | parent

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OptionOfT 8 minutes ago | parent

Which is why the long-term reviews make much more sense.

The car reviewer needs to get over the honeymoon phase of this new shiny gadget.

arealaccount 1 hour ago | parent

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?’

tsxng 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

arealaccount 48 minutes ago | parent

“Sponsored” is an interesting word to use

arjie 28 minutes ago | parent

One unfortunate thing is that Amazon blocked all reviews that said "In exchange for an honest and unbiased review, I received ..." which was a good marker of product crapitude. It makes sense for Amazon to do that since it makes them look better but as a user I wish it hadn't happened - because of AI I can now review all the crap reviews easily. It would have been good to have known.

CPUHall 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

cwillu 51 minutes ago | parent

> .bs-consent__sheet { … }

Couldn't have said it better myself

jedbrooke 40 minutes ago | parent

tangentially related: I’ve been apartment hunting recently and it reminds me of a common occurrence for apartment reviews:

5 star reviews are all: “I did the tour and the agent was friendly/place looked nice”

meanwhile the 1 star reviews: “I actually live here and this place is terrible.”

no doubt they ask you to review 5 stars on the tour…

tsxng 32 minutes ago | parent

True. One more thing we just found out: only about 15% of what reviewers say is negative, compare to 56% for owners.

nickff 24 minutes ago | parent

>"reviewers say is negative, compare to 56% for owners"

This is likely a misleading statistic, as dissatisfied owners are more likely to write and submit reviews than satisfied users.

edoceo 10 minutes ago | parent

Familiarity breeds contempt?

stavros 19 minutes ago | parent

Whenever I look at reviews for something, e.g. a restaurant, I always sort by worst and see what they say. If it's some dealbreaker like "I found a rat in my food", then I'm outta there. If it's "the service was slow this one time", I can live with it.

I don't pay any attention to the positive reviews at all, except just for the number of them.

OptionOfT 10 minutes ago | parent

Many places I toured offered $5 starbucks gift-cards for a review.

rluna828 34 minutes ago | parent

owners who face reliability issues are more likely to post. This could be reverse "survivor bias."

AndrewKemendo 26 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure it's possible to even give a reliability score for a new product.

The only way to do this would be to give reviewers the product a year before it's released. That's obviously not possible in the modern JIT product market economy

The reason I only buy old stuff and basically never a new product (unless it's a early adopter type thing) is so that I can get the community reliability score.

Never pay to be a new product tester

Scubabear68 26 minutes ago | parent

I learned this lesson with my Kia Telluride. Rave reviews, but it was a new model without years of data behind it.

At 70,000 miles very expensive parts began to break down like clockwork, like the very complicated alternator, and even small accidents racked up $10,000-$20,000 repair bills. Insurance paid for it, but the car was out of commission for a month each time.

I can’t fault the reviewers exactly, but I learned a lesson that there may be something to longer, proven designs that have been battle tested over millions of collective miles.

austin-cheney 17 minutes ago | parent

I think reliability is the reason they killed the Soul. It scored too high a score on reliability for its price point.

OptionOfT 10 minutes ago | parent

I think small accidents == large bills is caused by the amount of sensors and crumple zones in cars.

Layered on top of that is the massively increased cost of parts and labor to install the parts and paint them. And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.

Then there is the issue of availability of parts, especially in newer cars.

All of that makes it so that there are a 100+ cars outside the body-shop I frequently pass by. Because of the speed (or slowness) of the pipeline, body-shops need to be a certain size. Then insurance tries to squeeze them, and people don't get paid enough for the work they actually do.

So that's why your repaired bumper is 2 tints darker than your body. No-one has the time to properly blend the paints.

gnarlouse 11 minutes ago | parent

Can somebody explain "share of each sides opinions" as a statistic? Why am I solving a riddle to read an article?

bonsai_spool 5 minutes ago | parent

The title is a clear Claude-ism, I had low hopes after noticing it. The title should be one thing a human writes, if nothing else