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

>> The biggest problem is "I received this product in exchange for a fair and honest review" bullshit. Is Amazon doing anything to stop that? Those are legacy reviews. You're not allowed to do that anymore [source: I used to write incentived reviews]. Amazon has deleted a lot of reviews like that with their new rule changes. The problem is not "I received this product in exchange for a fair and honest review" -- that statement is a result of Amazon's old rules, which required disclosure. This is not very different from a product getting a Vine review (I was also a Vine reviewer for a time). Vine reviews tend to skew to the positive side in spite of Amazon telling reviewers to be honest (but to be fair, most of the Vine stuff I was getting were indeed good products). Not all reviewers who used that boilerplate disclosure statement were dishonest reviewers (I would like to think I was honest, but everyone's entitled their own perspective). In my case - I didn't accept everything that was offered to me, just stuff that looked like it was decent quality that I thought I would like. I reviewed everything in the context of their selling price. Most of the stuff I got sold for cheap, and were surprisingly good for that price. The higher the price of the product, the more critical I was. I'm not going to review a $20 fitness band with the same critical eye as a $300 band, because in general, you do get what you pay for. The required disclosure of "I received this product in exchange for a fair and honest review" is actually useful, because it's a signal to review readers that the review is incentivized. What companies are doing now is getting reviewers to buy the products to get "Verified Purchaser" status and paying them back via PayPal. That has made it MUCH worse than before, because people assume that a Verified Purchase review is safe. Having said all of that, Amazon does have its fair share of shady reviewers. Most of the reviewers who were higher ranked than me were still getting free review products after the rule changes. The main difference was that they were no longer disclosing that fact. I could tell who they were because of the products they were reviewing often mapped to offers I was getting from companies wanting me to do the Paypal workaround. The weirdest thing that happened after the rule change and my incentivized reviews were wiped was that my reviewer ranking went up significantly.

IshKebab 9y ago
Yes I didn't mean that the disclosure was the problem. It's the incentivised reviews that are the problem because you really can't give an honest opinion even if you want to. You didn't pay for the item like a normal reviewer and you have an implicit incentive to give a good review so you aren't reviewing from the same point of view as the reviews people actually want. It's the same reason many companies have policies that employees can't accept gifts. In theory they could have a rule "you can accept gives but don't let it affect your decisions", but people aren't robots. You can't turn that off.

IshKebab 9y ago

Yes I didn't mean that the disclosure was the problem. It's the incentivised reviews that are the problem because you really can't give an honest opinion even if you want to. You didn't pay for the item like a normal reviewer and you have an implicit incentive to give a good review so you aren't reviewing from the same point of view as the reviews people actually want. It's the same reason many companies have policies that employees can't accept gifts. In theory they could have a rule "you can accept gives but don't let it affect your decisions", but people aren't robots. You can't turn that off.