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MKBHD - Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies? (www.youtube.com)

submitted 5 months ago by jeena@jemmy.jeena.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

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My take on this is no they don't. As long as they are truthful they only report on the quality of the product and prevent many people of spending a lot of money from losing it by buying something that doesn't work.

If your product is shit your company does not deserve to be shielded from the backlash, this is the core of (classic) capitalism after all.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Product is an input, reviews are an output.

If your product can be killed by bad reviews you're either bad at making the product or bad at marketing the product. Managing a launch, including the relationships with reviewers, is part of shipping a product.

Now, that's for consumer goods. For artistic works it's a bit of a different beast and you can get a lot of other factors and definitely, by design, a lot more subjectivity. But if you're shipping cars and computing devices... yeah, no, this is a weird fixation to have. I'm guessing it's because it's the first time when whatever mismanagement happened becomes noticeable, so you can have the false impression that something was fine until the bad reviews told you it wasn't.

Although I'll say I've often owned and very much enjoyed products that don't review well. Computing device reviews in particular tend to focus on specific aspects, just because they're the easy A/B comparisons between the dozens of similar things they cover. The effect is sometimes only very general use devices get good reviews, so more specialized or targeted devices get worse marks just because they're not competing on the same areas. You see this a lot with gaming phones, and it stands out to me on a lot of the new PC handheld reviews, too. So if you ask me whether reviews can homogeneize a product and end up making every phone look the same? Maaaybe. Over time. Eventually. For most of the market, perhaps, but not all of the market.

Otherwise no, that premise is nonsense.