Why user reviews are worthless

Say you are in the market for a new frying pan. How do you go about figuring out which one to buy?

If you're like many shoppers, you probably log on to Amazon.com or another shopping site, poke around to find the size you want and something that's in your price range, but still find yourself faced with a choice of maybe a dozen potential options. How do you pick from that point? If you don't go with the cheapest of the lot, chances are you'll buy one based on which has the best rating as provided by prior purchasers of the item.

Alas, those ratings aren't likely to help you much, and that's because in the world of the web, little ever seems to go wrong. The Wall Street Journal did the math. In general, the average rating for anything online, as judged by the teeming masses, is 4.3 stars out of 5.

The web -- renowned for being a haven for anonymous, bitter diatribes and a running archive of wholly unrestricted anger -- turns out to be an awfully friendly when it comes to things like rating commercial products. Much like the scene at Lake Wobegon, all the vacuums are strong, all the TVs are good looking, and all the computers are above average.

Why is everyone so effusive about, well, everything? Chalk it up to human nature, says one marketing research firm, which debunks the myth that people are more likely to offer a negative opinion than a positive one. (The old rule of thumb was that you get 10 times the hate from an angry customer than you get in love from a happy one.) In fact, according to Keller Fay Group's research, 65 percent of word-of-mouth is positive and only 8 percent is negative, quite the opposite of the conventional wisdom.

Why? As I see it, people have been taught since birth to be nice. You know the rule: If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all. It often takes years of toiling as a professional critic before you can really dig your teeth into something.

The so-called "positivity problem" is now a big issue for major websites, which struggle with how to temper enthusiasm for shoddy products and services. After all, if you buy a 4.5-star dishwasher, you expect it to work pretty well, and retailers may face more returns than they should from buyers who feel they've been misled by the site. It's even worse for a site like eBay, where a merchant who earned just 4 out of 5 stars from his buyers is probably a deadbeat at best, a criminal at worst.

Bottom line: Merchants may try to temper this stuff, but as a consumer, you need to keep your expectations in check, too.

For more on this topic, I invite you to check out my book on film criticism, which has several pages devoted to grade inflation. I'm happy to report it has a perfect five-star rating on Amazon.com, so you know it's good.