Half a billion reviews, without reading one
Aggregates over 507.7 million Amazon reviews across 33 categories, 1996–2023 — no text, no users, no products, just counts and distributions. What survives aggregation is the shape of the thing: growth, praise inflation, and the clock people shop by.
The six largest categories in color, the other 27 in grey. Every category rides the same S-curve a decade apart; the log scale is what makes the claim legible — on a linear axis the early years would be a flat line and the story would read as 'nothing, then everything'.
- Home and Kitchen
- Clothing Shoes and Jewelry
- Electronics
- Books
- Tools and Home Improvement
- Health and Household
Amazon Reviews 2023 (McAuley Lab) aggregates, amazon-reviews/merged_results
Share of reviews at each star level, centered on the 3-star middle. Rows sort by 4–5-star share. The J-shape holds in every category — people review to praise or to warn, rarely to shrug.
- 1★
- 2★
- 3★
- 4★
- 5★
Amazon Reviews 2023 aggregates
Share of each category's reviews by hour, midnight to midnight UTC, for the twelve largest categories — a clock, not a timeline. The curves are near-identical: whatever people buy, they write about it on the same daily rhythm.
Amazon Reviews 2023 aggregates