Irrationally irritating bad reviews

When I look at reviews for a particular product, I usually make an effort to look specifically at negative reviews and recent reviews.

In the case of negative reviews, however, sometimes you come across a very emphatic negative review with a high number of votes, but the review is factually incorrect in some way.

A recent example I came across was when looking at power banks on Amazon. A person left a one-star review on a 10,000 mAh model claiming they only measured 2000 mAh capacity with their USB power meter, and that was 80% less than advertised. Their fatal error? They forget to take into account voltage – it was charging their other device (another power bank) at 15 volts (for at least for part of the charge), while the advertised 10,000 mAh battery capacity is measured at 3.6 volts in this case. (Power is equal to voltage times current, so 2000 mAh at 15 volts is the same number of watt-hours as 8333 mAh at 3.6 volts. Recording and comparing watt-hours in the first place is likely to be a better idea of course, especially if you don’t have a way to discharge the power bank at a fixed voltage…)

Such a claim is also lacking a bit of common sense – if the output capacity were only 20% of the advertised battery capacity, the power bank wouldn’t charge a decent smartphone even halfway, and there would be a flood of other negative reviews.

Another recent example was a bad review for a particular brand of sun cream, with the reviewer claiming that they looked up the batch code on some random website and it said the product was manufactured five years ago. The error in this case is that they didn’t enter the batch code on the random website, but instead a product number found the front of the bottle (a number that is the same on every bottle). The reviewer even highlighted the non-batch code in a photo. (The actual batch code is on the bottom of the bottle.)

On the one hand, it’s not my job to defend companies’ products – they can do that themselves. On the other hand, bad reviews which are essentially misinformation are irritating as you feel powerless to correct them. Once upon a time, you could leave comments on reviews on Amazon (starting a discussion thread). That feature no longer exists, however, and you can now only mark a review as helpful or report it as violating community guidelines (without being able to enter any real detail). (The only real way to correct another review is to write a review of your own, but you may not want to or be in a position to write a proper review.)

And while it’s not my job to defend companies’ products, I don’t really want good products to fail either. (Especially ones that I own or buy regularly.)