Talk:Amazon Vine

Notability
The Vine program is somewhat notable because amazon identifies reviews by Vine members on their site. In any case, the Vine program is more notable than Harriet Klausner. I am going to remove the notability comment but if someone thinks it belongs there, feel free to put it back with an explanation as to why you think it belongs.Tgpaul58 (talk) 21:22, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the state as of 19 May 2009, but the state of the article today suggests very little noteability - It seems to be entirely composed of original research, and is merely a description of a promotional program run by a commercial enterprise. This should be rolled into the overall article on Amazon, with little more than the introduction left in.Martin Turner (talk) 23:10, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Quality of reviews
Should more be said about the quality of Vine reviews? Personally I exclude all Vine reviews when considering a purchase. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.184.205.138 (talk) 19:59, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes there is a high bias to 5 star reviews. Often you have the feeling 90% 5 star, 5% 4 star (to let it look more critical) and 5% 1 to 3 stars. If a user would give 2 and 3 star ratings all the time he might not get the nice stuff in the future like notebooks and DSLR cams the companies send in. And everyone knows it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.54.153.38 (talk) 15:55, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
 * So you think I am right in disregarding Vine reviews then? 86.147.58.141 (talk) 15:20, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Regarding the quality of given reviews within the Vine programme, the proverb "Never look a gift horse in the mouth" describes a little bit the following: That any goods, which are for free, are not avaliated in such a critical way as things which were bought by money. I cannot say, how much influence has the member's fear of being neglected or even dismissed - because of seeming "not to have enough goodwill, or not having the same level of benevolence like other testers". For sure, that might be a factor that could bias ratings.--Peão de estância (talk) 10:58, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles are not supposed to show bias. It's not a question of speculation but a matter of presenting facts. The facts are that Amazon doesn't encourage Vine members to write positive reviews and there's no evidence that they ever removed somebody from Vine for doing so. Manufacturers, not Amazon, gain from positive reviews, and the manufacturers have no say in who gets Vine samples. Amazon gains from trusted reviews, and reviews that showed bias would cost Amazon money and credibility. Amazon gains when customers buy alternatives to badly reviewed products, and loses when customers buy products they dislike, especially if they feel misled. Amazon openly tells Vine reviewers that reviews can be positive or negative and it will not affect their membership in the program.

There are no statistics showing what percentage of Vine reviews have five stars or any other number of stars. Amazon doesn't publish those statistics for non-Vine reviews either. Vine reviewers will pick items they expect to like. Customers will buy items they expect to like. A high number of five star reviews from either group is not unexpected. A trust factor would have to consider differences in star ratings from what paying customers with the same level of trust would come up with. There's no evidence that star ratings from Vine reviewers for Vine products are higher than their star ratings for non Vine products (Vine reviewers are chosen from trusted reviewers and it's likely that most reviews written by Vine reviewers are not Vine reviews.)

A speculative argument that Vine reviewers would somehow feel guilty about giving a bad product a bad review because they get to keep the bad product makes little sense. Giving good reviews to bad products as a way of assuring that a reviewer can continue to get bad products is an interesting notion, but without numbers to support it, it doesn't belong in a Wikipedia article. In fact, giving a good review to a bad product can reduce a reviewer's level of trust (percentage of "helpful" votes) and doing so increases the likelihood of getting kicked out of the Vine program, not the other way around. As a safeguard, Vine reviews are noted as Vine reviews, meaning the reviewers have to satisfy a potentially skeptical readership who are looking for possible bias.

If there's a basis to make claims of bias, then facts and numbers are needed to support it. They should also account for bias in non-Vine reviews. Is a paying customer more willing to admit making a bad purchasing decision than a Vine reviewer is to say he didn't like a product that he received for the purpose of determining whether he'd like it? If so, show statistics that support this claim. Hagrinas (talk) 19:43, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

My wife is a vine member; something to keep in mind is that most members are requesting things they're interested in, so there's obviously going to be a bias towards higher stars; we have yet to request anything that was really bad. As we wrote reviews, I tried to give the actual text value, noting the pros and cons of each item, even if I gave it four or five stars. ---Morgajel (talk) 02:16, 7 November 2011 (UTC)


 * The only time you should be posting anything about the quality of the reviews or the lack thereof is if you can do so in a non-biased manner and have reliable sources to back it up. There generally aren't any sources out there for this. I've put a one line sentence about some of the concerns people have had over the reviews, but nothing else needs to be said. There's nothing else that can be said about it that is backed up by reliable sources. Vine hasn't really gotten so much attention that it would have dozens of reliable sources that debunk or prove any of these theories. The closest there's been was a survey of the top reviewers and not all top reviewers are in this program.Tokyogirl79 (talk) 14:46, 24 January 2012 (UTC)tokyogirl79

Actually there has been a fair amount of research into the prevalence of five star reviews, not just for Vine but of top ranked reviewers in general. Casual reviewers are much more likely to give five star reviews, and are also likely to give one star reviews. The typical reviewer is inspired to review only when he/she considers a product so good that it seems necessary to boast about a discovery, or is frustrated to the point that it seems necessary to warn people. Vine reviewers don't start out as Vine reviewers, but do start out with a degree of trust from the Amazon customer base. They don't get kicked out of the program for writing negative reviews, but could get kicked out (in theory) for having a huge drop in rank because customers don't find the reviews helpful. Amazon prefers to have reviews for products that fall in between five stars and one star, since those are the ones that don't attract casual reviewers, and are the best candidates for Vine reviewers.

I suggest that people look at free tools such as ARAT that make it incredibly easy to compare the distribution of stars given by any Vine reviewer to that of any other reviewer. The tools are there for objective analysis.

This reminds me of a flawed study that concluded that the top movie reviewers are more likely to give high praise to movies than less prominent reviewers give. Roger Ebert pointed out what should have been obvious to those who did the study. The top reviewers get assigned to the movies that are most likely going to be the top movies. No newspaper is going to give the potential blockbuster to a junior reporter and give the top reporter a low budget film to review. Likewise, Vine reviewers don't want to fill their homes with junk and gain nothing by doing so. They have a choice of items to review and are most likely to pick the products that they expect to be the best in the first place. The same is true among those who buy products. People don't buy products expecting them to be bad, so it's expected that reviews in general will be good. The difference is that Vine reviewers risk nothing by taking a chance. So reviewing a $300 waffle iron and finding it to be of low quality will warrant a poor review, but chances are the same person wouldn't have bought it in the first place. And people who buy $300 waffle irons are more likely to be embarrassed to admit their mistake.

Amazon has far more to gain with unbiased reviews. If a Vine reviewer trashes a toaster and that causes people to buy a different highly rated toaster at Amazon, then Amazon comes out ahead. The reviewer might get positive feedback for helping customers avoid a mistake. But if the same reviewer gives a good review to a bad toaster, that reviewer is stuck with a toaster that he can't even give away, is likely to get negative votes from customers who feel betrayed, and Amazon can lose business from customers who wouldn't trust the review process.

The bottom line is that the notion that Vine reviewers give more five star reviews is pure speculation and all actual research shows the opposite. You can check yourself but you can't post the results in Wikipedia because that would be original research. 50.0.106.10 (talk) 16:42, 1 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Agree. However, as a Vine Reviewer myself, I can tell you that I wasn't asked to join vine because I either A) had a wide spread of different types of reviews (most of them were either 1 or 5 stars and, like you said, were either of the "This Sucks" or "This is Awesome" variety) or B) had a large following. However, I do think that it is important that you have dozens of votes (either positive or negative), which gives Amazon the assurance that your reviews are actually READ rather than simply ignored.  My reviewer ranking was somewhere in the 10-20,000's when I was asked to join and it hovers somewhere in the 16-1700's now, but I think the increase is based solely on the increased volume of my reviews (and thus the possibility of more positive "likes") rather than any change in my reviewing style.  Considering I've seen Vine Voice reviewers with MUCH lower reviewer rankings and/or who simply write crap reviews and don't seem to care, it's always appeared to me that Vine basically just asks people to join based upon nothing more than simply "throwing a dart"... Ckruschke (talk) 18:59, 2 July 2014 (UTC)Ckruschke

Membership Criteria
As I would like to confirm, decisive is not the total number of given reviews within the "regular amazon", not at all. Apparently, for being invited to the Vine Membership it also does not make a distiction, if a amazon member would avaliate purchased things with five, three or maybe only with two stars. My own assupmtion is that those ones are invited, whose product reviews represent on the average a honest, apprehensible and sober opinion; Reviews which are conclusively argued and written in a good stile - And consequently helpful for any other person who decides about buying a product. --Peão de estância (talk) 11:00, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Revamped article
I revamped the article since it's been in dire need of some TLC for a while now. I've cleaned out a lot of original research as well as information that could be best summarized in a few sentences. We don't need exceedingly long sections about the newsletter when it's just easier and clearer to state that members get two newsletters a month. The parts about whether or not the newsletters are targeted and the people who say that it isn't are unnecessary and are pure OR. I'm not entirely convinced that the program is notable enough to warrant its own article, but I've found a few sources for the article beyond the primary link that was already on the page. Yes, I know that there's more information that could potentially be added, but the biggest problem is that there aren't any reliable sources to back this up. There's speculation on the forums and a bajillion non-notable blogs, but none of it can be used as a source for this info.Tokyogirl79 (talk) 14:35, 24 January 2012 (UTC)Tokyogirl79

Updated reviews
Amazon announced that 100% of the Vine merchandise received must be reviewed. This was announced to Vine members who received a email stating the program change on April 5, 2013. I would source that information, but it could be privileged and for Vine members only. Quill and Pen (talk) 04:00, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll just note that the effect of this program change has been rather hilariously bad. For example, many Vine reviewers requested snow removal equipment, and wrote some 5- and 4-star reviews about it because they had a review deadline hanging over them. Only problem was, they'd had no snow since receiving the product in question. In actual fact, the product can't cope with any significant snowfall, and would be better replaced with a $10 shovel. A few of the Vine reviewers have come back to admit this, but most of them are either too embarrassed to do so, or still haven't had any snowfall.
 * The new policy might have made sense for books, but for seasonal equipment that you might not even use for a year - not so much. 82.164.89.93 (talk) 11:50, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
 * As a Vine Voice reviewer myself, I can attest that the program change HAS NOT been "hilariously bad". I'm not sure where you are getting this info, but your single example is anecdotal at best. The change was made to ensure reviewers weren't pocketing free items for which they never had any intention of reviewing. Considering you have 30 days to perform the review, this should give you ample time to actually use the item. If someone was to get a shovel and then have no snow during the 30 day review window, it is a simple matter to contact Amazon and state you were unable to adequately review the product. They would then take this item off your list. It is actually much harder to perform a good book review in the 30 day window (especially if you get it and the book is awful) which is why I very infrequently select books unless they are short or I know I will like them. What is a much larger problem is the amount of Viners who, in trying to have the first review up for an item, put up a review after only having the product for a few hours or, worse yet, put up the review before actually receiving the item. This "striving to be first" is a much worse problem because it tends to encourage reviewers to do poor reviews - thus defeating the entire reason for the Vine program. Ckruschke (talk) 18:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)Ckruschke