"Preview" Epinions: Why all the uproar?
Jul 27 '00
I read an epinion earlier today that I found rather disturbing. The epinion was on the Microsoft X-Box, which is basically a video game machine that will be released sometime next year, and is currently receiving a lot of attention in the press (aka "hype") for being really powerful.
In any case, the details of the product are irrelevant--what is relevant is that it currently has its own "preview" category, and many people have written perfectly legitimate opinions about it. The disturbing review in question was not so much of a review of the product at all, but rather a comdemnation of writing "preview" opinions of unreleased products (or, more broadly, simply the act of writing an opinion of a product you have never used firsthand). The author felt that people should hold-off on writing about the product until it is released in 2001, because it is not "possible to review a product that nobody has tried out yet and it is not even shipping."
Sure, such a statement sounds logical. It must be, or else it wouldn't be such a widely-held belief at Epinions. That 9 out of 10 of the review's ratings were HR's attests to that, and IMO is even more disturbing than the review itself.
Let's not forget, first of all, that this site is all about *opinions*... not "reviews", which IMO is an invented term as far as Epinions is concerned. Possibly the word "review" was once actually an official term (I vaguely remember opinions once being called "Reviews" on the profile pages), but as far as I can tell, the term is now practically nonexistent on the site (the blue bar at the very top of the screen being one exception ;-).
Some might see it as a technicality, but there's a big semantic difference between the two words. One can have an "opinion" on anything, and while certainly some opinions are more educated and/or logical than others, every opinion at least has the potential for legitimacy. I happen to have very strong opinions on the safety (or lack thereof) of SUV's. My opinions happen to be, IMO, well-founded and based on scientific studies and statistical data. Have I ever USED an SUV? Absolutely not. Of course I certainly would need to, if I were to write a "review" on SUV's. But my lack of direct first-hand experience with them does little to de-legitimize my opinion of them.
Let's also not forget that there is a huge, fundamental difference between a review/opinion in which the writer claims to have firsthand experience with the product, but actually and obviously does not (most of the early Voodoo 5 reviews on this site, for example) and *opinions* written about a product which has been assigned a category before its official release date.
This completely illogical unwritten "rule"--that one must have firsthand experience with a product to write an opinion--simply has little rational basis. My recent Voodoo 5 epinion, for example, happens to be my most highly-read and highly-rated epinion to date, and IMO contains as much helpful information as any other V5 review on the site. Yet I have never used, or even SEEN the product, which I clearly state at the beginning of the review.
Or take the Athlon CPU, for example. While I haven't written an opinion on it, I've read over a hundred articles on it--magazine, internet, or otherwise--and feel that I know more about the Athlon than 99% of the people who HAVE written opinions on it. Whether I've used it firsthand is completely inconsequential, since the additional information I would gain from such an experience is essentially zero.
By the way, my aforementioned Voodoo 5 review happens to be my first and only opinion of a product that I have not used. In fact, it's the only review I've written of a product that I don't own. What I'm trying to make clear is that I'm not writing this out of any kind of vested interest, or to somehow "defend" anything I've done, but simply because I feel this mentality that has permeated Epinions is completely illogical. Should we continue to NR and distrust people who write fraudulent reviews of products they claim to have used? Absolutely. But that is not to say that all epinions of un-released (or just simply un-used) products do not also have their place.
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Epinions.com ID:
vicwang
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Member: Vic Wang
Location: Texas
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 216 members
About Me:
Systems Analyst and all-around computer guru who's always keeping up with the latest technology.
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