The online review predicament

A while ago, like back in November, I was in the market for a 3D printer. My main use of this would be for fast prototyping of a robot I would be building to take to IIT-B Techfest literally the next month.

After searching google for a while, I came across many printers. Most far too expensive for my budget. I went to the 3D Printing discord for help, and after a lot of back and forth of things that don't ship to me and budget constraints, I found the Elegoo Neptune 4. most people instantly denied it as a potential option. Their reasoning being, many people in the discord were throwing in their complaints about print quality and the ungodly amount of effort required to maintain it. I didn't care about print quality cuz well, I'm not printing art. It's a prototype. I was still scared of the QC issues and other reported problems. However, after going through a LOT of Youtube reviews, I was pretty sure it's gonna be fine

After getting the printer, I actually did not face ANY issues. The print quality was actually better than I expected, and it was FAST! 18 minute Benchy!! I considered myself lucky and moved on. I didn't share my experience anywhere except maybe a message or two in the 3D printing discord (remember this)

A month or so later, my mom ended up buying a Pixel 6a. She didn't like it much and preferred her old broken phone over it so I ended up getting it as my 5T died around the same time(yay). I ended up using it for two whole months without any issues. Then, one day, while scrolling Reddit, I stumbled across r/GooglePixel. Apparently people dislike the 6a and Pixels in general due to reported issues.

But here's the catch, I didn't face any issues. Heck I've been running the Android 15 Developer Previews and Betas on this thing and it's absolutely fine!

So, I came across this comment on one of the threads, and it made me realise what's up.

When I bought my Neptune and had a good experience, I never told anybody about my positive experience. When I got my Pixel and loved it, I never told anyone about, well, the positive experience. But the people who did have a negative experience went around asking for help and showing their dissatisfaction. This created a larger ratio of negative posts to positive posts in the community, creating a bias on the people that it's not a good product, where in reality, it's just a bias.

This can be extended to reviews in general. For example, Whenever I would have a positive Uber ride, I would not bother leaving a review because I view it as a hassle. But when I would have issues, I'd especially remember to leave a lesser star rating in order to help Uber and potential future drivers.

Whenever an app asks us to leave a rating, we don't usually bother and smack the "Later" button. But, when we're having issues, guess what do we do? Open up the Google Play Store and leave a 1-star review.

This is just something interesting I came across and decided would be a good thing to write about(also to just test my writing skills). I personally now do keep this in mind when I'm looking at reviews and try to account for the bias.

Thanks for reading :)