u/avskotl

I'm about to upload my review of this chainsaw to Amazon (which I fully expect to be rejected) and spotted another couple of Vine reviews that confirm that there is either a significant design or manufacturing flaw with this chainsaw.

If you've received this device please look into how chainsaw chain brakes work, have a look at my video, and you'll see that the brakes on these saws are wired in the reverse way to how they should work.

The left hand brake is supposed to be a kickback arrestor, which is if the saw kick backs (and flies toward your head) then your left wrist will force the switch forward, cutting power and enabling the chain brake.

With this device, the switch is wired the other way so power is only applied when the switch is forward so disabling the kickback arrestor. This is a potentially life-changing or fatal flaw. If your saw kicks back (which can happen in a fraction of a second) then there is nothing to stop it hitting your face.

I'm about to submit my review and I'll lodge a complaint with Amazon, but we know how poor they are with these kinds of requests.

So if you have received this saw, please look into how chain brakes work and, if you agree with my take, please go back and resubmit your review with an appropriate warning for others.

Now that we have more data under our belts I went back in and reviewed my quality stats and one thing that was interesting was that every review that had images got scored "Excellent".

Of course, the thing with stats is that you can use them to tell any story you want and I would caveat this by remarking that it's extremely likely that I put more effort into the written review for anything I could be bothered taking photos of (or even creating a video), so it may be that images are just along for the ride.

One other, less-contentious, note is that my "Excellent" reviews have lower average star ratings than the batches of "Fair" and "Good" ratings, so I don't think there's much support for the evidence that you get down-scored for giving lower star-ratings.

This is a new one on me. Got an ok iPhone watch strap from AI a couple of weeks ago and wrote a 4 star review for it, but called out that you can't charge it on a desktop stand.

Just noticed that it's marked as "Return Received" in old-fashioned-Amazon, despite me never requesting a return (of course), not returning it and not receiving any messages whatsoever.

Of course, this means my review has been removed (not "unapproved", but completely removed).

Seems a new trick by an underhand seller?

Note that the image is from my own reviews tracker - it's not a publicly available app or plugin (sorry!)

I finally got round to trying to make sense of the quality scores that Amazon is slapping on our reviews, and thought this would be of interest to others. Note that I'm not tracking which reviews have images (might do that in the future) so can't offer any info on correlation of images to Excellents, other than my current eval period has 32% evals-with-media (and 100% Excellent ratings). Edit: I went and added reviews-with-images, see later reply.

My takeaways (other opinions are available)

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First, the dominant signal is that Vine quality score seems to reward depth much more than it rewards star rating. Stars barely separate the buckets: Poor is still about 4.3, Fair about 4.6, Excellent about 4.4, and Good is 5.0 but on only 2 items. By contrast, review length separates them dramatically: Poor averages 39 words, Fair 58, Excellent 167. That suggests the quality score is probably reacting more to completeness, coverage, or detail than to positivity.

Second, the system appears heavily top-coded toward Excellent once a review clears some implicit threshold. Over 90% of scored items are Excellent, with very little in the middle. That makes me think this is not a finely graded editorial scale in practice. It behaves more like:

• too thin -> Poor / Fair
• detailed enough -> Excellent
• Good is either rare or unstable as a category

Third, sentence count reinforces that this is about structure, not just filler length. Excellent is not only longer in words, it has far more sentences on average (7.9 versus 2.8 / 3.3). That hints the score may favour reviews that cover multiple points rather than just being verbose.

Fourth, price may matter, but seems to be secondary. Higher-priced items skew more Excellent, but I suspect that may partly be because they naturally invite longer, more detailed reviews. In other words, price might be correlated with score through review depth rather than being independently rewarded.

Fifth, the data is telling us more about the scoring rubric than about product quality. This page is not really saying “better products get better quality scores.” It’s saying “reviews that look more substantial get better quality scores.”

In summary:

• the score looks weakly related to stars
• strongly related to review depth/structure
• probably threshold-based rather than nuanced

Not entirely surprising but useful to see the figures!

Hate to imagine what the ingredients are