I tried, but I really don’t like the omission of written reviews and Q&A. I don’t feel comfortable buying anything anymore. Reading what knowledgeable people had to write and ask about a product made me a lot more confident in buying. And that’s the thing, there was only a couple times I have ever actually had buyer’s remorse before, and I’ve bought quite a lot. I think that says a lot about the value of customer feedback.
I’m not against the idea of these forums being used for reviews and and Q&A as long as the developer provides a link to them in the product description. And maybe if only the developer can respond. The idea of anyone here being able to respond to reviews and product questions I think would create a lot of other problems, because people that don’t even own and use the product can respond.
And the idea of customers only emailing the developer questions seems like an obviously bad idea. Imagine 120+ people asking the same question within an email with a variety of other different questions. The developer would still have to answer the same question 120+ times along with the other different questions. The developer would have to spend all of his/her time responding just to emails. And while I do like FAQs, 90%+ of the time they don’t answer my very specific questions.
I think a lot of people here do online shopping. Would you feel comfortable buying a product from Amazon without reading what at least a couple customers had to say about it? I realized that I don’t shop ANYWHERE online that doesn’t have written reviews.