The end result of this isn't reviews that serve as helpful warnings to consumers, but rather reviews that nobody takes seriously at all because they aren't a reliable record of user experience.

It's easy to quibble with this in cases like the Samsung batteries. But exploding batteries aren't the common case: much dumber things are.

My review _is_ a reliable record of user experience. If the reader buys the printer he is likely to face the same issue that I'm describing. To not warn them of the issue with the product seems way more unethical to me in my moral framework than the moral stance of keeping the reviews sacred.

Heck, if I and others didn't do this and the printer was still at 4stars because the uninformed majority don't understand the technical aspect of this planned obsolescence, other uninformed readers may not feel the need to read the reviews at all (the average is 4! It probably has no issues! HP is a household name, I'll be using this for years!)

This mentality seems to me to have produced reviews --- on Yelp, on Grubhub, and christ have mercy on the Apple App Store --- that are basically worthless. You can painstakingly read all the reviews and try to glean useful tidbits, but you cannot look at the overall review scores and use them to make reliable decisions.

> you cannot look at the overall review scores and use them to make reliable decisions.

As I said, my review (that the printer has hard-coded planned obsolescence in place) is a fair review allowing you to make a more informed, reliable decision.

It's not worth a long debate, but you're not telling me your whole argument so I don't know how to respond.

The problem comes when a small subset of unhappy users... creates a mountain of bad reviews.

"It never happened to me, or any HP printer I've ever dealt with, but I read online that..."

I'd put a 5 star review on my Samsung Note. Why? Because my phone didn't explode. Hell... my phone has been through the RINGER and it still works. Can I give it a 6 star?

But because of a small SMALL subset of users that have issues with Samsung Phones, all of a sudden there are a thousand 1 star reviews who say "they explode and kill puppies (because that's what the TV/Internet told me)"?

What percentage of iPhones were affected by Bendgate? How many reviews were from Android users who never would have bought an iPhone anyway?

There's a line and, personally, I think that it's crossed when you review something negatively for an issue you've not personally experienced.

Is HP shitty for doing this? Does Samsung need negative press for it? Should Apple have to face their issues? Of course.

But unless YOU PERSONALLY have been affected, you are just part of a mob out on a witch hunt.

So if you haven't been killed by taking counterfeit or misleading cancer-drugs you don't have a right to call out the fraud?

You don't appear to have thought this all the way through...

Of your examples, only HP intended to make a crappy product. Apple and Samsung tried to make a better one (thinner, more battery life, etc) and just made some mistakes. Mistakes deserve pointing out, intentional dishonesty does deserve a witch-hunt. Every day you don't point this out to non-technical people is a day the scammers get rich from their scams.

Is a one star review really an accurate description of "replacement ink is expensive"? I mean, if the printer literally self combusted and burned your house down when 3rd party ink was used, that seems like it would be worse, but one star is already as low as we can go.