Nobody loves a whiner

Occasionally I write reviews at Amazon. Reviewers get graded in turn on how “useful” readers consider their reviews to be and if many consider your reviews to be useful you go up in reviewer rank. I have no idea if you get any benefits whatsoever from being a high-ranked reviewer, but of course the competitive instinct reacts on any ranking numbers.

So, suspiciously I watched reviews where I did not get good marks and thought I saw a pattern. Hmm… Quickly, drag the numbers and drop them onto the nearest statistical analysis software. Yup, there is a weak (R² = 0.26) but still statistically significant (p < 0.01) correlation between me giving high marks in my review and the review considered useful.

So, is it me writing worse reviews about the bad items, or do people for some reason react negatively to low marks? I should write a spider to go through a suitable sample of Amazon reviews and gather more statistics.