A Great Precedent
Aug 23, 02:11 PM
Amazon just started including histograms of customer ratings for products.
This is a really great precedent for all customer review sites out there. As I’ve mentioned before, averages suck. Histograms reveal far more information. What if a book receives an average 3.0 score, but it’s because everyone either rates it as a 1 or a 5? A book you either love or hate is very different from a book that’s just middle-of-the-road.
This data looks very odd, so I was curious. It looks vaguely like the sort of map you’d get if you had an unpopular product that the authors “talk up” by posting positive reviews. But… I doubt even the most dedicated author would post 1367 reviews, and there’s a lot of 3s and 4s, which you wouldn’t expect in that situation.
Turns out this is the daVinci Codec, which makes sense: it gets very high ratings, but offends a core set of people who rate it low. (Despite the fact that DISAGREEING with something isn’t the same as IT BEING BAD...)
Still, even Catwoman’s reviews look just like this, inverted: lots of people rated Catwoman a 5. WHY?
— Craig Perko · Aug 27, 11:02 AM · #