I have mentioned this multiple times before, but here it is again. I find that most, if not all yoyo reviews are just purely for entertainment purposes. Even when the yoyo being reviewed is purchased by the reviewer, the reviewer is still compelled to make a review that is positively skewed because of the community. The community has a pretty severe allergic reaction to negative opinions about yoyos, maybe rightfully so (so that it doesn’t devolve into a toxic cesspool of insults, slurs and personal attacks, which happens all too easily when negative opinions are shared). But this ends up unintentionally conditioning yoyo reviewers to always make reviews that are skewed in favour of the yoyo. With the state of yoyo reviews now, I’m sure quite a lot of people want brutally honest and objective reviews. But, the community isn’t ready for it and cannot handle it, especially the brutality of such honest reviews. When you hear the phrase “praise publicly, criticise privately”, it just defeats the point of a brutally honest review, where you would have to criticise publicly as well.
As a lot of people have mentioned above, a lot of these reviewers get their yoyos for free or have some involvement with the people who made the yoyo. They have the incentive to continue to churn out positive yoyo reviews so that companies would send them more free yoyos to review in the future. Furthermore, a reviewer’s credibility, is in general determined by the number of similar products they have reviewed and tried out. A reviewer has to try out a lot of different products before they’re considered credible as people know that their opinion is well-informed from their past experiences with lots of different products. I know that this is not really the case in the yoyo community, but for most other communities, this is the case. This further incentivises churning out positive reviews so companies will continue to send free products to review, improving the reviewer’s credibility as he now has more products to review. This means that anyone who reviews a yoyo that have been obtained for free is going to favour the yoyo a little and their opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.
In addition, a lot of yoyos that come out nowadays are so good that everything comes down to preferences, which make objective reviews rather pointless since they’re just going to point out the obvious. Reviews need to provide value, but when you can glean the information the review provides for the product page for the yoyo, such reviews are no longer valuable. Rarely is there an objectively bad yoyo being produced. Recently, there has only been the Dumpster Fire and the Stoopid Capitalism Day Tree (sic) yoyo from Rain City Skills that can be considered objectively bad, and both are intentionally designed to be terrible, which says a lot about how great yoyos are nowadays. It’s like all yoyos produced nowadays are in the top tier, and at the highest tier, there really are only slight differences between the competing yoyos which means that purchasing decisions are going to be made on preferences rather than quality, since all yoyos produced today can be considered to be in the same league in terms of quality. No longer are there tier differences like in most other products. For example, cheap musical instruments are inevitably going to sound worse than those that cost thousands of dollars. Cheap audio equipment is going to sound worse than the more expensive ones, though there are some standouts that have an insane price to performance ratio which will end up becoming the most popular. That’s why there’s an entry level budget pick, a mid range pick, a top end pick and a money is no thing pick, for the best price to performance ratio. But for yoyos, a $30 yoyo can easily compete on the same level as a $1000 yoyo, removing the need for such picks. Sure, there are standouts that a lot of the community loves, but in the end, getting any $30 yoyo would do a great job. The same can’t be said for a lot of other products. This is why yoyos are categorised not in terms of performance or price, but in terms of shape, size and weight. The decision to buy a yoyo is no longer based on “how good of a yoyo can I get for my money” but rather “what yoyo do I think I will like the best”. It’s no longer based on objective traits of performance and quality for the price but rather, based on subjective preferences, which is why objective reviews have little value. This is why people are watching reviews to know the reviewer’s preferences and then finding the reviewer whose preferences align with theirs. This way, when the reviewer really likes a yoyo, there’s a good chance they would really like the yoyo as well. Subjectivity in reviews is the one providing value to a review instead of objectivity, which is quite the 180 from most product reviews. That is why I recommend that reviews should be very subjective to be valuable. For me, I find that too many reviewers skim on the answers to the questions, “How does it play on the string?” and “What are my preferences? How do I prefer my yoyos to play?” and instead ramble on about the history or the specs of the yoyo (basically objective facts that can be found on the product page), which makes most yoyo reviews obsolete in making purchasing decisions for yoyos, at least for me.
In the end, I think we have ended up in a very unique problem of having every single product be so good that purchasing decisions are made almost entirely by preferences rather than performance. We have reached a new frontier that I don’t think any community has ever reached before and we thus have completely new and novel problems so unique that we can’t look elsewhere for solutions, or even clues to the solutions. The question to ask is, “How do we make reviews work when purchasing decisions are made on preferences?” which nicely encapsulates the problems we face with reviews.
But first, the community’s tolerance for negative opinions has to be increased by a huge amount because the fear of backlash is very real for reviewers who decide to put up negative opinions, which will inherently skew reviews to favour the yoyo. People who want to post their negative reviews of a yoyo will also be greatly discouraged by the backlash, leaving only positive reviews lying around. I’m pretty sure we all want someone like Crinacle (somehow companies still send him free stuff even when he bashes them to the 9th circle of hell), someone who is extremely blunt, critical and honest in reviewing yoyos, but the community just can’t handle it yet. My negative opinions of the Assassin generates quite a hostile response from some people as it is so widely loved by the community and as we have recently seen, some manufacturers can’t take negative opinions well either. The aim of keeping the discussion civil has been slightly confused with a vendetta against negative opinions. I get that it is much more difficult to keep a discussion civil when negative opinions are involved, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t share negative opinions. I also understand that we also want to keep the community very positive and really welcoming with it’s lovely energy, but some of that positivity is going to be lost if we want brutally honest reviews, it’s a sacrifice that we have to make for better reviews. It really depends on where our priority lies, better, more valuable reviews, or maintaining the current positive energy of the community.