11 ms·

Fakespot – measure the legitimacy of reviews on popular sites

143 points by throwaway13337 9y ago

pavel_lishin 9y ago
How do fake reviewers get the "verified purchase" tag on Amazon? This particular analysis[1] explicitly lists "Alex Brown" as a "Unreliable Reviewer", but the Amazon page[2] says his review is a verified purchase. Did Novopal just buy it for him? (Also, I wish I could plug my Amazon profile into Fakespot and see what it thinks about me.) [1]: https://www.fakespot.com/product/novopal-baby-stroller-organizer-with-shoulder-strap-universal-fitting-anti-slip-safety-buckle-design https://www.fakespot.com/product/novopal-baby-stroller-organ... [2]: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N5J6LXT#customerReviews https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N5J6LXT#customerReviews
- pkaye 9y ago
  The fake reviewer will buy the product first and then the company will reimburse and reward the reviewer on the side once a review is posted.
- pglhn 9y ago
  I've heard that one way of doing this is for the seller to give the purchaser a discount coupon for 100% off
  - bambax 9y ago
    No, discounted purchases don't get you the "Verified" badge. The way sellers operate today is, they ask you to buy the product "for real" and then reimburse you (and more) via Paypal. This is against Amazon's rules but lots of sellers are doing it. I rank around 6000th reviewer in FR and yet I constantly receive messages offering me to review products using this method.
- achamayou 9y ago
  > Also, I wish I could plug my Amazon profile into Fakespot and see what it thinks about me Although that sounds neat, and I wish I could do that too, I suspect this would be far too helpful to actors running bogus profiles to be allowed to exist.
forapurpose 9y ago
I wonder how they address this problem, which affects all attempts to spot fake reviews: How do they know how accurate their results are?[0] What are the false negative and false positive rates? To measure your accuracy objectively, you'd need an independent method to verify, with high reliability, the legitimacy of the reviews. (You may think you can spot them manually, and maybe you can spot some obvious ones, but false negatives are perilous: You don't know if the reviewer is simply better at hiding their trick than you are in discovering it - and they likely have far more expertise and experience than you do. Consider: Could you write a fake review that would trick someone like yourself?) Fakespot's FAQ says the following. I think the use of machine learning is a good example of the problem: The machine needs a good data set from which to learn, which means they'd have to flag reviews in the training data as legitimate or not - but they have no way to determine that. Basically, they are training the machine to make the same judgments, of unknown, accuracy, as the humans (in fairness, I'm making some presumptions about their use of machine learning). What criteria are used by Fakespot when analyzing reviews? Fakespot utilizes numerous technologies to validate the authenticity of reviews. The primary criteria is the language utilized by the reviewer, the profile of the reviewer,correlation with other reviewers data and machine learning algorithm that focuses on improving itself by detecting fraudulent reviews. The technologies include: profile clusters, sentiment analysis, cluster correlation and artificial intelligence intertwined with these functionalities. https://www.fakespot.com/faq https://www.fakespot.com/faq [0] As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."
- Rapzid 9y ago
  My knee-jerk reaction is that they are detecting anomalies and low-quality reviews for some definition of quality. As you pointed out, without a consistent ground truth target how could it really separate "fake" from "legit"? Perhaps they partnered with a fake review business and used their records?
- netheril96 9y ago
  I had the same reaction as yours. I clicked many links on the website, only to find such fluffy statements about machine learning algorithms, but no information whatsoever about the metrics and ground truth. They basically dodge the most important questions and therefore I conclude that they are not in any way trustworthy.
mehrdadn 9y ago
Does anyone know how well it works to just check to see if reviews have been posted in a short/bursty duration? I feel like most fake ones seem to be ones posted very recently or during a short time period, but I'm not sure if that just means I'm missing the rest of them or not.
mehrdadn 9y ago
I'm skeptical Fakespot works well. Consider this product: > https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064EKNKI https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064EKNKI Where do they get the idea that 25% of the reviews are unreliable/deceptive? I bought it and it works just fine, which is pretty consistent with 87% of the reviews being 4+. Why should I think otherwise?
- Zak 9y ago
  It's attempting to spot sponsored reviews, not bad products.
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    To quote itself, it's spotting "unreliable" and "deceptive" reviews, not merely sponsored ones. And even in the latter case: do those look like sponsored reviews?
    - Zak 9y ago
      No, but I imagine sponsored reviews aren't supposed to look like sponsored reviews. The three it flagged as suspicious for the ethernet cable above were all very short, like "Great product!" or "A++++". I'm not sure what to think of that. I write reviews (of flashlights) as a hobby and wouldn't call something that doesn't describe how the product was tested or include any technical or performance analysis a review. On the other hand, the average buyer doesn't usually have the knowledge to write a useful technical review and just wants to report that the product met their expectations.
      - mehrdadn 9y ago
        > No, but I imagine sponsored reviews aren't supposed to look like sponsored reviews. I mean, yes, but that wasn't the point. If the sponsored reviews seem to blend in with the normal reviews and and seem to be at least as accurate as normal reviews then how in the world are they "fake"? Where is the tangible distinction for me as a customer? (Why in the world would I avoid such products?) > I write reviews (of flashlights) as a hobby Funny you mention that! Flashlights seem like just about the worst-marketed products I've seen on Amazon, so they indeed definitely need great reviews. At the risk of going off-topic, do you have any tips on figuring out what the lumen output of a flashlight actually is (or even what LEDs they use)? I keep seeing Cree LEDs being claimed to output 2-3x as many lumens as they're even capable of.
zionic 9y ago
I really can't stand this website. We had them say ~40% of our Amazon reviews were fake/unreliable... and I'm pretty damn sure we'd know if we were faking our own reviews. I don't know how their system works, but the false positive rate in my experience is absurd.
- nikanj 9y ago
  Their long-term monetization strategy probably involves you paying them to ”verify” your reviews.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  Care to share a link so we can take a look?
- Oras 9y ago
  who's we? and looking at the website I think it used NLP to analyse review text and they state in about us that they check grammar and correlation so you could have a legitimate review with wrong grammar marked as spam.
- sehugg 9y ago
  Same here, for my all-organic ebook reviews it gave an F and said there was "HIGH DECEPTION" involved. It seems to penalize you for having above four stars.
zzzcpan 9y ago
Let's be honest, fake reviews is a fake problem. Reviews were never supposed to work for customers' benefits. I mean how in the world shallow emotional opinions of people with unmet expectations and wasted time or with fanatic love for the brand would help anyone? It's just that when people start ignoring reviews all those corporations don't make as much profits.
bluetwo 9y ago
I wish this site worked well. Based on my tests it doesn't. This is a real problem without yet a solution.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Works well based on mine.
bambax 9y ago
Doesn't seem to support Amazon European marketplaces. Review Meta does, and works very well.
- user5994461 9y ago
  It works on amazon UK. I think their magic algorithms only support English.
user5994461 9y ago
Fake reviews are clustered per category. Take a look at cream to make you less fat, magic thing to grow your hair back, or iphone accessories, you will find that almost all the reviews are fake. Too much money to be made.
acd 9y ago
Tried on the Amazon echo dot best seller which had 4.5 stars but adjusted review score are trustworthy score 3. Thirty percent low quality reviews according to Fakespot.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Maybe I'm naive but isn't this something Amazon, for example, should be doing? Why aren't they concerned about the integrity of their community?
- dvt 9y ago
  > Why aren't they concerned about the integrity of their community? Amazon has virtually no competition, ergo is not incentivized whatsoever to be concerned with the integrity of their community. Further, Amazon will charge you for return shipping so, again, they couldn't care less if a positively reviewed product actually sucks. Now that I think about it, the whole system is pretty brilliant because they're double dipping: charging the customer for returns but charging the vendor for warehouse space. It's the definition of a win-win.
  - manojlds 9y ago
    Oh, you have to pay for returns? That's not case (yet?) with Amazon.in.
  - arbie 9y ago
    Return shipping is free if the product is defective or the website description is inaccurate.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      Most people choose to bin and forget the $10 shit they got, instead of sending back and asking for refund.
- beamatronic 9y ago
  Just don't buy anything that isn't explicitly sold by Amazon.com. Or a few trusted others like AnkerDirect
  - mattpavelle 9y ago
    This is a common misconception. As has been stated before on similar threads, Amazon comingles inventory. So if you as a third party seller have a bunch of fake widgets for sale on Amazon and anyone else (including Amazon themselves) sell the same widget (same by name) then Amazon has no control over whose inventory a buyer receivers, regardless of the Sold By label on Amazon.com https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-opens-door-to-knockoffs-1399852852 https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-op... Relevant paragraphs if you can't get past the paywall: "As more third-party sellers have signed up to offer products through Amazon and use its order-fulfillment services, the Seattle-based giant has allowed many to pool their inventory with supposedly identical items supplied by other sellers—in essence commingling products from third-party merchants with those supplied directly to Amazon by the brands themselves. In other words, a product ordered from a third-party seller may not have originated from that particular seller. If the bar code matches, any one that is on the shelf will do."
jamisteven 9y ago
I use this site regularly its never let me down.
amelius 9y ago
Can't a malicious actor use this to check their own reviews before posting, until they pass the test?
antoncohen 9y ago
This just isn't reliable. I tested in on the Amazon Echo 2nd Gen, it gave it a D grade, 45.8% low quality reviews, half a star. The two unreliable reviews I checked were two-star reviews, they were not high quality reviews, but they weren't "fake". For example one complained that they thought it was wireless, but it requires a power cord. I checked the product's two star reviews (6% of reviews), the reviews I saw were all legit. The were long reviews, mostly complaining about the sound quality compared to the 1st gen. For reference, the top 5-star review also says sound quality was poor, until after the third firmware update. Amazon isn't paying for fake reviews of the Echo, and no one would pay someone to purchase a $79 product (verified purchase) and give it a two-star review.
- 55555 9y ago
  Is it flagging Vine reviewers? That would make sense... Could just be unreliable though.
- sytelus 9y ago
  tried couple of products... seems to be working great. For example, this is spot on: https://www.fakespot.com/product/hanger-hooks-nuolux-hanger-clips-mini-flocking-clothes-rack-holders-12pcs-random-color https://www.fakespot.com/product/hanger-hooks-nuolux-hanger-...
- aero_sm1th 9y ago
  I use Fakespot religiously since 2016 and I noticed the same thing so I emailed them asking them, why would Amazons' products have fake reviews? This was their reply (from co-founder, Ming): "We have noticed trends where fake review clubs/bots seed their reviewer profiles by leaving reviews on various products, specifically Amazon best selling products to create a profile that looks legitimate (it is done to fool anti-fraud systems that Amazon utilizes). Our engine detects these seed reviewer profiles and therefore penalizes them accordingly by examining their profile and our AI algorithm (one of numerous) was trained to distinguish these patterns." I hope this is helpful. I love the website and I think it is not to the benefit of Amazon, Yelp, or TripAdvisor to do anything about fake reviews as it only helps their platforms generate more $.
SyneRyder 9y ago
It might be worth clicking the "run analysis again" button if it's offered to you. On the headphones product I tried (and have purchased myself), it flagged some genuine reviews as having been created by automated accounts. Seems it thought the surname Akcicek was just random letters generated by a computer. But after running the analysis on the page again, it changed its mind about that review and decided it was now legitimate.
- LV-426 9y ago
  > But after running the analysis on the page again, it changed its mind about that review and decided it was now legitimate. This doesn't sound very reliable. If nothing had changed on the review, what's the basis for it changing its mind?
  - bartl 9y ago
    It probably is a learning system... It got trained more. The review itself doesn't have to change. The system merely adjusted its parameters due to more exposure to new reviews.
    - LV-426 9y ago
      Possibly, yeah. I was also under the misapprehension the re-analyse button came up (randomly) immediately after a review, but it seems it appears on old stored reviews. Anyone who uses this site really needs to do a re-analysis, because on the products I just tested I'd rate its prior ability to detect fakes (reviews and reviewers) at F. After re-analysis I'll upgrade its ability to C. TBH, I don't understand the point. I trust my own ability to evaluate reviews more than the unknown logic of a third party website, which may have its own interests/motives influencing its reviews of reviews.
eps 9y ago
Is there a way to report/flag a _product_ listing on Amazon? As opposed to flagging individual reviews. I ran into a software listing that had several hundred reviews, all 5 stars, but in reality is some SEO-driven bug-infested piece of crap. I wish I could take it down somehow, because of its borderline scam nature.
- jpindar 9y ago
  There is a "Report incorrect product information" link on each product page, and someone does read what you post there. I've reported a few products where the name didn't match the picture or description, and they were fixed within a few days. Whether they would care about a less obvious problem, I don't know.
telltruth 9y ago
Most people don't realize this but lot of products I'm seeing these days are priced almost 20% more on Amazon than many other places. For example, Nest was on sell on Amazon about $100 more than in Costco during Christmas period. Amazon has successfully trained people in to thinking that everything there is lowest priced and you just need to click button to get the goods. Further more, many of the items now are actually fake even when branded. In many categories like cables, batteries, cameras - you are actually very likely to buy either Chinese branded or fake branded items from Amazon then the real deal. For example, virtually 1 out 4 product listing on Duracell are actually fake Duracell. It will still say "Sold by Duracell" and available on Amazon prime to make it completely legit but its fake supplied from Chinese seller. The funniest thing is that during Black Friday, many of these product prices went up while Amazon advertized sale on the site, truly cashing out the trust they have built over the years. Amazon is becoming jungle in truest sense where your money would be eaten away if you are not careful. Bezo keeps talking about "customer obsession" but he seems to complete ignore all of the above.
- tmaly 9y ago
  I remember a few years back there was a post on HN about algorithmic price changes of books on Amazon. I wonder if this was broadened to other products?
  - bradbatt 9y ago
    They do it on a bunch of their products - maybe all of them, I'm not sure. You can see pricing history (as well as set yourself price alerts) at a couple of different websites such as https://camelcamelcamel.com/ https://camelcamelcamel.com/
dfraser992 9y ago
I did my MSc in Data Science dissertation on classification of fake reviews - I never looked at Fakespot in depth, but my cursory gut feeling is that ReviewMeta.com is better (their blog is helpful). The problem in general is pervasive across all review based sites, like Yelp and TripAdvisor, but as the top poster points out, Amazon benefits from being a hands-off middleman, so they are not going to bother dealing with any problems until it becomes a PR nightmare. If anyone is interested, you can find my dissertation at: https://douglas-fraser.com/datadata/ https://douglas-fraser.com/datadata/ Only text based features were used, nothing involving other types of signals like reviewer name or spamming groups. I started out with 180 million Amazon reviews from 1997 onwards... but that got too big of a project, so the dataset used was a test set used in a lot of research on this topic. I will be expanding on the research in my blog, examining other sets of text based features I never got the time to use, and things like PCA as well.

How do fake reviewers get the "verified purchase" tag on Amazon? This particular analysis[1] explicitly lists "Alex Brown" as a "Unreliable Reviewer", but the Amazon page[2] says his review is a verified purchase. Did Novopal just buy it for him? (Also, I wish I could plug my Amazon profile into Fakespot and see what it thinks about me.) [1]: https://www.fakespot.com/product/novopal-baby-stroller-organizer-with-shoulder-strap-universal-fitting-anti-slip-safety-buckle-design https://www.fakespot.com/product/novopal-baby-stroller-organ... [2]: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N5J6LXT#customerReviews https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N5J6LXT#customerReviews

pkaye 9y ago
The fake reviewer will buy the product first and then the company will reimburse and reward the reviewer on the side once a review is posted.
pglhn 9y ago
I've heard that one way of doing this is for the seller to give the purchaser a discount coupon for 100% off
- bambax 9y ago
  No, discounted purchases don't get you the "Verified" badge. The way sellers operate today is, they ask you to buy the product "for real" and then reimburse you (and more) via Paypal. This is against Amazon's rules but lots of sellers are doing it. I rank around 6000th reviewer in FR and yet I constantly receive messages offering me to review products using this method.
achamayou 9y ago
> Also, I wish I could plug my Amazon profile into Fakespot and see what it thinks about me Although that sounds neat, and I wish I could do that too, I suspect this would be far too helpful to actors running bogus profiles to be allowed to exist.

forapurpose 9y ago

I wonder how they address this problem, which affects all attempts to spot fake reviews: How do they know how accurate their results are?[0] What are the false negative and false positive rates? To measure your accuracy objectively, you'd need an independent method to verify, with high reliability, the legitimacy of the reviews. (You may think you can spot them manually, and maybe you can spot some obvious ones, but false negatives are perilous: You don't know if the reviewer is simply better at hiding their trick than you are in discovering it - and they likely have far more expertise and experience than you do. Consider: Could you write a fake review that would trick someone like yourself?) Fakespot's FAQ says the following. I think the use of machine learning is a good example of the problem: The machine needs a good data set from which to learn, which means they'd have to flag reviews in the training data as legitimate or not - but they have no way to determine that. Basically, they are training the machine to make the same judgments, of unknown, accuracy, as the humans (in fairness, I'm making some presumptions about their use of machine learning). What criteria are used by Fakespot when analyzing reviews? Fakespot utilizes numerous technologies to validate the authenticity of reviews. The primary criteria is the language utilized by the reviewer, the profile of the reviewer,correlation with other reviewers data and machine learning algorithm that focuses on improving itself by detecting fraudulent reviews. The technologies include: profile clusters, sentiment analysis, cluster correlation and artificial intelligence intertwined with these functionalities. https://www.fakespot.com/faq https://www.fakespot.com/faq [0] As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

Rapzid 9y ago
My knee-jerk reaction is that they are detecting anomalies and low-quality reviews for some definition of quality. As you pointed out, without a consistent ground truth target how could it really separate "fake" from "legit"? Perhaps they partnered with a fake review business and used their records?
netheril96 9y ago
I had the same reaction as yours. I clicked many links on the website, only to find such fluffy statements about machine learning algorithms, but no information whatsoever about the metrics and ground truth. They basically dodge the most important questions and therefore I conclude that they are not in any way trustworthy.

mehrdadn 9y ago

Does anyone know how well it works to just check to see if reviews have been posted in a short/bursty duration? I feel like most fake ones seem to be ones posted very recently or during a short time period, but I'm not sure if that just means I'm missing the rest of them or not.

mehrdadn 9y ago

I'm skeptical Fakespot works well. Consider this product: > https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064EKNKI https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064EKNKI Where do they get the idea that 25% of the reviews are unreliable/deceptive? I bought it and it works just fine, which is pretty consistent with 87% of the reviews being 4+. Why should I think otherwise?

Zak 9y ago
It's attempting to spot sponsored reviews, not bad products.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  To quote itself, it's spotting "unreliable" and "deceptive" reviews, not merely sponsored ones. And even in the latter case: do those look like sponsored reviews?
  - Zak 9y ago
    No, but I imagine sponsored reviews aren't supposed to look like sponsored reviews. The three it flagged as suspicious for the ethernet cable above were all very short, like "Great product!" or "A++++". I'm not sure what to think of that. I write reviews (of flashlights) as a hobby and wouldn't call something that doesn't describe how the product was tested or include any technical or performance analysis a review. On the other hand, the average buyer doesn't usually have the knowledge to write a useful technical review and just wants to report that the product met their expectations.
    - mehrdadn 9y ago
      > No, but I imagine sponsored reviews aren't supposed to look like sponsored reviews. I mean, yes, but that wasn't the point. If the sponsored reviews seem to blend in with the normal reviews and and seem to be at least as accurate as normal reviews then how in the world are they "fake"? Where is the tangible distinction for me as a customer? (Why in the world would I avoid such products?) > I write reviews (of flashlights) as a hobby Funny you mention that! Flashlights seem like just about the worst-marketed products I've seen on Amazon, so they indeed definitely need great reviews. At the risk of going off-topic, do you have any tips on figuring out what the lumen output of a flashlight actually is (or even what LEDs they use)? I keep seeing Cree LEDs being claimed to output 2-3x as many lumens as they're even capable of.

zionic 9y ago

I really can't stand this website. We had them say ~40% of our Amazon reviews were fake/unreliable... and I'm pretty damn sure we'd know if we were faking our own reviews. I don't know how their system works, but the false positive rate in my experience is absurd.

nikanj 9y ago
Their long-term monetization strategy probably involves you paying them to ”verify” your reviews.
rahimnathwani 9y ago
Care to share a link so we can take a look?
Oras 9y ago
who's we? and looking at the website I think it used NLP to analyse review text and they state in about us that they check grammar and correlation so you could have a legitimate review with wrong grammar marked as spam.
sehugg 9y ago
Same here, for my all-organic ebook reviews it gave an F and said there was "HIGH DECEPTION" involved. It seems to penalize you for having above four stars.

zzzcpan 9y ago

Let's be honest, fake reviews is a fake problem. Reviews were never supposed to work for customers' benefits. I mean how in the world shallow emotional opinions of people with unmet expectations and wasted time or with fanatic love for the brand would help anyone? It's just that when people start ignoring reviews all those corporations don't make as much profits.

bluetwo 9y ago

I wish this site worked well. Based on my tests it doesn't. This is a real problem without yet a solution.

user5994461 9y ago
Works well based on mine.

bambax 9y ago

Doesn't seem to support Amazon European marketplaces. Review Meta does, and works very well.

user5994461 9y ago
It works on amazon UK. I think their magic algorithms only support English.

user5994461 9y ago

Fake reviews are clustered per category. Take a look at cream to make you less fat, magic thing to grow your hair back, or iphone accessories, you will find that almost all the reviews are fake. Too much money to be made.

acd 9y ago

Tried on the Amazon echo dot best seller which had 4.5 stars but adjusted review score are trustworthy score 3. Thirty percent low quality reviews according to Fakespot.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

Maybe I'm naive but isn't this something Amazon, for example, should be doing? Why aren't they concerned about the integrity of their community?

dvt 9y ago
> Why aren't they concerned about the integrity of their community? Amazon has virtually no competition, ergo is not incentivized whatsoever to be concerned with the integrity of their community. Further, Amazon will charge you for return shipping so, again, they couldn't care less if a positively reviewed product actually sucks. Now that I think about it, the whole system is pretty brilliant because they're double dipping: charging the customer for returns but charging the vendor for warehouse space. It's the definition of a win-win.
- manojlds 9y ago
  Oh, you have to pay for returns? That's not case (yet?) with Amazon.in.
- arbie 9y ago
  Return shipping is free if the product is defective or the website description is inaccurate.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Most people choose to bin and forget the $10 shit they got, instead of sending back and asking for refund.
beamatronic 9y ago
Just don't buy anything that isn't explicitly sold by Amazon.com. Or a few trusted others like AnkerDirect
- mattpavelle 9y ago
  This is a common misconception. As has been stated before on similar threads, Amazon comingles inventory. So if you as a third party seller have a bunch of fake widgets for sale on Amazon and anyone else (including Amazon themselves) sell the same widget (same by name) then Amazon has no control over whose inventory a buyer receivers, regardless of the Sold By label on Amazon.com https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-opens-door-to-knockoffs-1399852852 https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-op... Relevant paragraphs if you can't get past the paywall: "As more third-party sellers have signed up to offer products through Amazon and use its order-fulfillment services, the Seattle-based giant has allowed many to pool their inventory with supposedly identical items supplied by other sellers—in essence commingling products from third-party merchants with those supplied directly to Amazon by the brands themselves. In other words, a product ordered from a third-party seller may not have originated from that particular seller. If the bar code matches, any one that is on the shelf will do."

jamisteven 9y ago

I use this site regularly its never let me down.

amelius 9y ago

Can't a malicious actor use this to check their own reviews before posting, until they pass the test?

antoncohen 9y ago

This just isn't reliable. I tested in on the Amazon Echo 2nd Gen, it gave it a D grade, 45.8% low quality reviews, half a star. The two unreliable reviews I checked were two-star reviews, they were not high quality reviews, but they weren't "fake". For example one complained that they thought it was wireless, but it requires a power cord. I checked the product's two star reviews (6% of reviews), the reviews I saw were all legit. The were long reviews, mostly complaining about the sound quality compared to the 1st gen. For reference, the top 5-star review also says sound quality was poor, until after the third firmware update. Amazon isn't paying for fake reviews of the Echo, and no one would pay someone to purchase a $79 product (verified purchase) and give it a two-star review.

55555 9y ago
Is it flagging Vine reviewers? That would make sense... Could just be unreliable though.
sytelus 9y ago
tried couple of products... seems to be working great. For example, this is spot on: https://www.fakespot.com/product/hanger-hooks-nuolux-hanger-clips-mini-flocking-clothes-rack-holders-12pcs-random-color https://www.fakespot.com/product/hanger-hooks-nuolux-hanger-...
aero_sm1th 9y ago
I use Fakespot religiously since 2016 and I noticed the same thing so I emailed them asking them, why would Amazons' products have fake reviews? This was their reply (from co-founder, Ming): "We have noticed trends where fake review clubs/bots seed their reviewer profiles by leaving reviews on various products, specifically Amazon best selling products to create a profile that looks legitimate (it is done to fool anti-fraud systems that Amazon utilizes). Our engine detects these seed reviewer profiles and therefore penalizes them accordingly by examining their profile and our AI algorithm (one of numerous) was trained to distinguish these patterns." I hope this is helpful. I love the website and I think it is not to the benefit of Amazon, Yelp, or TripAdvisor to do anything about fake reviews as it only helps their platforms generate more $.

SyneRyder 9y ago

It might be worth clicking the "run analysis again" button if it's offered to you. On the headphones product I tried (and have purchased myself), it flagged some genuine reviews as having been created by automated accounts. Seems it thought the surname Akcicek was just random letters generated by a computer. But after running the analysis on the page again, it changed its mind about that review and decided it was now legitimate.

LV-426 9y ago
> But after running the analysis on the page again, it changed its mind about that review and decided it was now legitimate. This doesn't sound very reliable. If nothing had changed on the review, what's the basis for it changing its mind?
- bartl 9y ago
  It probably is a learning system... It got trained more. The review itself doesn't have to change. The system merely adjusted its parameters due to more exposure to new reviews.
  - LV-426 9y ago
    Possibly, yeah. I was also under the misapprehension the re-analyse button came up (randomly) immediately after a review, but it seems it appears on old stored reviews. Anyone who uses this site really needs to do a re-analysis, because on the products I just tested I'd rate its prior ability to detect fakes (reviews and reviewers) at F. After re-analysis I'll upgrade its ability to C. TBH, I don't understand the point. I trust my own ability to evaluate reviews more than the unknown logic of a third party website, which may have its own interests/motives influencing its reviews of reviews.

eps 9y ago

Is there a way to report/flag a _product_ listing on Amazon? As opposed to flagging individual reviews. I ran into a software listing that had several hundred reviews, all 5 stars, but in reality is some SEO-driven bug-infested piece of crap. I wish I could take it down somehow, because of its borderline scam nature.

jpindar 9y ago
There is a "Report incorrect product information" link on each product page, and someone does read what you post there. I've reported a few products where the name didn't match the picture or description, and they were fixed within a few days. Whether they would care about a less obvious problem, I don't know.

telltruth 9y ago

Most people don't realize this but lot of products I'm seeing these days are priced almost 20% more on Amazon than many other places. For example, Nest was on sell on Amazon about $100 more than in Costco during Christmas period. Amazon has successfully trained people in to thinking that everything there is lowest priced and you just need to click button to get the goods. Further more, many of the items now are actually fake even when branded. In many categories like cables, batteries, cameras - you are actually very likely to buy either Chinese branded or fake branded items from Amazon then the real deal. For example, virtually 1 out 4 product listing on Duracell are actually fake Duracell. It will still say "Sold by Duracell" and available on Amazon prime to make it completely legit but its fake supplied from Chinese seller. The funniest thing is that during Black Friday, many of these product prices went up while Amazon advertized sale on the site, truly cashing out the trust they have built over the years. Amazon is becoming jungle in truest sense where your money would be eaten away if you are not careful. Bezo keeps talking about "customer obsession" but he seems to complete ignore all of the above.

tmaly 9y ago
I remember a few years back there was a post on HN about algorithmic price changes of books on Amazon. I wonder if this was broadened to other products?
- bradbatt 9y ago
  They do it on a bunch of their products - maybe all of them, I'm not sure. You can see pricing history (as well as set yourself price alerts) at a couple of different websites such as https://camelcamelcamel.com/ https://camelcamelcamel.com/

dfraser992 9y ago

I did my MSc in Data Science dissertation on classification of fake reviews - I never looked at Fakespot in depth, but my cursory gut feeling is that ReviewMeta.com is better (their blog is helpful). The problem in general is pervasive across all review based sites, like Yelp and TripAdvisor, but as the top poster points out, Amazon benefits from being a hands-off middleman, so they are not going to bother dealing with any problems until it becomes a PR nightmare. If anyone is interested, you can find my dissertation at: https://douglas-fraser.com/datadata/ https://douglas-fraser.com/datadata/ Only text based features were used, nothing involving other types of signals like reviewer name or spamming groups. I started out with 180 million Amazon reviews from 1997 onwards... but that got too big of a project, so the dataset used was a test set used in a lot of research on this topic. I will be expanding on the research in my blog, examining other sets of text based features I never got the time to use, and things like PCA as well.