If you're about to stay in a hotel for a couple nights soon and you see both positive and negative reviews

I like to read through the negative reviews to see if they are merely complainers or if there really had legitimate issues.

It would depend on what people were saying in the negative reviews and how numerous they were. If there were a lot of them--say half of all reviews--and what they were saying seemed pretty serious, I'd be inclined to believe them. However, if the negative reviews were from a few years back and the positive ones were more recent, I'd figure the people running the hotel had fixed whatever problems they had earlier.

I check the negatives, if there are a lot of them, with the same theme over a period of time it indicates a systemic issue. Then I check the positives and make sure the negatives are something I can live with.

If the complaint was that the receptionist did not curtsy, I would not stay in that dump.