this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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My take on this is no they don't. As long as they are truthful they only report on the quality of the product and prevent many people of spending a lot of money from losing it by buying something that doesn't work.

If your product is shit your company does not deserve to be shielded from the backlash, this is the core of (classic) capitalism after all.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Honest reviews prevent bad reviews from others and returns. They should be embraced for what they are and a blueprint for what you've done well and where there is room for improvement.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Product is an input, reviews are an output.

If your product can be killed by bad reviews you're either bad at making the product or bad at marketing the product. Managing a launch, including the relationships with reviewers, is part of shipping a product.

Now, that's for consumer goods. For artistic works it's a bit of a different beast and you can get a lot of other factors and definitely, by design, a lot more subjectivity. But if you're shipping cars and computing devices... yeah, no, this is a weird fixation to have. I'm guessing it's because it's the first time when whatever mismanagement happened becomes noticeable, so you can have the false impression that something was fine until the bad reviews told you it wasn't.

Although I'll say I've often owned and very much enjoyed products that don't review well. Computing device reviews in particular tend to focus on specific aspects, just because they're the easy A/B comparisons between the dozens of similar things they cover. The effect is sometimes only very general use devices get good reviews, so more specialized or targeted devices get worse marks just because they're not competing on the same areas. You see this a lot with gaming phones, and it stands out to me on a lot of the new PC handheld reviews, too. So if you ask me whether reviews can homogeneize a product and end up making every phone look the same? Maaaybe. Over time. Eventually. For most of the market, perhaps, but not all of the market.

Otherwise no, that premise is nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

MKBHD is pretty popular. His subscribers are probably the demographic that might be interested in this thing. So I'm sure his bad review has impact. But unless he's a big outlier or has a personal axe to grind with the company it does not seem like there's any ethical consideration to making such a harshly negative review. People should probably be more suspicious of the reviewers who don't give the product a harsh review.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Very simple.

Shitty products and bad/greedy/sociopathic management kill companies. And guess what? They're shitty companies. They should die.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think bad reviews can kill companies. If they are objective and honest, the review is not the core issue, the bad product is the issue.

But it is possible to have biased reviews, or dishonestly framed reviews. MKBHD is honest and objective, but you can't take for granted that every reviewer is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I saw a comment on a Patreon that someone got a free copy of...one of those dime a dozen boom shoots for his YouTube channel. He has about 500-1000 subs, and he's getting a video game. He definitely didn't like it, and was having to reconcile if he wanted to give it an honest review or tell the PR firm that the product wasn't good. I feel like this push and pull is way too common.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I hope they do I bought a nothing phone 1 after reading promises of how they wouldn't move to another phone until they had everything right etc.

Not only did they not keep it but after launching the 2 almost right after this claim they actively sabotaged the 1 the camera got worse the battery got way worse and thing is now super unstable and I really believe it's on purpose as custom roms make the phone great.

The company is dead to me but I am kinda enjoying seeing the phone 2 users now complain because they are starting to get the same treatment now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'm dead set in my belief that this happens to every phone, and I'm sad to see the nothing phone is going the same way.

I had a Motorola X that was suddenly dying in less than 5 hours and one day I couldn't even connect to my service. I looked and found that an update had uninstalled the phone's modem. Not even a factory reset helped.

After rooting and finding the correct package for my modem, the phone ran flawlessly using Resurrection Remix (I miss that ROM), proving that the battery and modem were indeed fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

There are a lot of reasons in here about how bad reviews kill products, but I didn't see mentioned how exceptional a product has to be to garner GOOD reviews. A business will get to the point of almost harassing you to leave a good review. In my experience people leave reviews when they are unhappy, and say nothing when they are satisfied.

An example of this was Teenage Engineering K.O. II EP-133 sampler. A bunch got released with broken fader knobs and the wave of bad reviews and complaints flooded in, drowning out the actual pros and cons of the device. T.E. isn't exactly floundering from it, but in another circumstance that could have killed the product (which I find to be phenomenal).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Do bullets kill soldiers?

Infantry soldiers in the open, possibly. Soldiers in an APC? No.

Same applies to companies. A single sufficient bad review on a small, one-person company can take it out entirely. A single review of a big corporation? Not even one from a big shot like MKBHD.

This headline is dumb.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

prevent many people of

This actually stuck out more than the comma splices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I was writing on the phone and editing something and yeah, that's the result :D

[–] Audacious 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I wonder if he would have made the same review if it was made by apple/samsung/google.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

He did something similar for the Apple VR headset. Not as extreme, but probably because the product was not that shit.

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