30 - Reviewing

I'm probably not the first to point this out, but I'm going to have a little mini-rant about it, but; Amazon's review system is, for the most part, rubbish.

I'm not talking here about the allegations of fake reviews (though if this is true, this is a problem), but about various practices that make reviews either completely pointless, or a chore to go through... I'm going to use Star Wars stuff as the examples here. There are two main problems. 

First problem is the inconsistency of allowing product to be reviewed before it's even been released. Take a look at the Blu-Ray release of Rise of Skywalker. There are currently 44 reviews. Not a single person actually owns a copy of the release. They're all reviewing the movie they saw at the cinema. Which is useless. It doesn't tell you about the quality of the Blu Ray, or how good the extras may be, or anything else. That's what I want to know about from the reviews. 

Second problem is combining reviews of different editions; say, for example I want to read a review of the Collectors Edition of The Force Awakens. Apparently there are currently 12,111 reviews of it... but no; a majority of these (I stopped after page 2) are reviewing other editions of the film, so there's a heck of a lot to wade through to read actual reviews of the collectors edition. 

A further example are the 2,020 (what a coincidence!) reviews of 3D version of Episode 4... Strewth, I thought, I didn't even know that had been released in 3D. Imagine watching the Tantive IV being pursued by the Star Destroyer in 3D... well, imagine is what you'll have to do as the 3D version was never released, and the reviews are for other editions of the movie. 

Now, I chose a high profile set of films to illustrate this problem, and I could have chosen anything else; it exists across all films and TV shows with multiple editions. And books. And it makes a mockery of the review system. 

Perhaps a solution would be to restrict all reviews to people who have purchased (and received) an item from Amazon, which would then link back to the specific edition purchased. That would stop the problems in one. It would mean fewer reviews, but they would be more meaningful and useful.