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Social proof via reviews (of products, restaurants, anything) is a great idea if you can assume good intent. Back in the good ol' days of the Internet this seem

Social proof via reviews (of products, restaurants, anything) is a great idea if you can assume good intent. Back in the good ol' days of the Internet this seemed plausible for some reason, but now there's real money to be made and that's out the window. Amazon and Yelp and the like may be better or worse at stemming the tide of fakery, but asking them to be better isn't going to fundamentally help. The whole idea is broken.

mc32 9y ago
I wonder if it will come back to a more distributed CR type of system. Also branding and maintaining the integrity of a brand. Currently you have a bevvy of brands for China sourced goods. The brands are obviously made up without much thought. Something like "Scarvast" trekking pole. "Vargus" flashlights, "Zukil" wireless speakers. "Brikor" dehumidifiers. And often times the same seller will have multiple "brands". This is what makes it unreliable and untrustworthy. It's like they live A/B test products on AMZ.
- pogue 9y ago
  I highly recommend a 30 Day trial subscription on Consumer Reports (CR) online if you're looking to buy a big ticket item. You can put in your CC# & other details and get free 30 day access to CR testing of a lot of products. Then cancel before the 30 days are up. You may end up paying a little more for a top notch product, but you can be assured if CR reviewed it, you're getting what you pay for.
  - tomerico 9y ago
    If consumer report (or the more general, independent testing lab) is the solution, I wonder if Amazon should buy them or build their own. A trusted source of reviews has proved itself successful with the USB-C cable example and Benson from Google verifying all of them
  - doglet 9y ago
    Maybe there's a market for verified customer reviews of popular items - even ones that aren't big ticket. Consumer Reports might grow to cover additional items and perhaps develop a browser extension for subscribers who gain access to trusted reviews.
- nasredin 9y ago
  The sellers are not really to blame here though. Often they are just Chinese-speaking American entrepreneurs. The problem is the lack of IP protection in China. And lack of any interest in branding and brand differentiation, hence you got "brands" that sounds like they were picked via /dev/rand. And of course everything is probably manufactured in the same 3 or 4 factories. Lev Andropov: It's stuck, yes? Watts: Back off! You don't know the components! Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!!
- ohashi 9y ago
  I do reviews for my startup, the fake reviews is a big problem. My solution has been to collect more data. I'm using twitter to collect millions of comments about web hosting companies and built a review site around it. (https://reviewsignal.com https://reviewsignal.com) I think writing a 'review' can be a strange behavior, listening to people talking organically and analyzing that seems more accurate. Also there's more data that way.
doglet 9y ago
We should still be able to ask them to make a reasonable effort, which keeps the fake review economy at bay
stevenAthompson 9y ago
The whole idea isn't broken, and it can be fixed pretty cheaply. I think the most fundamental problem is that Amazon hasn't realized that they're operating one of the worlds largest search engines yet. Ditto for other companies that offer results based on finding the best product to match customers "search criteria" (whether the criteria are explicit or not). If you know how PageRank works, how it was gamed by blackhat SEO's until Google was forced to fix it, and what Google did to fix it, then you already know how to fix product reviews. You just need to recognize that reviews are links, in the sense that a link counts as a vote of "authoritativeness." Since we also have negative reviews we can easily implement TrustRank (or an Amazony version of it) and quickly identify bad "domains" (products or vendors). I think it could be implemented poorly in a weekend or two with full access to the complete set of review and product data.

mc32 9y ago

I wonder if it will come back to a more distributed CR type of system. Also branding and maintaining the integrity of a brand. Currently you have a bevvy of brands for China sourced goods. The brands are obviously made up without much thought. Something like "Scarvast" trekking pole. "Vargus" flashlights, "Zukil" wireless speakers. "Brikor" dehumidifiers. And often times the same seller will have multiple "brands". This is what makes it unreliable and untrustworthy. It's like they live A/B test products on AMZ.

pogue 9y ago
I highly recommend a 30 Day trial subscription on Consumer Reports (CR) online if you're looking to buy a big ticket item. You can put in your CC# & other details and get free 30 day access to CR testing of a lot of products. Then cancel before the 30 days are up. You may end up paying a little more for a top notch product, but you can be assured if CR reviewed it, you're getting what you pay for.
- tomerico 9y ago
  If consumer report (or the more general, independent testing lab) is the solution, I wonder if Amazon should buy them or build their own. A trusted source of reviews has proved itself successful with the USB-C cable example and Benson from Google verifying all of them
- doglet 9y ago
  Maybe there's a market for verified customer reviews of popular items - even ones that aren't big ticket. Consumer Reports might grow to cover additional items and perhaps develop a browser extension for subscribers who gain access to trusted reviews.
nasredin 9y ago
The sellers are not really to blame here though. Often they are just Chinese-speaking American entrepreneurs. The problem is the lack of IP protection in China. And lack of any interest in branding and brand differentiation, hence you got "brands" that sounds like they were picked via /dev/rand. And of course everything is probably manufactured in the same 3 or 4 factories. Lev Andropov: It's stuck, yes? Watts: Back off! You don't know the components! Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!!
ohashi 9y ago
I do reviews for my startup, the fake reviews is a big problem. My solution has been to collect more data. I'm using twitter to collect millions of comments about web hosting companies and built a review site around it. (https://reviewsignal.com https://reviewsignal.com) I think writing a 'review' can be a strange behavior, listening to people talking organically and analyzing that seems more accurate. Also there's more data that way.

doglet 9y ago

We should still be able to ask them to make a reasonable effort, which keeps the fake review economy at bay

stevenAthompson 9y ago

The whole idea isn't broken, and it can be fixed pretty cheaply. I think the most fundamental problem is that Amazon hasn't realized that they're operating one of the worlds largest search engines yet. Ditto for other companies that offer results based on finding the best product to match customers "search criteria" (whether the criteria are explicit or not). If you know how PageRank works, how it was gamed by blackhat SEO's until Google was forced to fix it, and what Google did to fix it, then you already know how to fix product reviews. You just need to recognize that reviews are links, in the sense that a link counts as a vote of "authoritativeness." Since we also have negative reviews we can easily implement TrustRank (or an Amazony version of it) and quickly identify bad "domains" (products or vendors). I think it could be implemented poorly in a weekend or two with full access to the complete set of review and product data.