There's way more 1 star than 2 or 3. That usually indicates the product shows up DOA for a lot of people, or is otherwise probabilistically totally unsuitable for some group of people.
If the number of star ratings follows a more normal curve like the following, then I'm more confident in the quality of the product, even if both have an average 4 star rating:
I wouldn't take any rating metric seriously unless it accounted for how long they've owned it. Plus there's the difference between "I've owned 12 lawnmowers and this one's pretty okay, only broke down after 1.5yrs, 3 stars" and "this is my first lawnmower, used it once, it's amazing, never going back to cutting my lawn with scissors, 5 stars". Plus niche sites sometimes have better reviews for the same products (newegg).
All that said, there is information to be harvested in some of these reviews.
Good point about niche sites and the length of ownership. I've noticed that a number of starts on products like top rated power supplies goes down after a year an a half or so. While you might be getting a newly released power supply with 500 reviews averaging closer to 5 stars, after 2 years, you will notice that same product with 1600 reviews averaging at below 4 stars, because owners probably came back and updated their reviews.
It would be interesting to see a trend line of change in sentiment about a products over time, using existing data.
Curve for women is not as steep as depicted in my comment. However, the modal rating is 1, followed by 0. In the words of the post, "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh."
A lot of times, the 1-star ratings are only "knee-jerk reactions". The 5-star ratings are sometimes added by people related to the product (or people who for some reason have an agenda). I usually drop those two and focus on the 2-4 reviews.
For example, one common shape looks like this:
There's way more 1 star than 2 or 3. That usually indicates the product shows up DOA for a lot of people, or is otherwise probabilistically totally unsuitable for some group of people.If the number of star ratings follows a more normal curve like the following, then I'm more confident in the quality of the product, even if both have an average 4 star rating: