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Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes

335 points by Osiris30 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dang 10y ago
Please don't rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Submitted title was "Amazon Reviews Are Gamed by Compensated Reviews by Professional Review Companies".)
- aab0 10y ago
  You really think "Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews" is a better summary than "Amazon Reviews Are Gamed by Compensated Reviews by Professional Review Companies"? At least in the latter, 4/6 of the words in it are not meaningless fluff.
  - dang 10y ago
    It isn't a better summary in this case (though the article's title is ok once the subtitle is put in), but the rule has to work in general, and in general we aren't able to read all articles closely enough to vet rewritten titles.
- jandrese 10y ago
  That is a much better title than the one on the article. "Lets Talk About Amazon Reviews" is linkbait IMHO, it fails to cover the topic of the article in the title, only the subject.
- danso 10y ago
  I like the original title with the secondary clause, "Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes"...I mean, when I saw the title "Let's Talk About Amazon Reviews" coming from a domain that is not amazon.com -- i.e. it's not a product/dev announcement from Amazon -- I knew it'd be about review fakery, but maybe not everyone is so cynical.
  - dang 10y ago
    Ah yes, it's clearly better with the subtitle, so we've added that and taken out the superfluous bit ("Let's talk about").
ams6110 10y ago
If http://fakespot.com/ http://fakespot.com/ can spot fake reviews, Amazon themselves should be able to do it. It's in their long term interest that product reviews are genuine so that buyers have confidence. If I can't trust Amazon reviews, I'll just shop at Target where at least I can handle the physical product before I buy it.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  What is the rate of false positives with fakespot? A 3rd party can afford to be over-zealous, but a first party solution can't.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  A friend recommended fakespot to me a few months back. I tested it by pointing it to a product that I'd recently reviewed. It came back saying that the reviews were questionable, giving as an example of a shady review the one I'd just written myself! Needless to say, I wasn't impressed with their heuristics.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    Indeed. How do we know some fake-review-review site isn't corrupted and taking money to assassinate competitors?
    - corecoder 10y ago
      There should be a site that reviews and rates sites that review and rate reviews, so we could finally know which reviews reviews site to go to to find out which reviews are authentic.
      - KZeillmann 10y ago
        But then we'd need another site that reviews and rates sites that review and rate sites that review and rate reviews.
stagger87 10y ago
I love that Amazon tells me when a reviewer is part of the Vine program, so I can immediately ignore it. It's funny when a niche product has overwhelming negative reviews and a string of 5 star vine reviews.
- randyrand 10y ago
  The problem with Vine reviews is the users don't actually want or need the product they are reviewing. When you get something for free that you don't need, it's much easier to like it. When you're actually buying something to use it daily, you become much more critical.
  - grogenaut 10y ago
    My problem with vine is that it's good for general stuff like lamps or cords but when it comes to more intricate things like say an embroidery machine or a vinyl cutter (guess what I'm doing as a hobby recently) then they don't have enough domain knowledge to give accurate reviews. I also feel like a lot of them feel they have to give good reviews to keep in the vine program which I directly know is not true.
    - polshaw 10y ago
      The vine program is a disaster for Amazon reviews credibility IMO. The reviewers are almost never invested in the product and most come down to "this product does the thing it says it will do!" and then goes on to some largely irrelevant surface details "looks great, fits just right in my purse" and perhaps compares it to items in a completely different class instead of its actual competition "these $90 headphones are much better than my iphone ones". Some do make a good effort and can be supplementarily useful but they just don't have the same concerns as people looking to shell out full price. I understand Amazon's (face value) motivation for it; decent products that are passed by because nobody reviewed it. But once you have one or two decent reviews all they do is add to the noise. Some sectors I've been looking at lately (eg USB chargers) are absolutely flooded with them to the point where it can be hard to find regular reviews. I used to use sorting by average customer review as a quick hack to see some of the best products in a sector, now it is often synonymous with "most spammed"; they are killing a key USP. It's all very well playing the "we are transparent and non-coercive" card but the reality is people are very unlikely to start rocking the boat when you are handing them free stuff, no matter Amazon's position. And call me sceptical but don't forget the role of the selection process. I'm sure it helps sales in the short term but long term it's a massive own goal. IMO they could salvage it by enforcing a 2 freebie reviews limit, or allowing users to filter them-- especially in the overall star rating.
stcredzero 10y ago
As always, it comes down to economics. So long as it's economical for people to run fake review companies online and for companies to buy sets of fake reviews, then it is going to happen. So how do we do that?
- dexterdog 10y ago
  It's not economical for people to buy them if they get deleted for fraud. Amazon is in a position to use confirmed purchasers of a product as a filter. They can also score account based on how many legitimate reviews they have. Once they cross a threshold all of the reviews get nuked. If an account as 1000+ reviews and rarely purchases anything you just shadowban them.
  - nerfhammer 10y ago
    I've seen tons of fake-sounding reviews tagged with "Verified Purchase" lately. I think this is only a small impediment, since the seller gets most of the money back from buying their own product. They just have to have fake reviewers actually buy the product and then reimburse them.
  - EazyC 10y ago
    This is the most correct and obvious/very low cost way to do it that you almost start to think Amazon is in on the conspiracy with these fake reviewers because they have something to gain that we are not seeing.
    - dexterdog 10y ago
      That's the thing I don't get. Amazon wants to have reliable reviews, right? If people have to go elsewhere for reliable reviews those better-run sites will start affiliate programs with other sellers. That's a real risk for Amazon. I don't really care where I buy dog food or computer accessories or whatever. I live and breath AWS so they've got me there, but buying goods from them or target.com or wherever else is ultimately all the same.
exratione 10y ago
Clustered timing of reviews is unfortunately not a great metric for determining whether or not they are legitimate. Many - probably most - companies send out emails to buyers asking them to review, no compensation provided. This is pretty effective, and a big driver of legitimate reviews. The timing of those emails is determined by response rates, which tend to be better on specific days - hence the mails are batched. So for some large entities, you'll see reviews clustering on Thursday to Saturday for example.
- Magnets 10y ago
  Amazon manually check reviews, which may also cluster
PaulHoule 10y ago
I am more afraid of fake bad reviews. In the case of electronic, photography stuff and similar you find people get more consistent results with some products. For instance, charging cables. Hypothetically you could buy a $5 third party cable vs a $20 OEM part, but any thought you might have a fire leana to the $20 cable.
chatmasta 10y ago
Amazon likes to make it look like they are "cleaning up" the fake reviews industry, by suing companies out of existence. But in reality they're just trying to drive sellers to use their own, official "paid review" product. [0] Granted the Amazon program is more transparent (as the review is affixed with a label that says "user was compensated for this review"), but it's disingenuous at best for Amazon to act like they're taking the moral high ground by shutting down these review sites. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > it's disingenuous at best for Amazon to act like they're taking the moral high ground by shutting down these review sites. Has Amazon come out and said they're taking the moral high ground? I just assumed they were suing them for breaking their terms of service. Many companies do this if you break them frequently enough.
  - chatmasta 10y ago
    I think it's safe to assume that the many fluff pieces in the tech media are the result of a PR campaign to paint Amazon as the good guy cleaning up those bad people selling fake reviews ("the moral high ground"). But of course there's no mention of the fact that they've turned a blind eye to them for years, and they're only now shutting them down to eliminate competition for their new paid review product.
kin 10y ago
Yeah after being tricked by a product or two I've now developed a keen eye for products with fake reviews. Funny story: a co-worker of mine fell for the fake-review trick and bought a product, talking about its rave reviews. I knew from looking at the reviews that they were fake and he was going to be disappointed. He said "No, look, it has great reviews". I said okay, you're going to be disappointed. And he was disappointed. It was the "Amazon featured" lock laces.
- bcassedy 10y ago
  Reviews in general are not a great indicator because the average person writes a terrible review. Either the review is made based on irrelevant details or they lack the perspective necessary to review the item appropriately. Two recent examples: There is a cheesesteak restaurant near me that has 4 stars on Yelp. People rave about how they have the best cheesesteaks ever! Yet if you look more closely, reviews from people that have eaten a cheesesteak on the east coast are much lower. After trying it myself, the food is terribly bland. I was recently looking at coffee makers. The "Ninja" coffee maker has glowing reviews (though I suspect a chunk of them are fake). But the reviewers are comparing this $200 Ninja machine to their $30 Mr. Coffee. Again people that actually like good coffee are rating it much lower. Then looking at the reviews for a different coffee maker, many reviewers are comparing the result to their Aeropress or lower end Espresso machines.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    > There is a cheesesteak restaurant near me that has 4 stars on Yelp. People rave about how they have the best cheesesteaks ever! Yet if you look more closely, reviews from people that have eaten a cheesesteak on the east coast are much lower. After trying it myself, the food is terribly bland. Food is tough in some regions. In California, you get open warfare about the authenticity of Mexican restaurants. In the Midwest, people think Subway is a New York Deli.
  - kin 10y ago
    Yeah, Yelp is a whole other beast. I've also developed a quick filter for reading those. Plus, food reviews are a lot more subjective. Whereas with Amazon reviews, sometimes all you really want to know is whether or not a product works as advertised. Pair that w/ their questions system and I find Amazon reviews are pretty useful, even with the occasional product fluffed w/ positive ratings.
leejoramo 10y ago
There are other related problems with Amazon's product pages: Combining different items into one product page and review. For example take a look at the review for the "Dell Ultrasharp U2415 24-Inch" display. There are 6 different sized monitors on that page. Some have very different technical specs. Combining products makes sense when the difference is color preference or the size of a shirt. But the 24-inch U2415 is a very different display from the 34-Inch curved screen U3415W Question and Answer section just before the actual reviews. I often see nonsense such as a question about a computer cable: Q: Can I eat it? A: I eat mine with ketchup.
- uremog 10y ago
  Or the ever insightful: Q: [Any question] A: I don't know.
  - bobsoap 10y ago
    That boggled my mind for some time as well, but if you follow the rabbit, the answer is quite simple. Whenever someone asks a new question, Amazon sends an email to previous buyers of the product. The email is worded in a way that entices a quick reply from the user. I forget the exact language they use, but it's very straight-forward, and it seems to make some people think that someone asked them personally. It entices them so much that they actually reply to the email like they would to another person's email who is asking them directly... They are just being polite. What's funny is the irony in all of this. Amazon, a company that famously split tests nearly everything, manages to send people emails that look so genuine they get them to respond, even if they don't know an answer. And yet, the same company can't get the same people to add some genuine product reviews, which would help drown out the fakes. Of course I don't have the data to know the response rates of these emails. I also don't claim to know that drowning out fakes with more legitimate reviews is the end-all solution. But it does make me wonder why we're even having this discussion, and why we even need sites like Fakespot, while Amazon, sitting on all that data about every one of their users, somehow seems to be unable to put it to use.
    - uremog 10y ago
okket 10y ago
The problem is: Why should I write a review? I have nothing to gain. Maybe I have had a bad experience and want to warn others: That would explain mostly bad reviews for almost every product. (Given enough users, some will have bad experiences, if only it is by them misusing it) I can understand that mostly bad reviews creates an incentive to counter these with good reviews, but from the wrong side (seller, not consumer). This would explain the many fakes. I guess reasonable trustworthy 3rd party sites like consumer reports are still necessary.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  I write reviews all the time, and to be honest, Amazon makes it pretty easy. Basically if it shipped on time or earlier and was exactly what I expected, I will write a review and say exactly that.
  - HemanHeartYou 10y ago
    what youre doing is, seemingly, review the product based on amazon delivering it to you in a speedy and secure manner. unfortunately many reviews include this when it shouldnt even be considered.
  - _JamesA_ 10y ago
    I have never ordered a product from Amazon that didn't ship on time or wasn't what I expected. I'm not trying to be negative but I don't see what value the type of review you say you are writing adds.
    - jbob2000 10y ago
      I bought a smartphone case that looked robust in the picture, but was kinda cheap and didn't perfectly fit the phone, so I noted that in my review. It's just a dinky review, you're not supposed to do a full product breakdown. If everyone thought of amazon reviews this way and just gave 30 seconds for a review for every item, then there would be no automated review problem.
kilroy123 10y ago
I no longer trust Amazons reviews. They're so obviously loaded with fake reviews. I try to be smart about it and sort by most recent. I've been burned on a few products recently as well. I met a shady guy recently, who has personally paid for tons of take reviews on kindle books. After hearing how easy it is from him, I really lost trust.
- jonstokes 10y ago
  It's not just the reviews that are fake. I recently tried to buy a plush Baymax doll for my daughter, and there were so many people complaining about getting bad Chinese knockoffs from the sellers, that I gave up. They not only have lost control of their reviews, they've lost control of the vendors. Their whole storefront operation is circling the bowl, and I say this as a longtime Prime subscriber.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Ditto here. Amazon is almost as bad as circa 2004 EBay these days. Its impossible to find genuine products in many categories. Ordered a specific tool a few months ago, and a knockoff came in the mail via "epacket" from China. My assumption for most products these days is that if Amazon is cheaper than a retailer, it's grey market. IMO, they did a Walmart -- at some point the mission shifted from serving the customer to total domination at any cost.
    - bitJericho 10y ago
      I don't think so. Anything I buy shipped from and sold by amazon I know will be legit. I don't buy anything third party if I know I cant verify it's authentic. EBay is much worse in this regard as there is nobody I can trust to have properly sourced their inventory.
      - rahimnathwani 10y ago
        https://consumerist.com/2014/05/12/does-amazons-inventory-commingling-help-fake-products-fly-under-the-radar/ https://consumerist.com/2014/05/12/does-amazons-inventory-co...
jonstokes 10y ago
I actually know people whose job it is to write these things, and to create and maintain sock puppet personas on forums for the purpose of subtly promoting clients' products and disparaging those of competitors. Then there are the professional reviews, which are all conflicted because most reviewers either get to keep the gear or the gear maker is a sponsor of the site/publication and the reviewer knows it. I say this as a person who's still involved in publishing reviews (of outdoor gear, mostly), and who most of the time gets to keep whatever some company sends me. However rotten you think the adtech industry is, the state of product reviews online -- user generated, casual forum reviews, professional reviews, etc. -- is worse. I have a standard rant about the current state of the web that I give all my family and friends, and it always ends with: "if you didn't pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement."
- souljaswag 10y ago
  Indeed. I often get paid to write these types of reviews informally.
- logicallee 10y ago
  >if you didn't pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement. But your own comment (that I'm replying to) isn't one, and we're not paying for it - you're speaking to us frankly and off the cuff (and if anything, against your own interests on those other sites) because of the informal club-like forum that this is. In the end I and any other readers here are giving you all due weight. in exchange everyone else speaks frankly about stuff they know about. You can read stuff here that probably posters are explicitly prohibited by their employers from posting. some guy from (insert whatever state agency here) can probably post from a throwaway but still waaaaaaaaaaay in contravention of whatever their policies are, and with only a little bit of indirection. So it's hardly as simple as you suggest. yeah you have to read through the bullshit, but this has always been true everywhere. caveat emptor.
  - powellzer 10y ago
    Or jonstokes works for a paid, members-only site that provides owner-verified reviews, making his post a subtle advertisement.
xiaoma 10y ago
One thing I've found useful is following specific reviewers. For example, Peter Norvig reviews many, many programming and CS texts. He has both glowing reviews such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R30AQNQK2I1O7P?ref_=glimp_1rv_cl http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R30AQNQK2I1O7P?ref_=glimp_1r... And scathing ones such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2C7L5KHUVHOR2?ref_=glimp_1rv_cl http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2C7L5KHUVHOR2?ref_=glimp_1r... By following several reviewers I respect in each domain I care about, it's not hard to find quality texts (or products) that I'd never have found by typing words into Amazon's search box and looking at average review scores.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Great idea - This sounds like an idea for an app as finding and following reviewers you can trust manually sounds like a chore.
  - sparky_z 10y ago
    How do you know you can trust the app, though?
    - jameslk 10y ago
      The app would need to have its own reputation to protect (i.e. a brand). I think the best approach for this is an app with a large community behind it. For a while, that seemed to be Epinions. I'm not really sure why it didn't work out for them.
    - uptown 10y ago
      Maybe somebody can write-up a review.
      - OJFord 10y ago
        We could have an app to follow the ones we trust.
    - 10y ago
bitL 10y ago
Overall there seems to be an epidemics of "fakeness" in Internet ratings - even looking on IMDb for movie ratings I see e.g. a movie 7.7/10 but first few pages are unanimously 1-4/10 by what seem like genuine reviewers complaining about being deceived by IMDb to watch the movie...
- seizethecheese 10y ago
  Which is why I always use Metacritic. The issue with Metacritic is that anything with a specific social message will be artificially reviewed higher since critics have a much higher incentive to preserve reputation than random reviewers on IMDB.
  - frik 10y ago
    For me the star ratings on IMDb often correlate with my own rating. But Metacritic and RottenTomatoes are often very skewed in a different direction and I really don't care to analyze why they conclude with such a different rating. Also with video games, Metacritic is pretty useless in my opinion - it's far better to read just a few sites I trust and they give me a better rating overview than a broad range of many bought ("100") or clueless ("20") critic reviews or user reviews.
    - 4ad 10y ago
      I completely agree. I find IMBb rating 98% accurate. No, I won't necessarily like a 8.1 move better than a 8.0 movie, but I will like it more than a 7.5 movie. And a 6.9 movie will always be crap to me. I can think of very few movies where IMBb rating didn't agree with me at all, in either direction. And it's usually with movies that have a very social/philosophical/american message. But these are biased even more on the non-IMDb sites, like rotten tomatoes! It might not work for everyone, but it sure works for me.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  For movies, IMDB average scores are exclusively between 5 and 8: a Four Point Scale. In contrast, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores hit the full gamut reliably: (I wrote a full statistical blog post on this with visualizations: http://minimaxir.com/2016/01/movie-revenue-ratings/ http://minimaxir.com/2016/01/movie-revenue-ratings/ ) I did a similar thing for Amazon reviews many years ago but it was not very insightful. (http://minimaxir.com/2014/06/reviewing-reviews/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/06/reviewing-reviews/)
googletazer 10y ago
There are portals that connect reviewer shills with sellers who want to boost their product ranking. Google "buy amazon reviews" and you'll see it. Some do it individually, on fiverr for example. The portals themselves are a very lucrative business, and are not going away anytime soon. There is an arms race between sellers to get that sweet sweet real estate (get their products on page 1 or page 2), and business can be a cutthroat matter. Of course, the system will eventually come to a steady state when too many buyers get burned buying crap. Review and feedback systems is a topic I'm very interested in.
Magnets 10y ago
The other problem is that companies provide free or heavily discounted products in exchange for a review. So they are using real users who then with a wink and a nudge provide 4 & 5 star reviews to keep the free products coming.
codecamper 10y ago
Oh pleeeeeeze bring Fakespot to App store reviews! I'm not going to whine any more... but pleeeeeeeeze! I've got a competitor that has made millions making fake reviews to boost up his lousy little app. He's been at it for about 5 years!
themartorana 10y ago
You can filter Amazon reviews by "Verified Purchase" which, unless someone tells me differently, at least means the product was purchased. It's annoying but those reviews feel a bit more honest.
- joshstrange 10y ago
  It means Amazon facilitated sending the product which AFAIK also covers when companies "give" reviewers free product so I don't really trust those a whole lot more, maybe a little more but it's not perfect.
- hueylewis0 10y ago
  Did you read the article? It specifically mentioned that firms/fake reviewers use Verified Purchases as a method of building authenticity and believability. Specifically: "The compensated-review process is simple: Businesses paid to create dummy accounts purchase products from Amazon and write four- and five-star reviews. Buying the product makes it tougher for Amazon to police the reviews, because the reviews are in fact based on verified purchases."
- Magnets 10y ago
  AFAIK companies can provide discount codes for reviewers to "buy" the product but there is a limit to the discount amount.
tmaly 10y ago
I am glad they added verified reviews that are for people that actually bought the product. I wish they would take it one step farther and add a option to only show verified reviews and associated stats for those verified reviews
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  Verified doesn't help much with spam reviews, the seller gets most of the money back from buying their own product. My personal filter is to ignore any review that uses any variation of the phrase "found this little gem!".
biot 10y ago
I was looking at bathroom scales recently and noticed this myself. Lots of five star reviews, many of which received the product free in exchange for a review. If you look deeper, most of these reviews are superficial. Adjust the review filter a bit and a clearer picture emerges with one and two star reviews from people who use it daily and have noticed a ton of flaws. The product in question: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B0113YL5V4/?sortBy=recent&pageNumber=2&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B0113YL5V4/?sortBy=rece... If you search for glass bathroom scales on Alibaba, you can find this exact model available at a price of $4/unit in volume so it's not surprising if it ends up being not the greatest quality.
- biot 10y ago
  I just realized I botched the link. Corrected: http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Digital-Weight-Bathroom-Scale/product-reviews/B0113YL5V4/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_sr?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews&pageNumber=1&sortBy=recent&filterByStar=all_stars http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Digital-Weight-Bathroom-Scale... Shows most recent verified purchases.
p4wnc6 10y ago
This reminds me of a recent HN thread about Amazon Echo. I brought up my skepticism that the undisclosed but touted Amazon sales of Echo were really a signal that the device is being adopted and well-liked by the consumer market that Amazon sought to target. And, for saying anything even slightly negative about a big tech company, I of course got downvoted to oblivion by everyone adding their own anecdata. Most loudly, at least one commenter linked to the reviews on Amazon itself, some tens of thousands with a 4-ish star average, as if this was definitive proof of something. Even just casually looking through the reviews, it was easy to see that almost all of the glowing, positive reviews were ghost written, or came from "Top X reviewers" who clear have a selection bias for offering positive reviews to reinforce their status as a highly ranked Amazon reviewer, or from people who got advanced copies of the device (again, selection bias if they are the sort of people who actively seek out new tech to review), and on and on. What an echo chamber this place has become (no pun intended).
maaaats 10y ago
I liked Amazon better before it became what Ebay became. It used to be a warehouse, now it's thousands merchants competing for exposure, thus prompting this. When I search for a product, I now often get tens of matches, all almost identical, all having different prices and description and equally bad photographs.
chaostheory 10y ago
The only thing that the author doesn't seem very familiar with is with Amazon's Vine program which isn't surprising since there aren't a lot of members. > For example, returns and long-term use aren’t part of the evaluation. When you get something for free, you’re less likely to follow up on breakage concerns or customer service issues. Additionally, if the reviewer didn’t actually buy the product, that person doesn’t take the purchase and shipping processes into consideration. I don't feel that this is true. People who are selected for Vine aren't random Amazon customers. They are Amazon's top ranked reviewers. A lot of these reviewers have started reviewing hundreds of items before Vine or any paid reviewing programs even came into existence. i.e. They do it for the 'love' so they will discuss price and shipping considerations Yes given Vine's 30 day review deadline, you're not going to see anything initially about long term use; but... a lot of these reviews do get updated if anything about the product changes from the original review. > You might notice how few of the reviews through Vine and similar programs are negative or even critical. This isn’t a case of reviewers intentionally being dishonest, but rather the result of unconscious positive bias. I don't disagree here. > Not paying for an item can make difficulties with that item seem less irritating. Vine items are now treated as taxable income starting this year, so Vine reviewers are now paying for the items that they select. > Additionally, reviewers may give their opinions on items for which they have no expertise or real experience and therefore have no frame of reference about how well something works by comparison. I could be wrong but I feel that available Vine items are based on the customer's past purchase and review history. There's no guarantee that the customer is an expert, but there's some proof that the reviewer is at least familiar with the product category. I'm sure that there are some bad Vine reviews and bad Vine reviewers. However discrediting the entire program without any data just doesn't seem fair. (In case it wasn't already obvious, I'm part of the Vine program)
- troisx 10y ago
  Part of the problem with the Vine program is that there's no real need or want that other reviewers have. If I'm looking for a backup battery because it's something I need every day, and I get shipped one and it takes two weeks and then it doesn't work consistently (something that happened to me), then I'm going to have a review that says that. If I'm a Vine reviewer and a backup battery shows up and I use it a few times and it works fine, I'll probably leave a positive review and then set the item aside. The lack of need or want completely taints the review process The other issue is that psychology studies show that being given something ingratiates a person to the giver, which also greatly taints the Vine program.
tracker1 10y ago
Sounds like an opportunity for a fakespot browser extension...
Nagyman 10y ago
It certainly makes it more difficult to compare products. These third-party sellers aren't doing themselves any favours. I recently wanted to purchase a simple phone case (Samsung S7 Edge, so relatively new). ALL of the cases had 4-5 stars, which makes reviews useless during research mode. It was pretty easy to spot patterns in reviews that were essentially paid-for but very annoying. In the end, I ordered a case (after checking YouTube video reviews) and was contacted by the seller to review their product on Amazon in exchange for 10% off my next purchase with the same seller. BUT not if I was going to give them less than 5 stars; in _that_ case they wanted me to contact them directly. /end anecdote
uptown 10y ago
Try to buy an in-ear or forehead thermometer on Amazon based on reviews? I've found it impossible - because every one they sell seems to have its reviews tainted by people who received free merchandise in exchange for their "honest review".
- wmeredith 10y ago
  This is off-topic, but I feel your pain and have a (un-paid, and unaffiliated) recommendation. My wife and I went through about 10 thermometers of all types and price points the first year our first child was born. They were all of dubious accuracy, and worse: inconsistent. Then, at the pediatrician's office we noticed them using an inner-ear thermometer. I asked the nurse to see it. It was a Braun Thermoscan. They aren't cheap at ~$70, but we bought one 5 years ago and that was that. It's fast, accurate and consistent. It paid for itself long ago and still works like it was new. And one more time, because of the context of this comment: I have no affiliation with Braun.
mmanfrin 10y ago
The other major issue is in bait-and-switching products. A company can put out a great product that generates true 5-star ratings, and then swap out their product with a cheaper version but continue selling it at the 5-star-product-price.
Godel_unicode 10y ago
And now we get to have a recursive "but what's _your_ bias" discussion. For instance, would a writer for a site which posts professional reviews have a bias (conscious or otherwise) against reviews written by amateurs. Add in the "if that person was good I'd be out of work" bias and here we are. Note that I'm talking specifically about the authors critique of the vine program, obviously the review spam is a real problem. That aside, I do find wirecuter to be a good starting place.
xt00 10y ago
I know people that sell stuff on Amazon and they don't use fake reviews but if a competitor does use fake reviews it makes it hard not to want to make fake reviews also.. It's a vicious cycle.. Plus they get negative reviews out of nowhere.. Very likely the same competitor is paying to put negative reviews on your page.. So it's a double whammy.. Add a bunch of 1 stars to a competitor page and a bunch of 5 stars to your own page... Basically need to clean up the whole system somehow..
- xt00 10y ago
  What would be ideal is if there were like "real reviewers" that are verified and their review carried more weight.. Which obviously sucks for the seller if they give a bad review.. Maybe there could be a mitigation system where the seller could try to fix something then mark the problem as fixed or something and then the reviewer could mark it as they agree, then they could update their review..
  - shostack 10y ago
    A lot of the "fake" reviews are by real reviewers. It is a common tactic to reimburse reviewers for purchase of the item so they then show up as a verified purchaser.
VeejayRampay 10y ago
The reviewing system on Amazon gives WAY too much space to the hoards of morons would give products one star because the package was damaged on arrival. As long as that's the case, the average rating won't mean anything.
guelo 10y ago
If FakeSpot can detect fakes Amazon should be able to do it even better. The fact that FakeSpot even exists shows that Amazon has decided that they've won the online retail competition and there's no need to spend any more resources on improving it.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Does FakeSpot exist? The progress bar hangs whatever product I try it on. Meanwhile the "Recommended with honest reviews" products have acquired some one star reviews of their own. Useful or not? No idea. Doesn't look like it so far. But this is probably an unsolvable problem. You could solve it by hiring and paying 100% independent mystery shopper reviewers with unimpeachable integrity, and only reviewing products actually purchased for real money. I don't think many online merchants would support that. This is a fundamental problem with scarcity transactions - it's always more profitable to game the system than to play honestly.
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
The sad part about all this is that the "social networks" will drive their bus through this hole. It will be "Get recommendations from people you trust!!! (sortof)". And, in short order, we'll be back to the same situation, only more tied-up, gagged and corrupted. ("Hey, pssst, make money fooling you friends!")
- elihu 10y ago
  Actually, I think that's probably the only workable solution to the whole fake-review problem. The only reviews you should trust are the ones written either by people you already know and trust, or people who are trusted by people you trust, and so on. Currently, it's really easy to bribe a random person to write an anonymous review. If the maker of some product has to bribe a friend of mine in order to get me to buy that product, it's going to be a lot more work for a lot less gain. Eventually it starts to look a lot like a company bribing all of its customers at once to buy its products, which if they can pull that off and make money, more power to them I guess. The social media companies have the data and infrastructure to implement some sort of "product reviews weighted by the reviewer's proximity to you in the friend graph" feature, but I don't see users trusting Facebook or LinkedIn to be an impartial source of trustworthy reviews. (Also, a lot of Facebook friends aren't necessarily people you'd use for product recommendations, but that's a separate problem.)
magoon 10y ago
Sellers also game the system by offering a refund, without requiring a return, in exchange for reverting a bad review. I've reported this to Amazon but they weren't receptive.
- Vraxx 10y ago
  Maybe you could game their gaming of the system by ordering the product on multiple accounts and writing bad reviews of it and get all of they sent you for free.
- kstenerud 10y ago
  So change the review, get your refund, then change the review again to write about what happened.
- green_lunch 10y ago
  This isn't really 'gaming' the system. It's good customer service. Even one Bad Amazon review can be death to a business on Amazon. I think it's a little ridiculous that so much power is given to many buyers that only want to take out their anger on someone, even if it isn't really the fault of the seller. I used to be an Amazon seller and quit because so many people would leave negative feedback over unrealistic expectations. It seems to be the M.O. of the millennial generation.
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thruflo22 10y ago
My thought on this was to develop a generic review system (ie would work for anything with a url) that shows you subjective results based on your social graph / trust map and weeds out bad actors by crunching the advogato algorithm. The challenge is liquidity, ie how do you seed the network and content but if you can solve that you can operate a review service for a fraction of the resources currently being wasted on these red queen races.
- jameslk 10y ago
  > The challenge is liquidity, ie how do you seed the network and content but if you can solve that you can operate a review service for a fraction of the resources currently being wasted on these red queen races. I've been thinking about this problem a lot too. There's actually many services that have come and gone in the review space. The solution I've come to is that any review service needs to be more than just reviews. It really needs to be more of a community.
- hayksaakian 10y ago
  seed with ratings from other review sites, but don't show the copywritten reviews
fpgaminer 10y ago
One potential solution is for Amazon to do a better job of encouraging users to rate every product they buy. That would quickly drown out the fake reviews and make such tactics uneconomical. Off the top of my head I would suggest that on the post-checkout screen they should list the customer's most recent purchases asking "Please rate your current satisfaction with your recent purchases". Just a quick 5-star rating, a small button to write a textual review if the user wants, and a note clearly stating that their review can be changed later if their opinion changes. I suggest putting that at post-checkout because it's a point where Amazon still has the user engaged, so asking is not annoying (like their emails currently are), but the user is done shopping so they aren't preoccupied with something else. In other words, it is the least annoying time to ask. They should, of course, also have a rating box on the home page (again, a list of recent purchases, possibly muxing in older purchases at random). And then weighting reviews is super important. Reviews given by users later in their ownership of the product should be weighted higher than reviews given just after receiving the product. Changed reviews should be weighted higher, as well as reviews on returns.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
  Actually, they do this already. I get e-mailed about once a week from Amazon asking me, "How would you rate <<Thing you bought a month ago>>?" I frankly find it annoying. It's sad to say, but unless the item was either really good or really bad, I don't feel compelled to review it. The other problem is most people probably review their things as soon as they get it. Very few go back and edit their reviews if the thing disintegrates six months later, with the net result that the product has overwhelmingly positive reviews despite having the durability of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
  - fpgaminer 10y ago
    My comment addressed that: > I suggest putting that at post-checkout because it's a point where Amazon still has the user engaged, so asking is not annoying (like their emails currently are), but the user is done shopping so they aren't preoccupied with something else. And I addressed your second point as well in my comment.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Half the time the fakes are so ludicrously easy to spot that I really wonder why they bother. Fifty glowing reviews of a book within a day of publication all raising the same 4 esoteric points in the review. No doubt 4 points suggested by the author/publisher when asking for the astroturfing. Completely disregard all Amazon Vine reviews. Now weight heavily in favour of reviews that have had update edits - "it failed after 2 months. The replacement failed 3 months after that" (common on all makes of $200 LED gaming keyboards) or "after a year it's still in perfect condition". Photos on the reviews are often a good sign too - but only when there's just a few - photos on reviews are rare. So lots with similar framing would be an instant strike. Try finding a CAT6a cable on Amazon - seems they're all 4.5 - 5* wonderful, yet dig into the bad reviews a bit and most of them don't even meet wire or shield spec. Even those coming from Amazon themselves. Aside from reviews from specific, trustworthy people, reading the mid-tier and bad reviews gives a much better flavour of what a product is about, and the odd review tearing the product to pieces can be worth its weight in gold. If it's a marketplace seller my starting point is to mistrust all reviews and let them earn trust really slowly. I sure won't be going near Fakespot, especially when they're so intentionally vague in describing their own product - it'll be a score to game like your Klout score and all the other meaningless metrics. The astroturfers will adjust what's needed in the fakes to pass.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > Half the time the fakes are so ludicrously easy to spot that I really wonder why they bother. They only need to be slightly difficult for a robot to flag as a fake. Most people will just sort products by a combination of price-and-rating, and buy the top-rated thing in their budget; it doesn't matter if the 5-star reviews are all Markov-chain generated garbage, all users see are the stars.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    I know I'm probably atypical - a techie and old enough to be cynical of most things, but are most people really still that simplistic? Surely 3 or 4 crap purchases or 25%+ return rate is going to be enough to tell anyone that the star rating is worthless?
CM30 10y ago
When it comes to Amazon reviews, let's not forget some of the older examples of them being gamed. Before the internet 'services' and spammers offering to make fake reviews, the same thing was being done by notorious dodgy authors and creators on a more manual level. Like Robert Stanek, a notorious self published fantasy author who posted thousands of fake reviews of his books (and probably still does): http://conjugalfelicity.com/robert-stanek/gaming-the-amazon-system/ http://conjugalfelicity.com/robert-stanek/gaming-the-amazon-... For example, his books sold maybe ten copies a week, yet somehow got hundreds of glowing and suspiciously worded reviews on Amazon. Got to the point other sites (and Wikipedia) basically put up warning signs. So yeah, even before the current crop of reviewer sellers started popping up, this system was being gamed by the authors and creators themselves using sockpuppets to flood it with fake reviews for their work.
sixdimensional 10y ago
Maybe if Amazon simply posted a score/rating of how many people bought vs. returned the particular product and frequency over time, that information would alone be helpful. However, not sure they would ever share such competitively valuable information directly. They do sort of share it indirectly through the best sellers lists on the Amazon site, however, they do not share details of "how" they arrive at what "best-selling" means.
ck2 10y ago
Another problem on amazon is allowing 3rd parties to "piggy-back" on original listings that aren't available directly from Amazon itself, and then the 3rd party will either substitute or not actually have the original item at all and ship whatever. So the original item gets legit great reviews. But the reviewers never mention which seller they bought from. 3rd parties glam onto the high ratings and a lot of people get disappointment either with fulfillment or the product itself. This is why I no longer buy unless it is amazon or amazon fulfilled (so I can at least return it). But you pay a premium for that. Amazon could solve this by just noting which vendor the reviewer bought from on the subject line.
ldpg 10y ago
Here's just a few examples of listings with mostly fake reviews: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DN9UKHC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DN9UKHC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01D0JDZFO http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01D0JDZFO Most top listings are saturated with fake reviews. If you want to understand the depth of the fake listing problem, look at the thousands of people trying to create new listings in high-competition markets. Search Amazon for: "silicone oven mitts" "bamboo cutting board" "meal prep container" Click any result, then scroll down to the "Sponsored Products" section for that item. Repeat this, really dig down into the "sponsored" lists. Notice the amount of copiers. Now look at the reviews. For new sponsored products in these categories virtually all of the entries are from review-mill programs. There can be hundreds of fake reviews on a single listing. Many of the negative reviews you may see on these are fake as well, from competitors! Review-mill programs work by having the reviewers buy the product through amazon (they are reimbursed or discounted). Then they do a write ups. Many are short and organic looking, the more easily spotted ones contain lots of text and multiple photos of the product.
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dredmorbius 10y ago
TL;DR: Recommendations systems cannot be indifferent to truth. This article highlights pretty much precisely the same problem that the "social media promote (bogus) conspiracy theories" item yesterday did. Slightly recycled comment. Some related concepts: 1. Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, notes that an absolute requirement of an effective and healthy system is accurate feedback and information. Media which are indifferent to truth value, or which actively promote distortion (see Robert Proctor's term, agnotology), will actively harm the system. 2. Celine's 2nd law, and inversion. In Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, a character notes that "accurate information is possible only in a non-punishing situation". Its inverse is also true: acurate information is only possible when it is accuracy itself and ONLY accuracy which is rewarded. Academic publishing, in which paper output and journal selection is a gateway determinant of professional careers, would be an instance of this. Or the long skew of The Learning Channel from NASA-PBS educational co-production to Honey Boo-Boo broadcaster. 3. Paperclip Maximizer. "Don't be evil" isn't good enough. You've got to actively seek out good. Even a benign maximisation goal will, if not tempered by requirements to provide net benefit, lead to catastrophic results. 4. Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action" explains how and why small (but motivated) fringe groups can achieve goals directly opposed to the interests of far larger groups. This explains a great deal of market and political dysfunction. 5. A generalisation of Gresham's Law leads to the realisation that understanding of complex truths is itself expensive. It's also (Dunning-Kruger) beyond the capability of much of the population. This also has some rather dismal implications, though as William Ophuls notes, political theory based on the assumption that all the children can be above average ("the Lake Wobegon effect") are doomed. You dance with the dunce what brung ya. Amazon here will probably have to create and fund their own review staff if only to vet and validate user-supplied reviews. As one HN poster here notes, "what is my incentive to provide reviews?" A good review takes time, experience, is likely to draw flack, and, frankly, often comes from someone with better things to do with their time. Crowdsourcing is useful where data are thin and the crowd is likely to be unbiased. Where specific expertise is required, Peter Noverg on programming texts, the Google employee who's uncovered numerous fraudulent USB-C cables, one qualified reviewer trumps millions who know nothing. (But you've got to ensure that the qualified reviewer stays both honest and engaged.) More generally: the Amazon experience seems to be worsening. Trust is falling to eBay-like levels, if not worse. Search and discovery are poor, and product quality is all over the map. Books are one matter -- highly uniform product, simple function. Expensive kit of various description another. Among my recent purchases, an LED cabinet lighting system in which local, major chain, and Amazon sources (brick-and-morter and online) failed. Ikea turned out to have a well-thought-out product line, helpful (though ultimately not quite what I was looking for) information online, and, most importantly, an in-store display in which I could assess, mix, match, and ultimately assemble the system I'm using and enjoying now. Twice the price of what I'd initially specced out, but that system didn't work in the least. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/chnJ1MzcdhX https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/chnJ1Mzc...
toephu2 10y ago
Amazon needs quality control. They sell more and more crap and you have to spend so much time perusing the reviews to find out if a product is actually good or not. Sometimes I prefer to goto Costco where yes I deal with long lines but at least I know what I am buying is of decent quality, the prices are low, and they have a very generous return policy (most electronics can be returned within 90 days and anything else you can return whenever you want with or without the receipt).
perseusprime11 10y ago
This is a wide spread problem across the board not just web. Look at some of the reviews of the apps on iOS. Very detailed and makes a pitch to future users to buy this app. I have almost always never left a review unless it is a great app or if I got really mad at the app. Never felt the need to leave reviews if the app did the job it's supposed to do.
perseusprime11 10y ago
I wish there is something similar on the app store to weed out fake reviews.
mrfusion 10y ago
My idea is instead of having review why not show the percent of orders that were returned. That would give you sense of the quality. Another idea is to randomly select customers who actually ordered the product to leave a review. Since it's random you wouldn't have the self selection problem of people getting paid to leave reviews.
jldugger 10y ago
Why is the wirecutter even reading Amazon reviews? Isn't their job to give independent analysis?
- 4ad 10y ago
  How do you start your independent analysis if by not looking at what's popular? Doing your own analysis and reading amazon reviews are not exclusive. I find wirecutter usually accurate in facts, but I rarely agree with them on their recommendation of what is good for me. That being said, they are very explicit in why they recommend something, I just wish there were other reviewers who shared my set of interests and values in things.
  - jldugger 10y ago
    Bear in mind that they also filter out anything they can't get a referral fee for.
hippich 10y ago
Yes - there are fake reviews, but there are also bunch of discount-for-review. Most of these reviewers are leaving disclaimer and often leave 1-3 star review in my experience. Now the reason for that is because it super hard to get going with your product without sending discounted samples to reviewers. Because even if you spend tons of money on ads and somehow convince customer to buy your product without reviews, that customer in 99.9% will never leave a review. And if you dare to email this customer to ask for feedback - they will curse you, complain, report to amazon. That's where things currently are - it is two way street. Without any traffic on it you will end up with very few shitty products by big companies who will have no reason to improve quality or innovate. Just 2c from the other side of the fence.

335 points by Osiris30 10y ago

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dang 10y ago

Please don't rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Submitted title was "Amazon Reviews Are Gamed by Compensated Reviews by Professional Review Companies".)

aab0 10y ago
You really think "Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews" is a better summary than "Amazon Reviews Are Gamed by Compensated Reviews by Professional Review Companies"? At least in the latter, 4/6 of the words in it are not meaningless fluff.
- dang 10y ago
  It isn't a better summary in this case (though the article's title is ok once the subtitle is put in), but the rule has to work in general, and in general we aren't able to read all articles closely enough to vet rewritten titles.
jandrese 10y ago
That is a much better title than the one on the article. "Lets Talk About Amazon Reviews" is linkbait IMHO, it fails to cover the topic of the article in the title, only the subject.
danso 10y ago
I like the original title with the secondary clause, "Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes"...I mean, when I saw the title "Let's Talk About Amazon Reviews" coming from a domain that is not amazon.com -- i.e. it's not a product/dev announcement from Amazon -- I knew it'd be about review fakery, but maybe not everyone is so cynical.
- dang 10y ago
  Ah yes, it's clearly better with the subtitle, so we've added that and taken out the superfluous bit ("Let's talk about").

ams6110 10y ago

If http://fakespot.com/ http://fakespot.com/ can spot fake reviews, Amazon themselves should be able to do it. It's in their long term interest that product reviews are genuine so that buyers have confidence. If I can't trust Amazon reviews, I'll just shop at Target where at least I can handle the physical product before I buy it.

Klathmon 10y ago
What is the rate of false positives with fakespot? A 3rd party can afford to be over-zealous, but a first party solution can't.
CWuestefeld 10y ago
A friend recommended fakespot to me a few months back. I tested it by pointing it to a product that I'd recently reviewed. It came back saying that the reviews were questionable, giving as an example of a shady review the one I'd just written myself! Needless to say, I wasn't impressed with their heuristics.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Indeed. How do we know some fake-review-review site isn't corrupted and taking money to assassinate competitors?
  - corecoder 10y ago
    There should be a site that reviews and rates sites that review and rate reviews, so we could finally know which reviews reviews site to go to to find out which reviews are authentic.
    - KZeillmann 10y ago
      But then we'd need another site that reviews and rates sites that review and rate sites that review and rate reviews.

stagger87 10y ago

I love that Amazon tells me when a reviewer is part of the Vine program, so I can immediately ignore it. It's funny when a niche product has overwhelming negative reviews and a string of 5 star vine reviews.

randyrand 10y ago
The problem with Vine reviews is the users don't actually want or need the product they are reviewing. When you get something for free that you don't need, it's much easier to like it. When you're actually buying something to use it daily, you become much more critical.
- grogenaut 10y ago
  My problem with vine is that it's good for general stuff like lamps or cords but when it comes to more intricate things like say an embroidery machine or a vinyl cutter (guess what I'm doing as a hobby recently) then they don't have enough domain knowledge to give accurate reviews. I also feel like a lot of them feel they have to give good reviews to keep in the vine program which I directly know is not true.
  - polshaw 10y ago
    The vine program is a disaster for Amazon reviews credibility IMO. The reviewers are almost never invested in the product and most come down to "this product does the thing it says it will do!" and then goes on to some largely irrelevant surface details "looks great, fits just right in my purse" and perhaps compares it to items in a completely different class instead of its actual competition "these $90 headphones are much better than my iphone ones". Some do make a good effort and can be supplementarily useful but they just don't have the same concerns as people looking to shell out full price. I understand Amazon's (face value) motivation for it; decent products that are passed by because nobody reviewed it. But once you have one or two decent reviews all they do is add to the noise. Some sectors I've been looking at lately (eg USB chargers) are absolutely flooded with them to the point where it can be hard to find regular reviews. I used to use sorting by average customer review as a quick hack to see some of the best products in a sector, now it is often synonymous with "most spammed"; they are killing a key USP. It's all very well playing the "we are transparent and non-coercive" card but the reality is people are very unlikely to start rocking the boat when you are handing them free stuff, no matter Amazon's position. And call me sceptical but don't forget the role of the selection process. I'm sure it helps sales in the short term but long term it's a massive own goal. IMO they could salvage it by enforcing a 2 freebie reviews limit, or allowing users to filter them-- especially in the overall star rating.

stcredzero 10y ago

As always, it comes down to economics. So long as it's economical for people to run fake review companies online and for companies to buy sets of fake reviews, then it is going to happen. So how do we do that?

dexterdog 10y ago
It's not economical for people to buy them if they get deleted for fraud. Amazon is in a position to use confirmed purchasers of a product as a filter. They can also score account based on how many legitimate reviews they have. Once they cross a threshold all of the reviews get nuked. If an account as 1000+ reviews and rarely purchases anything you just shadowban them.
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  I've seen tons of fake-sounding reviews tagged with "Verified Purchase" lately. I think this is only a small impediment, since the seller gets most of the money back from buying their own product. They just have to have fake reviewers actually buy the product and then reimburse them.
- EazyC 10y ago
  This is the most correct and obvious/very low cost way to do it that you almost start to think Amazon is in on the conspiracy with these fake reviewers because they have something to gain that we are not seeing.
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    That's the thing I don't get. Amazon wants to have reliable reviews, right? If people have to go elsewhere for reliable reviews those better-run sites will start affiliate programs with other sellers. That's a real risk for Amazon. I don't really care where I buy dog food or computer accessories or whatever. I live and breath AWS so they've got me there, but buying goods from them or target.com or wherever else is ultimately all the same.

exratione 10y ago

Clustered timing of reviews is unfortunately not a great metric for determining whether or not they are legitimate. Many - probably most - companies send out emails to buyers asking them to review, no compensation provided. This is pretty effective, and a big driver of legitimate reviews. The timing of those emails is determined by response rates, which tend to be better on specific days - hence the mails are batched. So for some large entities, you'll see reviews clustering on Thursday to Saturday for example.

Magnets 10y ago
Amazon manually check reviews, which may also cluster

PaulHoule 10y ago

I am more afraid of fake bad reviews. In the case of electronic, photography stuff and similar you find people get more consistent results with some products. For instance, charging cables. Hypothetically you could buy a $5 third party cable vs a $20 OEM part, but any thought you might have a fire leana to the $20 cable.

chatmasta 10y ago

Amazon likes to make it look like they are "cleaning up" the fake reviews industry, by suing companies out of existence. But in reality they're just trying to drive sellers to use their own, official "paid review" product. [0] Granted the Amazon program is more transparent (as the review is affixed with a label that says "user was compensated for this review"), but it's disingenuous at best for Amazon to act like they're taking the moral high ground by shutting down these review sites. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> it's disingenuous at best for Amazon to act like they're taking the moral high ground by shutting down these review sites. Has Amazon come out and said they're taking the moral high ground? I just assumed they were suing them for breaking their terms of service. Many companies do this if you break them frequently enough.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  I think it's safe to assume that the many fluff pieces in the tech media are the result of a PR campaign to paint Amazon as the good guy cleaning up those bad people selling fake reviews ("the moral high ground"). But of course there's no mention of the fact that they've turned a blind eye to them for years, and they're only now shutting them down to eliminate competition for their new paid review product.

kin 10y ago

Yeah after being tricked by a product or two I've now developed a keen eye for products with fake reviews. Funny story: a co-worker of mine fell for the fake-review trick and bought a product, talking about its rave reviews. I knew from looking at the reviews that they were fake and he was going to be disappointed. He said "No, look, it has great reviews". I said okay, you're going to be disappointed. And he was disappointed. It was the "Amazon featured" lock laces.

bcassedy 10y ago
Reviews in general are not a great indicator because the average person writes a terrible review. Either the review is made based on irrelevant details or they lack the perspective necessary to review the item appropriately. Two recent examples: There is a cheesesteak restaurant near me that has 4 stars on Yelp. People rave about how they have the best cheesesteaks ever! Yet if you look more closely, reviews from people that have eaten a cheesesteak on the east coast are much lower. After trying it myself, the food is terribly bland. I was recently looking at coffee makers. The "Ninja" coffee maker has glowing reviews (though I suspect a chunk of them are fake). But the reviewers are comparing this $200 Ninja machine to their $30 Mr. Coffee. Again people that actually like good coffee are rating it much lower. Then looking at the reviews for a different coffee maker, many reviewers are comparing the result to their Aeropress or lower end Espresso machines.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  > There is a cheesesteak restaurant near me that has 4 stars on Yelp. People rave about how they have the best cheesesteaks ever! Yet if you look more closely, reviews from people that have eaten a cheesesteak on the east coast are much lower. After trying it myself, the food is terribly bland. Food is tough in some regions. In California, you get open warfare about the authenticity of Mexican restaurants. In the Midwest, people think Subway is a New York Deli.
- kin 10y ago
  Yeah, Yelp is a whole other beast. I've also developed a quick filter for reading those. Plus, food reviews are a lot more subjective. Whereas with Amazon reviews, sometimes all you really want to know is whether or not a product works as advertised. Pair that w/ their questions system and I find Amazon reviews are pretty useful, even with the occasional product fluffed w/ positive ratings.

leejoramo 10y ago

There are other related problems with Amazon's product pages: Combining different items into one product page and review. For example take a look at the review for the "Dell Ultrasharp U2415 24-Inch" display. There are 6 different sized monitors on that page. Some have very different technical specs. Combining products makes sense when the difference is color preference or the size of a shirt. But the 24-inch U2415 is a very different display from the 34-Inch curved screen U3415W Question and Answer section just before the actual reviews. I often see nonsense such as a question about a computer cable: Q: Can I eat it? A: I eat mine with ketchup.

uremog 10y ago
Or the ever insightful: Q: [Any question] A: I don't know.
- bobsoap 10y ago
  That boggled my mind for some time as well, but if you follow the rabbit, the answer is quite simple. Whenever someone asks a new question, Amazon sends an email to previous buyers of the product. The email is worded in a way that entices a quick reply from the user. I forget the exact language they use, but it's very straight-forward, and it seems to make some people think that someone asked them personally. It entices them so much that they actually reply to the email like they would to another person's email who is asking them directly... They are just being polite. What's funny is the irony in all of this. Amazon, a company that famously split tests nearly everything, manages to send people emails that look so genuine they get them to respond, even if they don't know an answer. And yet, the same company can't get the same people to add some genuine product reviews, which would help drown out the fakes. Of course I don't have the data to know the response rates of these emails. I also don't claim to know that drowning out fakes with more legitimate reviews is the end-all solution. But it does make me wonder why we're even having this discussion, and why we even need sites like Fakespot, while Amazon, sitting on all that data about every one of their users, somehow seems to be unable to put it to use.
  - uremog 10y ago

okket 10y ago

The problem is: Why should I write a review? I have nothing to gain. Maybe I have had a bad experience and want to warn others: That would explain mostly bad reviews for almost every product. (Given enough users, some will have bad experiences, if only it is by them misusing it) I can understand that mostly bad reviews creates an incentive to counter these with good reviews, but from the wrong side (seller, not consumer). This would explain the many fakes. I guess reasonable trustworthy 3rd party sites like consumer reports are still necessary.

jbob2000 10y ago
I write reviews all the time, and to be honest, Amazon makes it pretty easy. Basically if it shipped on time or earlier and was exactly what I expected, I will write a review and say exactly that.
- HemanHeartYou 10y ago
  what youre doing is, seemingly, review the product based on amazon delivering it to you in a speedy and secure manner. unfortunately many reviews include this when it shouldnt even be considered.
- _JamesA_ 10y ago
  I have never ordered a product from Amazon that didn't ship on time or wasn't what I expected. I'm not trying to be negative but I don't see what value the type of review you say you are writing adds.
  - jbob2000 10y ago
    I bought a smartphone case that looked robust in the picture, but was kinda cheap and didn't perfectly fit the phone, so I noted that in my review. It's just a dinky review, you're not supposed to do a full product breakdown. If everyone thought of amazon reviews this way and just gave 30 seconds for a review for every item, then there would be no automated review problem.

kilroy123 10y ago

I no longer trust Amazons reviews. They're so obviously loaded with fake reviews. I try to be smart about it and sort by most recent. I've been burned on a few products recently as well. I met a shady guy recently, who has personally paid for tons of take reviews on kindle books. After hearing how easy it is from him, I really lost trust.

jonstokes 10y ago
It's not just the reviews that are fake. I recently tried to buy a plush Baymax doll for my daughter, and there were so many people complaining about getting bad Chinese knockoffs from the sellers, that I gave up. They not only have lost control of their reviews, they've lost control of the vendors. Their whole storefront operation is circling the bowl, and I say this as a longtime Prime subscriber.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Ditto here. Amazon is almost as bad as circa 2004 EBay these days. Its impossible to find genuine products in many categories. Ordered a specific tool a few months ago, and a knockoff came in the mail via "epacket" from China. My assumption for most products these days is that if Amazon is cheaper than a retailer, it's grey market. IMO, they did a Walmart -- at some point the mission shifted from serving the customer to total domination at any cost.
  - bitJericho 10y ago
    I don't think so. Anything I buy shipped from and sold by amazon I know will be legit. I don't buy anything third party if I know I cant verify it's authentic. EBay is much worse in this regard as there is nobody I can trust to have properly sourced their inventory.
    - rahimnathwani 10y ago
      https://consumerist.com/2014/05/12/does-amazons-inventory-commingling-help-fake-products-fly-under-the-radar/ https://consumerist.com/2014/05/12/does-amazons-inventory-co...

jonstokes 10y ago

I actually know people whose job it is to write these things, and to create and maintain sock puppet personas on forums for the purpose of subtly promoting clients' products and disparaging those of competitors. Then there are the professional reviews, which are all conflicted because most reviewers either get to keep the gear or the gear maker is a sponsor of the site/publication and the reviewer knows it. I say this as a person who's still involved in publishing reviews (of outdoor gear, mostly), and who most of the time gets to keep whatever some company sends me. However rotten you think the adtech industry is, the state of product reviews online -- user generated, casual forum reviews, professional reviews, etc. -- is worse. I have a standard rant about the current state of the web that I give all my family and friends, and it always ends with: "if you didn't pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement."

souljaswag 10y ago
Indeed. I often get paid to write these types of reviews informally.
logicallee 10y ago
>if you didn't pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement. But your own comment (that I'm replying to) isn't one, and we're not paying for it - you're speaking to us frankly and off the cuff (and if anything, against your own interests on those other sites) because of the informal club-like forum that this is. In the end I and any other readers here are giving you all due weight. in exchange everyone else speaks frankly about stuff they know about. You can read stuff here that probably posters are explicitly prohibited by their employers from posting. some guy from (insert whatever state agency here) can probably post from a throwaway but still waaaaaaaaaaay in contravention of whatever their policies are, and with only a little bit of indirection. So it's hardly as simple as you suggest. yeah you have to read through the bullshit, but this has always been true everywhere. caveat emptor.
- powellzer 10y ago
  Or jonstokes works for a paid, members-only site that provides owner-verified reviews, making his post a subtle advertisement.

xiaoma 10y ago

One thing I've found useful is following specific reviewers. For example, Peter Norvig reviews many, many programming and CS texts. He has both glowing reviews such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R30AQNQK2I1O7P?ref_=glimp_1rv_cl http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R30AQNQK2I1O7P?ref_=glimp_1r... And scathing ones such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2C7L5KHUVHOR2?ref_=glimp_1rv_cl http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2C7L5KHUVHOR2?ref_=glimp_1r... By following several reviewers I respect in each domain I care about, it's not hard to find quality texts (or products) that I'd never have found by typing words into Amazon's search box and looking at average review scores.

simonswords82 10y ago
Great idea - This sounds like an idea for an app as finding and following reviewers you can trust manually sounds like a chore.
- sparky_z 10y ago
  How do you know you can trust the app, though?
  - jameslk 10y ago
    The app would need to have its own reputation to protect (i.e. a brand). I think the best approach for this is an app with a large community behind it. For a while, that seemed to be Epinions. I'm not really sure why it didn't work out for them.
  - uptown 10y ago
    Maybe somebody can write-up a review.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      We could have an app to follow the ones we trust.
  - 10y ago

bitL 10y ago

Overall there seems to be an epidemics of "fakeness" in Internet ratings - even looking on IMDb for movie ratings I see e.g. a movie 7.7/10 but first few pages are unanimously 1-4/10 by what seem like genuine reviewers complaining about being deceived by IMDb to watch the movie...

seizethecheese 10y ago
Which is why I always use Metacritic. The issue with Metacritic is that anything with a specific social message will be artificially reviewed higher since critics have a much higher incentive to preserve reputation than random reviewers on IMDB.
- frik 10y ago
  For me the star ratings on IMDb often correlate with my own rating. But Metacritic and RottenTomatoes are often very skewed in a different direction and I really don't care to analyze why they conclude with such a different rating. Also with video games, Metacritic is pretty useless in my opinion - it's far better to read just a few sites I trust and they give me a better rating overview than a broad range of many bought ("100") or clueless ("20") critic reviews or user reviews.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    I completely agree. I find IMBb rating 98% accurate. No, I won't necessarily like a 8.1 move better than a 8.0 movie, but I will like it more than a 7.5 movie. And a 6.9 movie will always be crap to me. I can think of very few movies where IMBb rating didn't agree with me at all, in either direction. And it's usually with movies that have a very social/philosophical/american message. But these are biased even more on the non-IMDb sites, like rotten tomatoes! It might not work for everyone, but it sure works for me.
minimaxir 10y ago
For movies, IMDB average scores are exclusively between 5 and 8: a Four Point Scale. In contrast, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores hit the full gamut reliably: (I wrote a full statistical blog post on this with visualizations: http://minimaxir.com/2016/01/movie-revenue-ratings/ http://minimaxir.com/2016/01/movie-revenue-ratings/ ) I did a similar thing for Amazon reviews many years ago but it was not very insightful. (http://minimaxir.com/2014/06/reviewing-reviews/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/06/reviewing-reviews/)

googletazer 10y ago

There are portals that connect reviewer shills with sellers who want to boost their product ranking. Google "buy amazon reviews" and you'll see it. Some do it individually, on fiverr for example. The portals themselves are a very lucrative business, and are not going away anytime soon. There is an arms race between sellers to get that sweet sweet real estate (get their products on page 1 or page 2), and business can be a cutthroat matter. Of course, the system will eventually come to a steady state when too many buyers get burned buying crap. Review and feedback systems is a topic I'm very interested in.

Magnets 10y ago

The other problem is that companies provide free or heavily discounted products in exchange for a review. So they are using real users who then with a wink and a nudge provide 4 & 5 star reviews to keep the free products coming.

codecamper 10y ago

Oh pleeeeeeze bring Fakespot to App store reviews! I'm not going to whine any more... but pleeeeeeeeze! I've got a competitor that has made millions making fake reviews to boost up his lousy little app. He's been at it for about 5 years!

themartorana 10y ago

You can filter Amazon reviews by "Verified Purchase" which, unless someone tells me differently, at least means the product was purchased. It's annoying but those reviews feel a bit more honest.

joshstrange 10y ago
It means Amazon facilitated sending the product which AFAIK also covers when companies "give" reviewers free product so I don't really trust those a whole lot more, maybe a little more but it's not perfect.
hueylewis0 10y ago
Did you read the article? It specifically mentioned that firms/fake reviewers use Verified Purchases as a method of building authenticity and believability. Specifically: "The compensated-review process is simple: Businesses paid to create dummy accounts purchase products from Amazon and write four- and five-star reviews. Buying the product makes it tougher for Amazon to police the reviews, because the reviews are in fact based on verified purchases."
Magnets 10y ago
AFAIK companies can provide discount codes for reviewers to "buy" the product but there is a limit to the discount amount.

tmaly 10y ago

I am glad they added verified reviews that are for people that actually bought the product. I wish they would take it one step farther and add a option to only show verified reviews and associated stats for those verified reviews

nerfhammer 10y ago
Verified doesn't help much with spam reviews, the seller gets most of the money back from buying their own product. My personal filter is to ignore any review that uses any variation of the phrase "found this little gem!".

biot 10y ago

I was looking at bathroom scales recently and noticed this myself. Lots of five star reviews, many of which received the product free in exchange for a review. If you look deeper, most of these reviews are superficial. Adjust the review filter a bit and a clearer picture emerges with one and two star reviews from people who use it daily and have noticed a ton of flaws. The product in question: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B0113YL5V4/?sortBy=recent&pageNumber=2&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B0113YL5V4/?sortBy=rece... If you search for glass bathroom scales on Alibaba, you can find this exact model available at a price of $4/unit in volume so it's not surprising if it ends up being not the greatest quality.

biot 10y ago
I just realized I botched the link. Corrected: http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Digital-Weight-Bathroom-Scale/product-reviews/B0113YL5V4/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_sr?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews&pageNumber=1&sortBy=recent&filterByStar=all_stars http://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Digital-Weight-Bathroom-Scale... Shows most recent verified purchases.

p4wnc6 10y ago

This reminds me of a recent HN thread about Amazon Echo. I brought up my skepticism that the undisclosed but touted Amazon sales of Echo were really a signal that the device is being adopted and well-liked by the consumer market that Amazon sought to target. And, for saying anything even slightly negative about a big tech company, I of course got downvoted to oblivion by everyone adding their own anecdata. Most loudly, at least one commenter linked to the reviews on Amazon itself, some tens of thousands with a 4-ish star average, as if this was definitive proof of something. Even just casually looking through the reviews, it was easy to see that almost all of the glowing, positive reviews were ghost written, or came from "Top X reviewers" who clear have a selection bias for offering positive reviews to reinforce their status as a highly ranked Amazon reviewer, or from people who got advanced copies of the device (again, selection bias if they are the sort of people who actively seek out new tech to review), and on and on. What an echo chamber this place has become (no pun intended).

maaaats 10y ago

I liked Amazon better before it became what Ebay became. It used to be a warehouse, now it's thousands merchants competing for exposure, thus prompting this. When I search for a product, I now often get tens of matches, all almost identical, all having different prices and description and equally bad photographs.

chaostheory 10y ago

The only thing that the author doesn't seem very familiar with is with Amazon's Vine program which isn't surprising since there aren't a lot of members. > For example, returns and long-term use aren’t part of the evaluation. When you get something for free, you’re less likely to follow up on breakage concerns or customer service issues. Additionally, if the reviewer didn’t actually buy the product, that person doesn’t take the purchase and shipping processes into consideration. I don't feel that this is true. People who are selected for Vine aren't random Amazon customers. They are Amazon's top ranked reviewers. A lot of these reviewers have started reviewing hundreds of items before Vine or any paid reviewing programs even came into existence. i.e. They do it for the 'love' so they will discuss price and shipping considerations Yes given Vine's 30 day review deadline, you're not going to see anything initially about long term use; but... a lot of these reviews do get updated if anything about the product changes from the original review. > You might notice how few of the reviews through Vine and similar programs are negative or even critical. This isn’t a case of reviewers intentionally being dishonest, but rather the result of unconscious positive bias. I don't disagree here. > Not paying for an item can make difficulties with that item seem less irritating. Vine items are now treated as taxable income starting this year, so Vine reviewers are now paying for the items that they select. > Additionally, reviewers may give their opinions on items for which they have no expertise or real experience and therefore have no frame of reference about how well something works by comparison. I could be wrong but I feel that available Vine items are based on the customer's past purchase and review history. There's no guarantee that the customer is an expert, but there's some proof that the reviewer is at least familiar with the product category. I'm sure that there are some bad Vine reviews and bad Vine reviewers. However discrediting the entire program without any data just doesn't seem fair. (In case it wasn't already obvious, I'm part of the Vine program)

troisx 10y ago
Part of the problem with the Vine program is that there's no real need or want that other reviewers have. If I'm looking for a backup battery because it's something I need every day, and I get shipped one and it takes two weeks and then it doesn't work consistently (something that happened to me), then I'm going to have a review that says that. If I'm a Vine reviewer and a backup battery shows up and I use it a few times and it works fine, I'll probably leave a positive review and then set the item aside. The lack of need or want completely taints the review process The other issue is that psychology studies show that being given something ingratiates a person to the giver, which also greatly taints the Vine program.

tracker1 10y ago

Sounds like an opportunity for a fakespot browser extension...

Nagyman 10y ago

It certainly makes it more difficult to compare products. These third-party sellers aren't doing themselves any favours. I recently wanted to purchase a simple phone case (Samsung S7 Edge, so relatively new). ALL of the cases had 4-5 stars, which makes reviews useless during research mode. It was pretty easy to spot patterns in reviews that were essentially paid-for but very annoying. In the end, I ordered a case (after checking YouTube video reviews) and was contacted by the seller to review their product on Amazon in exchange for 10% off my next purchase with the same seller. BUT not if I was going to give them less than 5 stars; in _that_ case they wanted me to contact them directly. /end anecdote

uptown 10y ago

Try to buy an in-ear or forehead thermometer on Amazon based on reviews? I've found it impossible - because every one they sell seems to have its reviews tainted by people who received free merchandise in exchange for their "honest review".

wmeredith 10y ago
This is off-topic, but I feel your pain and have a (un-paid, and unaffiliated) recommendation. My wife and I went through about 10 thermometers of all types and price points the first year our first child was born. They were all of dubious accuracy, and worse: inconsistent. Then, at the pediatrician's office we noticed them using an inner-ear thermometer. I asked the nurse to see it. It was a Braun Thermoscan. They aren't cheap at ~$70, but we bought one 5 years ago and that was that. It's fast, accurate and consistent. It paid for itself long ago and still works like it was new. And one more time, because of the context of this comment: I have no affiliation with Braun.

mmanfrin 10y ago

The other major issue is in bait-and-switching products. A company can put out a great product that generates true 5-star ratings, and then swap out their product with a cheaper version but continue selling it at the 5-star-product-price.

Godel_unicode 10y ago

And now we get to have a recursive "but what's _your_ bias" discussion. For instance, would a writer for a site which posts professional reviews have a bias (conscious or otherwise) against reviews written by amateurs. Add in the "if that person was good I'd be out of work" bias and here we are. Note that I'm talking specifically about the authors critique of the vine program, obviously the review spam is a real problem. That aside, I do find wirecuter to be a good starting place.

xt00 10y ago

I know people that sell stuff on Amazon and they don't use fake reviews but if a competitor does use fake reviews it makes it hard not to want to make fake reviews also.. It's a vicious cycle.. Plus they get negative reviews out of nowhere.. Very likely the same competitor is paying to put negative reviews on your page.. So it's a double whammy.. Add a bunch of 1 stars to a competitor page and a bunch of 5 stars to your own page... Basically need to clean up the whole system somehow..

xt00 10y ago
What would be ideal is if there were like "real reviewers" that are verified and their review carried more weight.. Which obviously sucks for the seller if they give a bad review.. Maybe there could be a mitigation system where the seller could try to fix something then mark the problem as fixed or something and then the reviewer could mark it as they agree, then they could update their review..
- shostack 10y ago
  A lot of the "fake" reviews are by real reviewers. It is a common tactic to reimburse reviewers for purchase of the item so they then show up as a verified purchaser.

VeejayRampay 10y ago

The reviewing system on Amazon gives WAY too much space to the hoards of morons would give products one star because the package was damaged on arrival. As long as that's the case, the average rating won't mean anything.

guelo 10y ago

If FakeSpot can detect fakes Amazon should be able to do it even better. The fact that FakeSpot even exists shows that Amazon has decided that they've won the online retail competition and there's no need to spend any more resources on improving it.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
Does FakeSpot exist? The progress bar hangs whatever product I try it on. Meanwhile the "Recommended with honest reviews" products have acquired some one star reviews of their own. Useful or not? No idea. Doesn't look like it so far. But this is probably an unsolvable problem. You could solve it by hiring and paying 100% independent mystery shopper reviewers with unimpeachable integrity, and only reviewing products actually purchased for real money. I don't think many online merchants would support that. This is a fundamental problem with scarcity transactions - it's always more profitable to game the system than to play honestly.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

The sad part about all this is that the "social networks" will drive their bus through this hole. It will be "Get recommendations from people you trust!!! (sortof)". And, in short order, we'll be back to the same situation, only more tied-up, gagged and corrupted. ("Hey, pssst, make money fooling you friends!")

elihu 10y ago
Actually, I think that's probably the only workable solution to the whole fake-review problem. The only reviews you should trust are the ones written either by people you already know and trust, or people who are trusted by people you trust, and so on. Currently, it's really easy to bribe a random person to write an anonymous review. If the maker of some product has to bribe a friend of mine in order to get me to buy that product, it's going to be a lot more work for a lot less gain. Eventually it starts to look a lot like a company bribing all of its customers at once to buy its products, which if they can pull that off and make money, more power to them I guess. The social media companies have the data and infrastructure to implement some sort of "product reviews weighted by the reviewer's proximity to you in the friend graph" feature, but I don't see users trusting Facebook or LinkedIn to be an impartial source of trustworthy reviews. (Also, a lot of Facebook friends aren't necessarily people you'd use for product recommendations, but that's a separate problem.)

magoon 10y ago

Sellers also game the system by offering a refund, without requiring a return, in exchange for reverting a bad review. I've reported this to Amazon but they weren't receptive.

Vraxx 10y ago
Maybe you could game their gaming of the system by ordering the product on multiple accounts and writing bad reviews of it and get all of they sent you for free.
kstenerud 10y ago
So change the review, get your refund, then change the review again to write about what happened.
green_lunch 10y ago
This isn't really 'gaming' the system. It's good customer service. Even one Bad Amazon review can be death to a business on Amazon. I think it's a little ridiculous that so much power is given to many buyers that only want to take out their anger on someone, even if it isn't really the fault of the seller. I used to be an Amazon seller and quit because so many people would leave negative feedback over unrealistic expectations. It seems to be the M.O. of the millennial generation.

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thruflo22 10y ago

My thought on this was to develop a generic review system (ie would work for anything with a url) that shows you subjective results based on your social graph / trust map and weeds out bad actors by crunching the advogato algorithm. The challenge is liquidity, ie how do you seed the network and content but if you can solve that you can operate a review service for a fraction of the resources currently being wasted on these red queen races.

jameslk 10y ago
> The challenge is liquidity, ie how do you seed the network and content but if you can solve that you can operate a review service for a fraction of the resources currently being wasted on these red queen races. I've been thinking about this problem a lot too. There's actually many services that have come and gone in the review space. The solution I've come to is that any review service needs to be more than just reviews. It really needs to be more of a community.
hayksaakian 10y ago
seed with ratings from other review sites, but don't show the copywritten reviews

fpgaminer 10y ago

One potential solution is for Amazon to do a better job of encouraging users to rate every product they buy. That would quickly drown out the fake reviews and make such tactics uneconomical. Off the top of my head I would suggest that on the post-checkout screen they should list the customer's most recent purchases asking "Please rate your current satisfaction with your recent purchases". Just a quick 5-star rating, a small button to write a textual review if the user wants, and a note clearly stating that their review can be changed later if their opinion changes. I suggest putting that at post-checkout because it's a point where Amazon still has the user engaged, so asking is not annoying (like their emails currently are), but the user is done shopping so they aren't preoccupied with something else. In other words, it is the least annoying time to ask. They should, of course, also have a rating box on the home page (again, a list of recent purchases, possibly muxing in older purchases at random). And then weighting reviews is super important. Reviews given by users later in their ownership of the product should be weighted higher than reviews given just after receiving the product. Changed reviews should be weighted higher, as well as reviews on returns.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Actually, they do this already. I get e-mailed about once a week from Amazon asking me, "How would you rate <<Thing you bought a month ago>>?" I frankly find it annoying. It's sad to say, but unless the item was either really good or really bad, I don't feel compelled to review it. The other problem is most people probably review their things as soon as they get it. Very few go back and edit their reviews if the thing disintegrates six months later, with the net result that the product has overwhelmingly positive reviews despite having the durability of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
- fpgaminer 10y ago
  My comment addressed that: > I suggest putting that at post-checkout because it's a point where Amazon still has the user engaged, so asking is not annoying (like their emails currently are), but the user is done shopping so they aren't preoccupied with something else. And I addressed your second point as well in my comment.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Half the time the fakes are so ludicrously easy to spot that I really wonder why they bother. Fifty glowing reviews of a book within a day of publication all raising the same 4 esoteric points in the review. No doubt 4 points suggested by the author/publisher when asking for the astroturfing. Completely disregard all Amazon Vine reviews. Now weight heavily in favour of reviews that have had update edits - "it failed after 2 months. The replacement failed 3 months after that" (common on all makes of $200 LED gaming keyboards) or "after a year it's still in perfect condition". Photos on the reviews are often a good sign too - but only when there's just a few - photos on reviews are rare. So lots with similar framing would be an instant strike. Try finding a CAT6a cable on Amazon - seems they're all 4.5 - 5* wonderful, yet dig into the bad reviews a bit and most of them don't even meet wire or shield spec. Even those coming from Amazon themselves. Aside from reviews from specific, trustworthy people, reading the mid-tier and bad reviews gives a much better flavour of what a product is about, and the odd review tearing the product to pieces can be worth its weight in gold. If it's a marketplace seller my starting point is to mistrust all reviews and let them earn trust really slowly. I sure won't be going near Fakespot, especially when they're so intentionally vague in describing their own product - it'll be a score to game like your Klout score and all the other meaningless metrics. The astroturfers will adjust what's needed in the fakes to pass.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> Half the time the fakes are so ludicrously easy to spot that I really wonder why they bother. They only need to be slightly difficult for a robot to flag as a fake. Most people will just sort products by a combination of price-and-rating, and buy the top-rated thing in their budget; it doesn't matter if the 5-star reviews are all Markov-chain generated garbage, all users see are the stars.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  I know I'm probably atypical - a techie and old enough to be cynical of most things, but are most people really still that simplistic? Surely 3 or 4 crap purchases or 25%+ return rate is going to be enough to tell anyone that the star rating is worthless?

CM30 10y ago

When it comes to Amazon reviews, let's not forget some of the older examples of them being gamed. Before the internet 'services' and spammers offering to make fake reviews, the same thing was being done by notorious dodgy authors and creators on a more manual level. Like Robert Stanek, a notorious self published fantasy author who posted thousands of fake reviews of his books (and probably still does): http://conjugalfelicity.com/robert-stanek/gaming-the-amazon-system/ http://conjugalfelicity.com/robert-stanek/gaming-the-amazon-... For example, his books sold maybe ten copies a week, yet somehow got hundreds of glowing and suspiciously worded reviews on Amazon. Got to the point other sites (and Wikipedia) basically put up warning signs. So yeah, even before the current crop of reviewer sellers started popping up, this system was being gamed by the authors and creators themselves using sockpuppets to flood it with fake reviews for their work.

sixdimensional 10y ago

Maybe if Amazon simply posted a score/rating of how many people bought vs. returned the particular product and frequency over time, that information would alone be helpful. However, not sure they would ever share such competitively valuable information directly. They do sort of share it indirectly through the best sellers lists on the Amazon site, however, they do not share details of "how" they arrive at what "best-selling" means.

ck2 10y ago

Another problem on amazon is allowing 3rd parties to "piggy-back" on original listings that aren't available directly from Amazon itself, and then the 3rd party will either substitute or not actually have the original item at all and ship whatever. So the original item gets legit great reviews. But the reviewers never mention which seller they bought from. 3rd parties glam onto the high ratings and a lot of people get disappointment either with fulfillment or the product itself. This is why I no longer buy unless it is amazon or amazon fulfilled (so I can at least return it). But you pay a premium for that. Amazon could solve this by just noting which vendor the reviewer bought from on the subject line.

ldpg 10y ago

Here's just a few examples of listings with mostly fake reviews: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DN9UKHC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DN9UKHC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01D0JDZFO http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01D0JDZFO Most top listings are saturated with fake reviews. If you want to understand the depth of the fake listing problem, look at the thousands of people trying to create new listings in high-competition markets. Search Amazon for: "silicone oven mitts" "bamboo cutting board" "meal prep container" Click any result, then scroll down to the "Sponsored Products" section for that item. Repeat this, really dig down into the "sponsored" lists. Notice the amount of copiers. Now look at the reviews. For new sponsored products in these categories virtually all of the entries are from review-mill programs. There can be hundreds of fake reviews on a single listing. Many of the negative reviews you may see on these are fake as well, from competitors! Review-mill programs work by having the reviewers buy the product through amazon (they are reimbursed or discounted). Then they do a write ups. Many are short and organic looking, the more easily spotted ones contain lots of text and multiple photos of the product.

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dredmorbius 10y ago

TL;DR: Recommendations systems cannot be indifferent to truth. This article highlights pretty much precisely the same problem that the "social media promote (bogus) conspiracy theories" item yesterday did. Slightly recycled comment. Some related concepts: 1. Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, notes that an absolute requirement of an effective and healthy system is accurate feedback and information. Media which are indifferent to truth value, or which actively promote distortion (see Robert Proctor's term, agnotology), will actively harm the system. 2. Celine's 2nd law, and inversion. In Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, a character notes that "accurate information is possible only in a non-punishing situation". Its inverse is also true: acurate information is only possible when it is accuracy itself and ONLY accuracy which is rewarded. Academic publishing, in which paper output and journal selection is a gateway determinant of professional careers, would be an instance of this. Or the long skew of The Learning Channel from NASA-PBS educational co-production to Honey Boo-Boo broadcaster. 3. Paperclip Maximizer. "Don't be evil" isn't good enough. You've got to actively seek out good. Even a benign maximisation goal will, if not tempered by requirements to provide net benefit, lead to catastrophic results. 4. Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action" explains how and why small (but motivated) fringe groups can achieve goals directly opposed to the interests of far larger groups. This explains a great deal of market and political dysfunction. 5. A generalisation of Gresham's Law leads to the realisation that understanding of complex truths is itself expensive. It's also (Dunning-Kruger) beyond the capability of much of the population. This also has some rather dismal implications, though as William Ophuls notes, political theory based on the assumption that all the children can be above average ("the Lake Wobegon effect") are doomed. You dance with the dunce what brung ya. Amazon here will probably have to create and fund their own review staff if only to vet and validate user-supplied reviews. As one HN poster here notes, "what is my incentive to provide reviews?" A good review takes time, experience, is likely to draw flack, and, frankly, often comes from someone with better things to do with their time. Crowdsourcing is useful where data are thin and the crowd is likely to be unbiased. Where specific expertise is required, Peter Noverg on programming texts, the Google employee who's uncovered numerous fraudulent USB-C cables, one qualified reviewer trumps millions who know nothing. (But you've got to ensure that the qualified reviewer stays both honest and engaged.) More generally: the Amazon experience seems to be worsening. Trust is falling to eBay-like levels, if not worse. Search and discovery are poor, and product quality is all over the map. Books are one matter -- highly uniform product, simple function. Expensive kit of various description another. Among my recent purchases, an LED cabinet lighting system in which local, major chain, and Amazon sources (brick-and-morter and online) failed. Ikea turned out to have a well-thought-out product line, helpful (though ultimately not quite what I was looking for) information online, and, most importantly, an in-store display in which I could assess, mix, match, and ultimately assemble the system I'm using and enjoying now. Twice the price of what I'd initially specced out, but that system didn't work in the least. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/chnJ1MzcdhX https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/chnJ1Mzc...

toephu2 10y ago

Amazon needs quality control. They sell more and more crap and you have to spend so much time perusing the reviews to find out if a product is actually good or not. Sometimes I prefer to goto Costco where yes I deal with long lines but at least I know what I am buying is of decent quality, the prices are low, and they have a very generous return policy (most electronics can be returned within 90 days and anything else you can return whenever you want with or without the receipt).

perseusprime11 10y ago

This is a wide spread problem across the board not just web. Look at some of the reviews of the apps on iOS. Very detailed and makes a pitch to future users to buy this app. I have almost always never left a review unless it is a great app or if I got really mad at the app. Never felt the need to leave reviews if the app did the job it's supposed to do.

perseusprime11 10y ago

I wish there is something similar on the app store to weed out fake reviews.

mrfusion 10y ago

My idea is instead of having review why not show the percent of orders that were returned. That would give you sense of the quality. Another idea is to randomly select customers who actually ordered the product to leave a review. Since it's random you wouldn't have the self selection problem of people getting paid to leave reviews.

jldugger 10y ago

Why is the wirecutter even reading Amazon reviews? Isn't their job to give independent analysis?

4ad 10y ago
How do you start your independent analysis if by not looking at what's popular? Doing your own analysis and reading amazon reviews are not exclusive. I find wirecutter usually accurate in facts, but I rarely agree with them on their recommendation of what is good for me. That being said, they are very explicit in why they recommend something, I just wish there were other reviewers who shared my set of interests and values in things.
- jldugger 10y ago
  Bear in mind that they also filter out anything they can't get a referral fee for.

hippich 10y ago

Yes - there are fake reviews, but there are also bunch of discount-for-review. Most of these reviewers are leaving disclaimer and often leave 1-3 star review in my experience. Now the reason for that is because it super hard to get going with your product without sending discounted samples to reviewers. Because even if you spend tons of money on ads and somehow convince customer to buy your product without reviews, that customer in 99.9% will never leave a review. And if you dare to email this customer to ask for feedback - they will curse you, complain, report to amazon. That's where things currently are - it is two way street. Without any traffic on it you will end up with very few shitty products by big companies who will have no reason to improve quality or innovate. Just 2c from the other side of the fence.