Entertainment Reviews (ie. Books, Movies, Etc)

Reviewers are like critics - biased, prejudiced, opinionated commentators.
Nobody needs them.

 

A review is baised on personal likes and dislikes so may not be the same as what I like or dislike. If I read revirws I unusually read the middle reviews first. I think there are people who write reviews who have never read the book, watched the movie, ate at the restaurant, or used the product they are reviewing. The only review I trust are those from people I know and even they don't agree.

 

When I was a lot younger and knew less about the ways of the world, I always thought newspaper and magazine reviews were a pretty good guide until I realised they were just paid advertisements or what is now known in the trade as advertorials.
Now the internet is such a big thing and reviews on most things are abundant. You can find a review on almost anything which leads to companies being set up to skew results of these reviews by paying people to give favourable or unfavourable reviews. When I started my job as IT Admin for a company that is the sole Australian importer and distributor for many high end international fashion brands, I discovered the true hold the huge fashion brands have over all media and how they portray themselves to the public. Our company employed "branding consultants" who used all sorts of data mining techniques to work out trends in the marketplace and the new fashions becoming popular as well as things losing favour and then they would pass this information to our "advertising consultants". The advertising consultants would set up advertising campaigns in print media, radio and TV media aimed at our identified target consumers using this information to create the marketing strategies. The internet became so popular and mainstream that we then needed "social media consultants" who used this previously gained information as well as fresh, new information taken from website analytics and used to maintain many different target internet profiles each using different names. The different names on the media accounts each cater to a different demographic based on age, sex, previous buying patterns, social standing, etc.......they leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of customer $$$$. If all this targeted influence isn't working or there has been a problem or misconception about a product in the marketplace then we employ "public relations consultants" to generate a fresh new image using all kinds of underhand techniques such as releasing half truths into the media to deflect negative focus, by paying celebrities to give supposedly "unsolicited" positive comments for cash to secretly promote our brand and also creating then posting fake reviews talking up the things that may have fallen from favour. With all these goings on in the background and knowing how much effort is put into maximising sales I no longer put much credence on reviews.

I will do an online search to find out if people have had problems with products or suppliers and there is also an Australian discussion forum called Whirlpool
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/
where people post all sorts of information about products and suppliers and ask about people's experience with different companies. I find many of the posts are negative and are warning others about shonky tradesmen or rip off merchants so if I am going to buy something and a cursory check on Whirlpool brings up no negative posts or only positive posts then I can be pretty confident that what I am buying is OK.

FWIW I know someone who when they were a struggling student at uni earned some money by posting fake reviews on review sites about businesses that were to be targeted by her employer. It was a shady agreement where she was paid in cash with no paper trail by a website development company that produced new websites in the hospitality industry with guaranteed results.......by getting students to post positive reviews about restaurants, hotels, bars, motels, bed and breakfasts and take away food shops as well as posting negative reviews about their competitors. She only did these reviews for about 3 months until she found a real job as she felt guilty about the dishonesty and lack of transparency. She said she regretted the fact that many people probably made decisions based on information in these reviews that just wasn't truthful and didn't want to be part of it any longer...............call me a cynic but she got her degree in law and is now a lawyer so I reckon it was an early introduction to her profession........

........so to think these paid reviews aren't happening in other sectors involving sales or services would be naive

 

I see reviews all the time that say after reading all the positive reviews they decided to try it only to be dissappointed in the item, hotel, restaurant, etc. So makes me question all the positive reviews also.
As for Tripadvisor I use to use it a lot but I think they sold their soul to advertising which makes them less creditable in my opinion.