User reviews: too many, biased, funny...

There have been a few recent blog posts about user product reviews: there are too many, they are biased, they can even be entertaining.

Yes, there are too many user reviews. And yes, they are biased.

"Bazaarvoice trend analysis has shown that product and service reviews are very positive, with an average rating of 4.3 out of 5," said Brett Hurt, CEO of Bazaarvoice, in a statement.

For example, the distribution of reviews collected for HiS resemble a "J":

There just can't be that many good products!

This was one of the motivations for starting HiS - give consumers a way to easily view the negative user experiences of all products, even the stellar ones.

details about how a product sucks

Visitors to HiS can now click on a product and get more details about how it sucks!
For example, check out the product page of the TomTom One:

As you can see, we've added the ratings history of the product over the last 12 months and a way to wade through the negative reviews using a term cloud of phrases that commonly appear.

added sort

As many have pointed out, the site needs sorting capability. It was an oversight to not have this in the prior release (ah, how I suck). Anyway, it's there now. You can sort by suckiness (least sucky first or most sucky first) or popularity (least popular first or most popular first).