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I don't think it's gonna make a difference. At least in Amazon ES, most reviews are written by top reviewers who have made their "career" by first reviewing sma

I don't think it's gonna make a difference. At least in Amazon ES, most reviews are written by top reviewers who have made their "career" by first reviewing small products bought by them and after that they're gifted other, bigger products (using 100% OFF coupons so they appear as verified purchases). The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value. And Amazon ES is full of those.

ashtube 9y ago
How can you say all reviews that have pictures and multiple paragraphs offer zero value? I have reviewed 100+ Amazon products and go in-depth whenever I can, and always provide value by providing hands on experience of using the products where I think it will help other people looking to buy that product.
morganvachon 9y ago
> The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value. Not always. I've seen tons of critical two- or three-star reviews that were multiple paragraphs and had pictures detailing the issues with the product. Piss off the right person with a shitty product or even an unfortunate lemon, and you'll get lambasted for it. And then there's people like me; I don't review Amazon purchases often, maybe one in 20 items, but when I do I write a detailed review because either the item greatly impressed me, or seriously pissed me off. I've never done a compensated review (I wouldn't even know how to start doing that) and the few times a negative review resulted in a seller offering to refund or replace in exchange for five stars and a positive review, I've refused. Only once did I change a review after interacting with a seller, and I left the entire negative text intact with an addendum stating their customer service was helpful and polite, and I was raising from two stars to three solely because their customer service attitude and promises to improve the product made up for the quality control issues in my mind. I did this without the seller requesting it, but they were greatly appreciative and refunded my purchase without me even asking for it.
- Kurtz79 9y ago
  There are probably reviewers in good conscience and those who take advantage of the system. The main problem compared to other environments is that reviewers on Amazon have no real accountability: try to sing praises of a bad videogame or movie as a journalist or youtuber and you'll be instantly known as a shill and a sellout. On Amazon, more than taking a mental note of particularly suspect reviewers, there is really little you can do.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  > Not always. I've seen tons of critical two- or three-star reviews that were multiple paragraphs and had pictures detailing the issues with the product. Piss off the right person with a shitty product or even an unfortunate lemon, and you'll get lambasted for it. Because those are irate customers who actually paid for the product and feel ripped off. I agree with OP: far more common are gushing, think pieces about how great this product that they got for free is. Often they disclose this fact but in many cases it seems they don't. The unbridled venality feels pathetic, like monkeys trained to do a dumb trick in return for more peanuts.
- astura 9y ago
  You're assuming a review wasn't paid just because it is critical? Competitors pay for critical reviews too.
- alexc05 9y ago
  In fairness - it's sometimes pretty fun to write a review for something. I kind-of enjoy it - probably why I'm also a prolific commenter on reddit and (less so) here. Have never been compensated for a review. (Or a comment on HN or Reddit for that matter).
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  For sure, the other typical 'long reviewers' are the 'Vine hopefuls'. People trying to build a reputation for good / helpful reviews so they can get 'free stuff' from the Vine program (where Amazon sends you products, ostensibly 'on (indefinite) loan') to review.
IshKebab 9y ago
I agree. The biggest problem is "I received this product in exchange for a fair and honest review" bullshit. Is Amazon doing anything to stop that?
- CamelCaseName 9y ago
  Absolutely. Reviews get purged all the time, you simply don't see them because you're not actively monitoring them. Amazon tends to remove reviews in waves. I suspect this is so that they can use known fraudulent reviewers to catch unknown fraudulent reviewers. As a seller, it was a great day to see my number one and two competitor have their product reviews dropped to almost 0 overnight. I didn't lose a single review. I hope Amazon keeps up what they're doing because it will only make things better. P.S. Other things to look at are: 1. Many reviews in a short time frame (Only 1-3% of people leave a product review, so if you see 20 reviews in 3 days, they would have needed to sell almost 700 units! Not impossible for a very well established product, but a new one? Almost impossible, report it.) 2. The very first reviews. These are almost always fake and unverified. No one ever looks for this but it is the most common indicator in my experience of faked reviews given how low the bar is. After protecting yourself, protect others! The best thing you can possibly do is to report violations!
  - dingaling 9y ago
    > The very first reviews. These are almost always fake and unverified. Possibly for new items in the mainstream. However for the long-tail of niche items the plurality of my Amazon reviews were the first and often they remain the only, particularly for older or out-of-print books.
    - CamelCaseName 9y ago
      Books are a very different beast. What I'm talking about is PL goods where you'll take $item and make it $item by CamelCaseName. Books on the other hand are probably sold by sellers who bought them used/returned/wholesale and are flipping them. They could care less about your product review because they almost always have only one or two copies.
SEJeff 9y ago
I'm definitely not a paid reviewer and I've done one or two of those multi paragraph reviews with pictures because either the product was comically bad or amazingly good. I'm a software engineer, definitely not a paid reviewer.
slantyyz 9y ago
>> (using 100% OFF coupons so they appear as verified purchases) Don't know about ES, but on CA, at some point in mid 2016, the 100% off coupon code purchases stopped appearing as verified purchases. Instead of being dismissive about reviews with photos and lots of text, the warning signs you should look for are hyperbolic words. One sentence reviews regardless of whether they're incentivized or not tend to be useless and lacking in any real info, imo. Not all incentivized reviewers are dishonest [full disclosure, I used to write incentivized reviews. I made an effort to be fair and honest, but when I looked at other reviews of the products I reviewed, I can definitely say there are a lot of lazy reviewers who would just post glowing reviews]. The things you should look out for are excessive use of superlatives (or in the rarer case of paid negative reviews, excessive use of highly negative terms) in the reviews. When I look at reviews for products (I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon), I generally take the figure skating approach of throwing out the highest and lowest scores and looking at the reviews in between.
reificator 9y ago
> The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value. Wait, I could be getting paid to be my normal long-winded self? Because that sounds like most, if not all, of my reviews that I've posted online.

ashtube 9y ago

How can you say all reviews that have pictures and multiple paragraphs offer zero value? I have reviewed 100+ Amazon products and go in-depth whenever I can, and always provide value by providing hands on experience of using the products where I think it will help other people looking to buy that product.

morganvachon 9y ago

> The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value. Not always. I've seen tons of critical two- or three-star reviews that were multiple paragraphs and had pictures detailing the issues with the product. Piss off the right person with a shitty product or even an unfortunate lemon, and you'll get lambasted for it. And then there's people like me; I don't review Amazon purchases often, maybe one in 20 items, but when I do I write a detailed review because either the item greatly impressed me, or seriously pissed me off. I've never done a compensated review (I wouldn't even know how to start doing that) and the few times a negative review resulted in a seller offering to refund or replace in exchange for five stars and a positive review, I've refused. Only once did I change a review after interacting with a seller, and I left the entire negative text intact with an addendum stating their customer service was helpful and polite, and I was raising from two stars to three solely because their customer service attitude and promises to improve the product made up for the quality control issues in my mind. I did this without the seller requesting it, but they were greatly appreciative and refunded my purchase without me even asking for it.

Kurtz79 9y ago
There are probably reviewers in good conscience and those who take advantage of the system. The main problem compared to other environments is that reviewers on Amazon have no real accountability: try to sing praises of a bad videogame or movie as a journalist or youtuber and you'll be instantly known as a shill and a sellout. On Amazon, more than taking a mental note of particularly suspect reviewers, there is really little you can do.
hyperbovine 9y ago
> Not always. I've seen tons of critical two- or three-star reviews that were multiple paragraphs and had pictures detailing the issues with the product. Piss off the right person with a shitty product or even an unfortunate lemon, and you'll get lambasted for it. Because those are irate customers who actually paid for the product and feel ripped off. I agree with OP: far more common are gushing, think pieces about how great this product that they got for free is. Often they disclose this fact but in many cases it seems they don't. The unbridled venality feels pathetic, like monkeys trained to do a dumb trick in return for more peanuts.
astura 9y ago
You're assuming a review wasn't paid just because it is critical? Competitors pay for critical reviews too.
alexc05 9y ago
In fairness - it's sometimes pretty fun to write a review for something. I kind-of enjoy it - probably why I'm also a prolific commenter on reddit and (less so) here. Have never been compensated for a review. (Or a comment on HN or Reddit for that matter).
FireBeyond 9y ago
For sure, the other typical 'long reviewers' are the 'Vine hopefuls'. People trying to build a reputation for good / helpful reviews so they can get 'free stuff' from the Vine program (where Amazon sends you products, ostensibly 'on (indefinite) loan') to review.

IshKebab 9y ago

I agree. The biggest problem is "I received this product in exchange for a fair and honest review" bullshit. Is Amazon doing anything to stop that?

CamelCaseName 9y ago
Absolutely. Reviews get purged all the time, you simply don't see them because you're not actively monitoring them. Amazon tends to remove reviews in waves. I suspect this is so that they can use known fraudulent reviewers to catch unknown fraudulent reviewers. As a seller, it was a great day to see my number one and two competitor have their product reviews dropped to almost 0 overnight. I didn't lose a single review. I hope Amazon keeps up what they're doing because it will only make things better. P.S. Other things to look at are: 1. Many reviews in a short time frame (Only 1-3% of people leave a product review, so if you see 20 reviews in 3 days, they would have needed to sell almost 700 units! Not impossible for a very well established product, but a new one? Almost impossible, report it.) 2. The very first reviews. These are almost always fake and unverified. No one ever looks for this but it is the most common indicator in my experience of faked reviews given how low the bar is. After protecting yourself, protect others! The best thing you can possibly do is to report violations!
- dingaling 9y ago
  > The very first reviews. These are almost always fake and unverified. Possibly for new items in the mainstream. However for the long-tail of niche items the plurality of my Amazon reviews were the first and often they remain the only, particularly for older or out-of-print books.
  - CamelCaseName 9y ago
    Books are a very different beast. What I'm talking about is PL goods where you'll take $item and make it $item by CamelCaseName. Books on the other hand are probably sold by sellers who bought them used/returned/wholesale and are flipping them. They could care less about your product review because they almost always have only one or two copies.

SEJeff 9y ago

I'm definitely not a paid reviewer and I've done one or two of those multi paragraph reviews with pictures because either the product was comically bad or amazingly good. I'm a software engineer, definitely not a paid reviewer.

slantyyz 9y ago

>> (using 100% OFF coupons so they appear as verified purchases) Don't know about ES, but on CA, at some point in mid 2016, the 100% off coupon code purchases stopped appearing as verified purchases. Instead of being dismissive about reviews with photos and lots of text, the warning signs you should look for are hyperbolic words. One sentence reviews regardless of whether they're incentivized or not tend to be useless and lacking in any real info, imo. Not all incentivized reviewers are dishonest [full disclosure, I used to write incentivized reviews. I made an effort to be fair and honest, but when I looked at other reviews of the products I reviewed, I can definitely say there are a lot of lazy reviewers who would just post glowing reviews]. The things you should look out for are excessive use of superlatives (or in the rarer case of paid negative reviews, excessive use of highly negative terms) in the reviews. When I look at reviews for products (I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon), I generally take the figure skating approach of throwing out the highest and lowest scores and looking at the reviews in between.

reificator 9y ago

> The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value. Wait, I could be getting paid to be my normal long-winded self? Because that sounds like most, if not all, of my reviews that I've posted online.