Do you believe online reviews?

[FoggySpecs]

If you see an online review do you take it at face value? I'm so sceptical, especially of TripAdvisor, Amazon anything on Instagram or Facebook.

Middling I'd say, I do use them as a guide but with a cynical eye, I an skeptical of anything with not many reviews or where they're all uniformly glowing or terrible. Obviously personal experience counts for more than online reviews for me but I have been saved from the odd bad purchase by trust pilot reviews and I do find trip advisor fairly good as well (providing like I say you take the extremes of opinion with a pinch of salt...)

Not since I have found out companies can pay these sites to have bad reviews removed.

To some extent...if its a chinese vendor def don't believe the reviews lol. I do find trip advisor to be quite good when it comes to reviews.

Depends:
If there are loads, into 1000s then probably as long as they aren't by reviewers: Aj, Ajilla, Aji, Allija, Ali, AAila, etc. I think I got half way through the reviews before I found one that wasn't clearly by this same person. Full marks for trying I suppose.

I also tend to look for the middling reviews, the 2/3/4 stars. 1 star can be axe to grind, 5 star can be paid for. Middle ones often give a good idea of issues and you can decide whether it's bad enough at the price to avoid.
If the 1 stars are all saying similar bad things then I take notice too, again, assuming it isn't my friend Aj.