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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Do bullets kill soldiers?
Infantry soldiers in the open, possibly. Soldiers in an APC? No.
Same applies to companies. A single sufficient bad review on a small, one-person company can take it out entirely. A single review of a big corporation? Not even one from a big shot like MKBHD.
This headline is dumb.
I wonder if he would have made the same review if it was made by apple/samsung/google.
He did something similar for the Apple VR headset. Not as extreme, but probably because the product was not that shit.
What are we supposed to do? Give bad products good reviews so the poor little million dollar startup doesn’t get its feelings hurt?
If we were talking about dishonest, malicious reviews, I’d understand.
That’s not the case here though, not only is Marques’ review honest, multiple reviewers reached the same conclusion as him.Go make an actual good product instead of whining on Twitter.
Is this about the Humane thing?
In his video, he mentions the Humane review - but also the Fisker car review which was equally scathing.
Just watched the whole video (and the car one afterwards). I think if MKBHD is being disingenuous, as one of the most influential reviewers, he would’ve been the first to be called out (based on the facts he’d got wrong in the video instead of conspiracies.) that didn’t happen so I’d say it’s safe to assume the problem stems from the product itself, at least in these cases. Anyway, great watch.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I hope they do I bought a nothing phone 1 after reading promises of how they wouldn’t move to another phone until they had everything right etc.
Not only did they not keep it but after launching the 2 almost right after this claim they actively sabotaged the 1 the camera got worse the battery got way worse and thing is now super unstable and I really believe it’s on purpose as custom roms make the phone great.
The company is dead to me but I am kinda enjoying seeing the phone 2 users now complain because they are starting to get the same treatment now.
I’m dead set in my belief that this happens to every phone, and I’m sad to see the nothing phone is going the same way.
I had a Motorola X that was suddenly dying in less than 5 hours and one day I couldn’t even connect to my service. I looked and found that an update had uninstalled the phone’s modem. Not even a factory reset helped.
After rooting and finding the correct package for my modem, the phone ran flawlessly using Resurrection Remix (I miss that ROM), proving that the battery and modem were indeed fine.
Bad products lead to bad reviews, bad word of mouth, and bad reputation… which can - and does - kill companies.
But the first thing has to be true for the others to follow.
I looked up what it would cost for me to buy one of these and run it daily.
After conversions and shipping, it would be $1100 to get one in my hands. It would be $50-60/month (Pin sub + data phone plan) to make it functional. And when the company inevitably folds in 1 to 2 years (or any of the companies they use for processing), the entire thing will turn into e-waste. It has literally zero on-device processing or functionality nor can it piggyback off your phone. It will turn into a paperweight.
This thing is a scam.
No single bad review ever killed a product. Because we all know that some things are just a matter of opinion, user error, etc. Opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one. If I’m interested, I’ll read several positive and negative opinions.
But if your product is bad enough to warrant several bad reviews, that’s on you. Should’ve done better research, should’ve made a better product.
This video clearly wasn’t “opinion” or “user error”.
He put in heaps of work and throughly documented an extensive list of major problems, many of them are individually bad enough to sink the product. Put them all together… ouch.
On the other hand, he did have some positive things to say. There’s scope here for this to be a good product. They just didn’t make it happen. I think where they went wrong was creating a standalone device. It should be an accessory to a phone — similar to a pair of ear buds. You don’t put an entire operating system, cellular connection, screen, voice assistant, etc in an ear bud. You put all of that on the phone and link the two with bluetooth.
He does excellent reviews and stuff in general.
I actually watched it before the ‘controversy’ and I think it certainly was a fair assessment. He clearly states the goal of the product and where it falls short. None of his criticism seems unreasonable.
Clearly, it’s trying to be an always-online communication, assistant and logging badge. Like a Star Trek commbadge on steroids. In theory, that’s a product that I’m very interested in. But when features are structurally unsound or actively annoying to use, well, I’m going to stick with the phone I’ve got.
Ironically, his ‘bad review’ got me interested to see what a version 2 will be like. Assuming they make it that far.
Well, Ralph Nader certainly was the catalist and voice that spelled the end of the Corvair and Pinto many years ago.
Ackchyually
This is the core of markets and markets have existed long before capitalism.
Sssssshhhhhh! You’re scaring the Americans!
I was saying this over on YouTube… it’s his responsibility to report tech developments accurately and responsibly, because today’s tech developments are tomorrow’s history. Future nerds need to know the score! Scooty-Puff Junior suuuuuuuucks!
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, but that’s not how that works.
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 ship. 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.
I feel like in most cases if a product has such bad reviews that it kills the company that made it, there’s a good reason for that.
Of course there are exceptions, and it is expect that a reviewer that they do their due diligence to make sure they’re giving an honest, accurate, and reasonable review, but no company should be shielded for being told their product isn’t good if it isn’t.
I gave a keyboard wrist rest a 3 star review because the pad is this weird shape that gets narrower in the middle. From the images on Amazon, it looked like it was more or less rectangular. Rounded ends but with a consistent width throughout. The seller started harassing me to change my review to 5 stars. I reported them to Amazon. The emails from the seller stopped, I haven’t bought something from Amazon since.
Sellers that demand or worse make up 5-star reviews are the ones who sell shitgarbage products and need to go out of business. Seeing 6 5-star reviews that all say “Great product! Would purchase again!” pretty much means the product will give you glans cancer and the doctors are going to have to cut off all the nerves that make it possible to orgasm.
I want to see a product get negative reviews by idiots. That’s how you know the product is good and the source is genuine.
Give an example: I bought a little inverter that works with my power tool batteries. It can deliver 110V60Hz AC at 150W from a drill battery, plus it has USB ports. I’ve run a desk lamp from this during a power failure, or charged my cell phone. Works fine. I knew it was legit when I read people’s reviews saying “Doesn’t run my hair dryer. 0/10.” Because there’s plenty of idiots in the world who don’t know how electricity works.
The problem on Amazon, especially for all these dropshippers that all sell mostly the same products: if you don’t have the best rating, nobody will buy your shit. So here it might indeed kill the company. Or at least this listing.
Which…fine. Don’t build your business on a faulty model.
For tech stuff, the best reviews to read are always the 1 or 2 star reviews, since you can see if the people complaining have legit gripes or they’re just idiots who bought the wrong thing for their task.
5 star reviews are mostly worthless, they have a strong likelihood of being fake, or for people who only ever post 5 or 1 star reviews. A product with fewer 5 star than 3 star reviews will likely make me shy away, if for no other reason than the dissenters are drowning out whoever the vendor hired to fake reviews for them. That’s noteworthy.
4 star reviews are more worth reading. There is a set of folks who thinks 5 stars should be reserved for extremely good exceeded expectations, and merely “as expected” should not get top marks. These are more likely written by people who bought the product and care about what they’re talking about.
3 star reviews will have actual good consumer information in them. “I was looking for a box to hold my Shark Model no. 24352097ASDF0872RSD vacuum cleaner accessories in, and this box does okay but the wide brush attachment thing doesn’t fit anywhere.” Okay, if I have that model of Shark, I know this might not be the box to buy for my vacuum accessories. It’s not that the box is a bad box, it’s just this isn’t the correct use case. Thanks fellow citizen!
2 star reviews are almost never written because you seldom dissatisfy a customer below the middle of the scale without completely pissing them off.
1 star reviews come in a wondrous variety. Anything from “product never arrived” which you’re warned is wrong to leave in the product review because so many of these platforms are designed to separate the product, seller and delivery service for maximum customer violation, but okay. You’ll get “Product wasn’t as advertised at all, ordered a coffee grinder got a salad shooter” which can sometimes happen when dropshippers misuse the listing sub-options menus. You know how if you order a T-shirt from Amazon you get one listing on which you select size and color from drop down menus? Or Duct tape: 1 pack, 2 pack, 5 pack? I’ve seen sellers who probably don’t speak English as a primary language market completely different products like this, which leads to dumb shit like reviews for several different items mixed together. If I see a lot of 1 star reviews, and many of them are “soldering iron did a terrible job curling my hair” I take that as a good sign, because the seller feels legitimate enough to let those remain up. Illegitimate sellers can’t tolerate low review scores and will try to have them removed or hidden. Or, you see a pattern of “flashlight power button quit working after 3 months” in which case you know to legitimately avoid this flashlight because it legitimately isn’t well made.
MKBHD is pretty popular. His subscribers are probably the demographic that might be interested in this thing. So I’m sure his bad review has impact. But unless he’s a big outlier or has a personal axe to grind with the company it does not seem like there’s any ethical consideration to making such a harshly negative review. People should probably be more suspicious of the reviewers who don’t give the product a harsh review.
The reviewer should be truthful and fair. If that means trashing a shitty product then that’s how it should be. Not calling out shitty products hurts the consumer and means the reviewer is doing a bad job.
He didn’t even trash the product — he just accurately described it.
Entities like LTT have a very large audience and the opinion they put forward tends to influence a large crowd. Dishonest reviews about an emerging startup could ruin their customer basis.
Or, to use your example, reviews that don’t understand the product or play it for laughs. 😅
Well, this is MKBHD who has an even larger audience
Well, this is MKBHD who has an even larger audience
And is known primarily as a reviewer.
LTT do some reviews, but that’s not their primary focus.
