this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
293 points (89.1% liked)

Technology

59436 readers
3704 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MudMan@fedia.io 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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.