I think his simple test somewhat accounts for this. Botted reviews usually don&#x27;t bother with the sophistication of generating noise in their ratings, banking instead on the possible sale from a spendy shopper instead of trying to convince the already skeptical.<p>With the assumption that most botted reviews aren&#x27;t going to be any lower than the two highest options, the same suspicions the article raises should come into play here as well, botted responses or shill responses.<p>Though, reviews in general are not really all that good. Southwark&#x27;s Yelp episode was a long but cute take on it, but keep in mind that almost everyone sees reviews differently. On Newegg, it&#x27;s incredibly common for a part&#x2F;device to get 1 egg because it didn&#x27;t work for whatever reason, even when it&#x27;s the buyer&#x27;s own fault (e.g., buying an incompatible CPU&#x2F;mobo, which happens). DoA items, misconfigured computers (e.g., forgetting to plug in a power cable), and so on all warrant 1 star, even though they have nothing to do with the performance of the item in question. (DoA being an exception, though I would argue a device being DoA by chance is not the same as widespread DoA, and that the rating system should have a special category for DoA which gets its own tally and is independent of the ratings)