Obsessed with reviews

In principle the idea of this post occurred to me due to certain rating of my camera that has been published by certain web site and a controversy that ensued. However, it also occurred to me that this can be generalized a little and hence I decided to post this is in my non-photographic blog.

It seems to me that people are obsessed with reviews. I for one admit of being so. Say, you set out to buy something relatively simple and inexpensive. Let it be a very basic cell phone. Likely you would have questions the answers for which will be looked for on the web. The next logical step is to look for review sites and read these reviews because reviews are thought to be comprehensive and you want to see the whole picture.

This is where true madness begins. Here are few points of illustration.

1. Say, the site also features user comments. If you start reading those, you might loose serious amount of time and gain virtually nothing.
2. Suppose now, that somehow you've come to think that this very review site you have found is in fact respectable. Now what if this time they did a half-hearted job and you were attentive enough to notice it. Not good, if you ask me. In particular you might have been loosing time in the past reading that site.
3. Usually, probably for just about anything there is a discussion forum. So you find one and decide to register only to ask a couple of questions. Likely you'll loose more time still. In particular, one of the so called gurus that would answer your questions is in fact a person who read more review sites than you have and assembled authoritative opinion of their own without any particularly real basis.
   

No, I am not trying to say that review sites or forums aren't worth anything. They are and often valuable information can be found there. However it gets increasingly difficult to find very small gemstones of truth among these haystacks anything but.

I can probably give some examples of what I mean but it may be better if you, my dear reader, thought of your own encounters with "processed and canned" information...

This post may have a sequel...