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What do you guys think of these review ratings?
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What do you guys think of these review ratings?

https://reviewsignal.com/webhosting

Do these ratings match your experience?

Comments

  • Debian

  • Do not trust any ratings in your life. Only one way to check something - try it by yourself.
    Ratings very easy to buy/manipulate/make fake votes / make fake reviews.

    Thanked by 1regalhost
  • ChuckChuck Member
    edited October 2018

    @desperand said:
    Do not trust any ratings in your life. Only one way to check something - try it by yourself.
    Ratings very easy to buy/manipulate/make fake votes / make fake reviews.

    especially prostitute. You need to try it by yourself.
    don't forget "slut".

    Thanked by 1regalhost
  • Just wanted to say hi and chime in, that's my website linked.

    I know the people here are very skeptical of review sites and that's good. They should be given how terrible review sites in this space are. That's why I built what I did and I wanted to at least explain how it's a bit different than what everyone is used to.

    I'll start by saying it's not perfect. There are some very real problems/limitations with trying to create an honest review site. The biggest one is my method requires lots of data. The belief is that enough data can drown out the people manipulating things/cheating/mistakes/noise/etc and give an accurate insight into different brands (the method is actually copied from my master's thesis if you're a nerd, I predicted movie box office sales using twitter data + sentiment analysis). However, most companies are too small to collect a big enough sample size of data. So I can only track the biggest brands, so all the great small companies just don't work within this context. So a lot of the companies here and the majority of companies as a whole, just don't fit my methodology until they get big enough. It sucks and there is a way I could get around it using some math (Wilson Confidence Interval for the curious), except, it would make small companies look bad because of the low statistical confidence in their rating. I don't want to do that because that's not fair to them. I can go into the math in detail if you want, but I'll just skip that for now.

    Ok, so what am I actually doing? I'm collecting hundreds of thousands of opinions people share on Twitter about these companies and analyzing the sentiment (good or bad) of the tweets about the companies. The rating you see is basically what % of people have a favorable opinion of the company (the full algorithm actually weights opinions based on how old they are, older=less value). So the goal is tracking over time what people think about all these brands. I don't inject any personal opinion into them, people can't even write reviews on my site directly, it's all just passively listening to the conversations happening on twitter.

    But you use affiliate links? Yup, I have deals with basically any company that has a program. There used to be a site that did the same thing as me but started a few years later and did it without affiliate links (so basically they did run a charity), he sold it off though but beforehand I actually compared our data and found it was very similar (mind you major differences are I had years more data, mine operates automatically with machine learning vs his manual categorization, I run mine as a business vs no affiliate links). It was a great way to keep my own site honest and have something to compare against. Since mine isn't a charity and I don't have a good public benchmark to compare to anymore, I've been pretty open about everything that goes on at Review Signal. I've even disclosed my revenue publicly.

    I also share all this information in the How It Works section detailing how the site works, the ranking algorithms, the classification scheme, the affiliate links, and more.

    I'm more than happy to address any issues/answer any questions you might have. I'd appreciate it if people were at least open enough to look at it with a VERY skeptical attitude but open enough to consider that there might be at least one honest review site in the web hosting space.

    Thanked by 3Chuck MikePT that_guy
  • deankdeank Member, Troll

    Never trust any review sites despite what they say.

    Never.

  • That's a pretty cool idea, but a quick glance at the reviews shows that what this page collects is complete garbage.

  • @gol3m said:
    That's a pretty cool idea, but a quick glance at the reviews shows that what this page collects is complete garbage.

    Not only are the reviews utter garbage, the site has:

    • affiliate links
    • more affiliate links
    • a truck load of affiliate links
    • an Armageddon of affiliate links

    I get that it’s a business, but really? It barely works. All I see is a Twitter scraper + a shit ton of affiliate links.

    tl;dr it’s a great concept on paper — but in practice, reviews look like:

  • kohashikohashi Member
    edited October 2018

    There are definitely affiliate links, I am pretty upfront about that. What is a lot to you, I'm not sure, each company that has a program is linked (not all companies have programs, eg. amazon, azure, heroku, etc). It's never been a determining factor in a listing. If it's there, I'll signup (assuming the ToS doesn't restrict me from operating an honest site).

    As far as the quality of the reviews, they certainly aren't going to look like to long thoughtful reviews you might be used to. It's Twitter. That said, the key point is the quantity of data and what's embedded in these tiny opinions. My goal is seeing what people think of these brands and bringing an honest way to compare between brands. It's hard to get public data points but as far as I know one company publicly shared their Net Promoter Score (NPS) score and I compared it to my rating. For those unaware:

    The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer's overall satisfaction with a company's product or service and the customer's loyalty to the brand.

    While you might not think each individual review is helpful (they aren't), what it does tap into in aggregate is how people generally feel towards the brand.

    If you look at the ratings and see how the brands have ended up in terms of order, how does it look to what's in your mind? Is it roughly about what you'd expect or is there some companies you feel are wildly off?

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