User reviews are highly skewed towards those with extreme experiences and often based on undisclosed idiosyncrasies. Users post a bad review after one negative experience, and there are many Amazon reviews where it doesn't even appear to be the case that the person has actually used the product.
Creating a valuable review actually requires a systematic approach. Take, for example, a review of a cell phone's battery life. Such reviews are useless without disclosure of your usage patterns, whether you're in a good signal or bad signal area, whether you like to jack up the brightness to 100%, etc. And aggregating a bunch of shoddy reviews can't compare to one good one.
> User reviews are highly skewed towards those with extreme experiences and often based on undisclosed idiosyncrasies. Users post a bad review after one negative experience, and there are many Amazon reviews where it doesn't even appear to be the case that the person has actually used the product.
Typically the greater the number of consumer reviews will offset this problem. Again, some information is better than no information.
> And aggregating a bunch of shoddy reviews can't compare to one good one.
As you've already mentioned, many people can discern bad reviews from good ones. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing.
3 of the 5 reviews of this Dell 4K monitor are clearly using it on computers that can't drive 4k@60 HZ. The fourth is from someone who owns a completely different, non-4K Dell monitor. That leaves one reliable review, which provides very little information.
The best consumer reviews are typically found on Amazon. Moreover, you're still ignoring the problem of established organizations being unable to review the massive amounts of incoming products that are produced and shipped every year.
Consumer Reports doesn't have the resources to review everything and neither do outlets like CNET.