Was This Review Helpful?

Okay, friends, I've put up with looking at this crap for years now, and I've finally got to say something about it before I go postal. It's not that I particularly like the band involved, or their song (just for the record, it's the single "My Heart, Your Hands" by the band Dommin, which was offered this week as a free download on iTunes) ... it's just that this sort of reckless behavior has really been getting on my nerves. Here's a little quiz for you: Which of the reviews in the image here is the best one?



Notice that I didn't say "your favorite one", or "the one you agree with the most". I said "the best one". I'll give you a hint: it also happens to be the longest one. And that's where the problem lies. Our society has been conditioned to have such short attention spans that our eyes will tend to gravitate toward the shortest posts, because we "don't have time" (give me a friggin' break) to read the longer ones. Just compare the total number of helpful/non-helpful votes on each post, and that's all the proof my argument needs. But the atrophy of our ability to concentrate is a topic for another time and another place.

What I'm getting at is that the vast majority of the posts in the attached image here are not "reviews", they're "opinions", and as such they should have been deleted by the iTunes store administrators. What's the difference? An opinion states simply what the writer thinks or feels (or what it's "fashionable" to think or feel), whereas a review tells us the most important part: WHY the writer thinks or feels the way they do. I'm sick and tired of people posting a profound little nugget of wisdom like "this song sucks it sounds like crap" (usually in just that sort of run-on sentence, with no capitalization or punctuation and gobs of misspellings), with the ones who fancy themselves a bit more clever throwing in a reckless bashing of an artist that they personally don't happen to like, regardless of its relevance to the topic at hand.

To me, reading that sort of junk is a far greater waste of my time than a coherent, thoughtful review that's five times as long but which takes the innovative approach of actually explaining the nature of the writer's opinion. Why does he/she not like what they're hearing? That's what I want to know. Whether or not I agree with them, I will consider that a helpful review, and I won't consider the minute or two it took me to read it to be "wasted" time. This is one of the pet peeves I have about the Internet: it's been made so simple to use that a lot of the people who use it are out-and-out simpletons (my readers excepted, obviously), making for way too much worthless crap for the more intelligent of us to have to sift through. What I'm trying to say is that if you're going to bother writing a review, please make it worth reading.

And please, for the love of Perquackey, think twice before you vote "yes" or "no" on the "Was this review helpful?" question. It is not -- I repeat, IT IS NOT -- asking you "Do you agree with this review?" What it is asking is whether, assuming you didn't own this item, it would help inform your decision as to whether or not you'd buy it. Is this too difficult to understand? If so, then you probably need to just take the nearest damn off-ramp from the Information Superhighway and let the rest of us drive.

Gosh, you didn't think you'd hear a rant like this from me, did you? Well, that's how much I'd been getting pissed about this...!