Even if he meant to hit the "2" in lieu of a "4", that's still hard to imagine (if the distance is correct).

i have tried to be a descent swimmer. i find it very hard. i consider it a victory of i can just hold my pace steady.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

The entire "business" of Amazon reviews is astounding. There are people for whom, by any reasonable accounting metric, the writing of reviews is actually a job.

The comments section of Amazon is huge in its importance. But it's not always favorable. I've heard of competitors funding negative reviews. It's crazy. But understandable when you consider the scope of Amazon's power.

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"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp

How does one go about getting one of these jobs?

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

Going LR here, but Newt Gingrich is a great Amazon book reviewer!

"I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth."

So, you're swimming downhill... Sorry Dan, I just couldn't resist.

The comments section of Amazon is huge in its importance. But it's not always favorable. I've heard of competitors funding negative reviews. It's crazy. But understandable when you consider the scope of Amazon's power.


The whole "business" of reviews is a bit interesting these days

They say lay-people's reviews, in the age of social media, are more genuine, and believable and that we should treat so-called expert reviews, as biased towards whatever brands are spending the most with that particular media/retail outlet.

As to the first part - I understand the genuine part, but often these reviews are done by people who have no idea what they are talking about!! As to the second, sure, I'd be lying if I said that, some/many expert reviews may be biased in a fashion, but, the reviewer is sometimes, VERY knowledgeable about what they are reviewing/testing.

So where are we at with all this?

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

There is a Chrome app called Fakespot that does some sort of analysis of reviews for a product on Amazon. You click on the app while you're on the Amazon page, and it will come up with a letter grade and comments about what it found, which might be several similar reviews or poor quality reviews or other. I was going to pull the trigger a few times on something that looked to be the best price with a 4+ star rating, only to find Fakespot graded the reviews D or worse. Don't buy now without checking it.

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el cabrero
Pure American Naturals
http://www.pureamericannaturals.com/
https://www.facebook.com/PureAmericanNaturals/

PSA: if you want reliable reviews for tech gadgets, look over on newegg.com Their site is not as relevant as amazon and that removes the incentive to post fake reviews. Also, only nerds shop at new egg so the reviews tend to be dcrainmaker-esque in depth and accurate.

That IS a victory. I continue to try to be an okay swimmer. It's not taking yet. Probably because I'm not trying hed enough

ha ha that's terrible! Those kinds of reviews almost turn me off products. It's interesting with triathlon and things like wetsuits how few official tests there are. You would think if a company had a wetsuit that was significantly quicker than it's rivals, they would have done a comparison test with a pro swimming in 5+ wetsuits, demonstrating how much quicker their wetsuit actually was. Brenton Ford did a wetsuit test, but that was comparing sleeveless to sleeved, difference over 400m was 7s. I reckon difference in a top of the range $1000 vs $200 wetsuit would be negligible, assuming it was a good fit.

Wouldn't that make you a diver :-)

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29 years and counting

Although the writers of these reviews may have genuine intentions to provide honest feedback, that still doesn't make their comments unbiased or representative.

The following is somewhat of a generalisation but I do think it holds true for the most part. When someone's bought something, they want it to be good. They want to feel good about their purchase and their ability to select the best product for their purposes. Unless they hit a specific problem that upsets them they will tend to hold the opinion that their possession is superior to the alternatives. I'm sure I've been guilty of this myself. So, while people may be genuine, they are sub-consciously heavily biased.

Secondly, I'd agree with you that many people don't understand what they're reviewing well enough to provide any useful insight. So star ratings are pretty useless without reading the accompanying comments and figuring out what, if anything, they mean.

Thirdly, those who post comments and ratings are often a small minority of those who purchased a product. If a small proportion of those that buy something provide a review/rating, a large proportion of those tend to do so specifically BECAUSE they have either a vested interest or some sort of complaint with either the product or the company. Many complaints are no doubt valid but it's clear from reading many negative reviews that the reviewer is punishing the company for their own failures. People often make silly assumptions about what they are buying (based on their own ignorance, not misleading product information) and then get upset when they turn out to be incorrect. So often the reviews are not representative of the majority of users, since you don't hear from them. And the negative reviews CAN be, but are not necessarily, nonsense.

So, yeah, reviews and ratings are clumsy and horribly inaccurate tools in deciding what to buy.

On this note... I've done Amazon MTurk for extra money. Long story short you do simple task for small amounts of cash, usually a couple cents to a dollar. One of those is "write a book review" for about 25 cents. Log on, write "this book is canned awesomeness and helped me so much" submit, and you're good to go. Who's to say someone didn't do the exact same thing for any other review?

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I still lapped everyone on the couch!

Ha ha...reminds me of my middle school days (or junior high depending on what part of the world/country you're from). A few times I got lazy to actually read a book for my book report. Instead went with reading grabbing random interesting book from my siblings collection then read the summary page and synopsis only. Wrote some generalizations to get by and still did pretty well on those reports actually.

Ocean conditions vary quite a bit. Waves, currents, and drafting and other things can have a larger impact than any wetsuit over a 1K swim.

That said that difference sounds a little too good to be true.

Ya think? :p

40 minutes for a mile must be some pretty serious flaws in swim technique, probably legs pointing down to the bottom and head up above the water. 17 minutes is ITU pro level speeds. No wetsuit is going to help go that fast.

Thanks for flagging this. Our reviews are hosted and administered by an independent third party. We can't influence them or cherry pick which ones we post or don't post. I believe there is some sort of blocking if there is bad language or a gross inaccuracy or something. Didn't see this one so one of my teammates will definitely reach out to the reviewer to see if he or she wants to revise, or else we will take down.

Thanks,
Rob

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rob canales
ceo + co-founder at ROKA
http://www.roka.com

I would have been more impressed if they would have had completed an Ironman or at very least a 70.3 whilst wearing the Viper Comp suit and qualified for World Championships.
Anyone can swim faster, would buy one if there was an aero advantage on the bike and compression technology on the run that reduces soreness and fatigue.

I want to know too. I'm a miserable opinionated prick at the best of times. I can type reasonably fast as well. I'd love to get paid to write crappy reviews about competitors products!

What I love, is reading reviews of small businesses, and the reviewers write glowing reviews, but use their actual name, and it's the same as the business owner. Or FB stalking them to find the family relationship. Hilarious.

I write enough bad reviews about shitty restaurants or bad service at bike stores etc. I might actually be overqualified for writing bad reviews ;-)

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TriDork

"Happiness is a myth. All you can hope for is to get laid once in a while, drunk once in a while and to eat chocolate every day"

No problem. At least it was an obvious false or maybe misstatement by the reviewer. And I think most people that are even aware of swimsuits sort of know what to expect from them.