22 ms·

Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

455 points by EnderWT 8y ago

richjdsmith 8y ago
Hmm, I had (apparently wrongly) assumed this had become common knowledge. Now I am beginning to wonder what percentage of people are aware of this issue. On a different note, I saw elsewhere (Axiom perhaps? I cannot remember) that amazon claimed it was only roughly 1% of all reviews that were paid for. Which based on my past experience in E-Commerce, seems significantly lower than would be estimates.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  > Hmm, I had (apparently wrongly) assumed this had become common knowledge. me too. maybe NPR is behind the times. also: Amazon is a sponsor of NPR (just sayin') > amazon claimed it was only roughly 1% of all reviews that were paid for. yes. that's right. the 1% figure also appears in the NPR article: "Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon.
  - toss1 8y ago
    Even if we make the (dubious, imo) assumption that the low 1% figure is accurate, it can still be a huge problem. There are 480 million products on Amazon, many in somewhat obscure categories. Seems that if the fake reviews are simply concentrated in a popular 1% slice, we've got almost 5 million popular products with ~~100% fake reviews. Obviously oversimplified, but the likelihood is that the reviews are sufficiently concentrated to be a problem using their own figures, and the real figures are likely higher
    - canes123456 8y ago
      I would not assume that. The impact of a paid review decreases as the number of reviews increases. ie it probably better to pay for reviews for a low volume or new product
JohnTHaller 8y ago
It's common knowledge among most techies that the majority of Amazon reviews are fake and that counterfeit items are a big issue, but most of the general population is completely unaware. I was searching for an inexpensive pair of polarized sunglasses last week and the "Amazon Recommended" ones had an F on FakeSpot with 70%+ fake reviews.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  How legitimate is FakeSpot though? I find nearly everything has an F with a high amount of fake reviews when I use it.
  - zaksoup 8y ago
    Is that a sign of illegitimate fake-spotting, or a sign of just how widespread fake reviews are? Personally I'm quite inclined to believe an extremely high fail rate.
    - 394549 8y ago
      > Is that a sign of illegitimate fake-spotting, or a sign of just how widespread fake reviews are? Personally I'm quite inclined to believe an extremely high fail rate. I think fake reviews are pretty widespread. This Washington Post story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-merchants-secretly-use-facebook-to-flood-amazon-with-fake-reviews/2018/04/23/5dad1e30-4392-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-merchant...) talks about how Facebook groups are used trade free stuff in exchange for good reviews. I joined some, and they seemed to have a lot of traffic. FakeSpot seems to put a lot of emphasis on analyzing the reviewers, probably looking for accounts who appear to be participating in one of these review rings.
      - corin_ 8y ago
        > FakeSpot seems to spend put a lot of emphasis on analyzing the reviewers, probably looking for accounts who appear to be participating in one of these review rings. Presumably this (and the fact that Amazon can analyse them too) leads to a wider spread of fake reviews even on legitimate items, as having fake accounts write generic reviews on a random selection of items they don’t care about would make them harder to detect.
oceanghost 8y ago
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the Amazon Vine program which sends products to well-standing reviewers in order to seed reviews.
jackdh 8y ago
"Some"
riazrizvi 8y ago
I've been using https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to flag bullshit reviews for a few months now. After many happy purchases informed by its review analysis, I believe it works.
- drewr 8y ago
  How can we believe you?
  - riazrizvi 8y ago
    : ) Well don't take it on trust, validate it works. And keep validating it still works, because one day it won't. Everyone seems to sell out in the end.
    - wuliwong 8y ago
      What do you mean by "validate it"?
      - loco5niner 8y ago
        I've used fakespot for purchases for a while now. I feel that it's helped me avoid bad products. Thus... it's validated (at lease for myself)
    - endorphone 8y ago
      It's impossible to validate. Further for all we know Fakespot (which curiously has been mentioned multiple times) might itself be a fake that undermines products that are sponsored, etc. It probably isn't, I'm just saying.
      - riazrizvi 8y ago
        ? You could manually analyze the reviewers for suspicious non-specificity, typical of paid reviewers for whom it is not cost effective to write a tailored review when they are being paid pennies per post. Also over time you could compare the quality of products that it says have fake reviews vs ones it says does not.
bob_theslob646 8y ago
How are there not laws that enforce companies to verify there reviews. I understand it is a complex problem, but first it was our elections were manipulated via spam advertising and now, most of the products that we buy are going to be.
- wuliwong 8y ago
  Don't worry, they will eventually regulate that too.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Well such moderation requirements would be massively impractical and run afoul of safe harbor. Not to mention being defacto prior restraint. Besides even if money was no object it isn't possible to always and definitively prove truth or falsehood. Even if someone posts a five star review of chalky dry chocolate they may just have crappy taste.
  - tim333 8y ago
    Don't worry. The EU will probably mandate something massively impractical anyway.
dawhizkid 8y ago
I'm glad the media seems to finally be paying attention to a problem most people know/have suspected for a long time, though I wonder if Amazon will ever be held accountable in the same way FB has with Cambridge Analytica...seems like it will take a major crisis (someone dying or getting seriously injured buying a fake product on Amazon) for something to actually happen.
laurex 8y ago
There was a great Planet Money podcast on the genesis of ReviewMeta which I've been using on Amazon reviews since. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370 https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
- 394549 8y ago
  I've been using https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ to check review for fakes on Amazon.
  - loco5niner 8y ago
    And I've started using BOTH reviewmeta and fakespot. Good results so far.
- throwaway287391 8y ago
  Since listening to that podcast a few weeks ago I've also started checking both ReviewMeta and FakeSpot for every Amazon listing I think about buying. It's really made shopping on Amazon a frustrating experience -- well over half the products I've checked (in a couple specific product categories) have had F or D ratings according to both sites. I've wondered if some of these are false positives (i.e. ReviewMeta flags a product's reviews as fake but they're actually legitimate), but when you look at their reasoning in the breakdown they give, it's usually pretty convincing that many/most of the reviews are indeed fake. I feel like this might be a case where ignorance is (mostly) bliss ... when I naively thought the vast majority of reviews on Amazon were genuine, shopping was much faster and simpler, and I mostly had good experiences buying well-reviewed products despite that many of those reviews were probably fake.
  - Jach 8y ago
    Consider that if you go buy an equivalent item at a box store, there aren't any reviews, the company (sometimes companies) with products on offer just happens to have enough money to get the stores to stock them over any potential competition. Similarly with fake and paid reviews, those companies happen to have money to do it (and do it better than competition, they can't all be using the same github script). A company with money to do things like that surely has some amount of money in the product itself, so what you get will probably work out as well as what you'd get from the store... The bigger problem for Amazon I think is fake products and inventory co-mingling, rather than fake reviews per se. But while others are complaining about the 5-star system not being very good (there's a fancy Bayesian system I've seen before that's better..), at least Amazon shows you the distribution, reviewers can upload photos, and it lets you filter by star count to get a sense of the things said for various ratings. I'll have to start trying out the fake review spotting tools. But I don't think my current behavior will change that much...
snegu 8y ago
Last night I finally abandoned a book that was absolute trash, but had 83% 5-star reviews on Amazon. Looking at the reviews now, I see that most of them are written by people who only write 5-star reviews (it has an F-rating on Fakespot). Feeling like kind of a dummy right now.
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  Name and shame!
  - 13of40 8y ago
    The Art of the Deal has an F, with 57% low quality reviews. "Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is high deception involved."
    - nasredin 8y ago
      Shouldn't it be around 49%? Or is it just bumped up due to an old electoral algorithm Amazon uses? Hmmm...
    - 13of40 8y ago
      Hmmm...can't edit, but: I just looked at this again, and it's interesting to note that the Kindle version has an A rating and the print version has an F rating, even though they appear to share the same set of reviews. Scroll down to see the first two entries in the product list here: https://www.fakespot.com/company/donald-j-trump https://www.fakespot.com/company/donald-j-trump
    - tibarion 8y ago
      If you are solely posting just to make a political jab then there are more appropriate places to make such comments that are not Hacker News
  - qzw 8y ago
    Not the OP, but this reminds me of a similar experience I had with a book called Space Opera a few months ago. Don't remember where I first heard of it, but it was being touted as comparable to the Hitchhiker's Guide. All the reviews on Amazon were 5 stars, and since the kindle version was only $5, I bought it without checking further. It turned out to be a pretty disappointing read, and nowhere near the caliber of anything in the Hitchhiker's series. I remember while reading it wondering how could all the reviews have been so good. I just checked fakespot, and it had an F rating with 92% low quality reviews as of April 25 [0]. I then had fakespot update the analysis, and it's now a D, with 41% low quality reviews [1]. So it seems like the fake reviews were bought to get things jump started, and now real reviews are catching up. Now that I think about it, it's probably a fairly common way for authors and/or their publishers/publicists to get the early sales and hype going. [0] https://imgur.com/a/PWFTTbV https://imgur.com/a/PWFTTbV [1] https://www.fakespot.com/product/space-opera-7ea7cc4e-4bae-4574-a18b-fe84448d3abf https://www.fakespot.com/product/space-opera-7ea7cc4e-4bae-4...
jwilk 8y ago
Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775
barbegal 8y ago
Star ratings in general are just poor. In a 1 to 5 star rating, 3 is average but most people would perceive 3 stars to be above average. People tend to leave reviews only when they are displeased with the product, really pleased with the product or get something in return for making the review, in this case free products. I tend to just filter on reviews that are 2 or 3 stars and use those to work out the cons of the product. These reviews are the most likely to be honest and can often give you the information that other reviewers forget to mention. Unfortunately, 2 and 3 star reviews are the least likely to be posted so you can only find them on products that have been reviewed hundreds of times.
- fireattack 8y ago
  Really? I think most people perceive anything less than 4 stars (or even 4.5 stars for some) as "bad". I for one won't buy anything that are "merely" 3-stars.
  - malnourish 8y ago
    I think the issue, for me, is not that 3 stars is bad. I probably use a number of products each day that are legitimately 3-star worthy. It's that 3 stars on Amazon et al are an amalgam of 1 and 5 star reviews. There is then a risk, is this product bad but propped up by low reviews? Can I expect poor quality control? Etc
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    True, I gave a tech book 3 stars once and the author contacted me to request that I reconsider, explaining that anything less than 5 stars could doom a brand new tech book on Amazon. He offered personal support and training in return for raising the score. It didn't work, but it also convinced me that he has a good point regarding the score: Reviews are difficult ground due to their subjective nature, and a lot of reviewers are simply qualitatively bad at writing reviews. If an author just sits back and does nothing, they are risking their brand on the individuals who take the time to write reviews, and that set of individuals could be--even randomly--pretty bad. For example: I've seen many, many 1-star "product was damaged in shipping" and similar e.g. "received wrong product" one-reviews for products that were absolutely stellar. Getting into even more tricky ground, I've seen 1-star "product is unscientific" reviews left on books containing information that is mainly intractable to science, like studies in history.
BadassFractal 8y ago
How does one protect oneself from these? Are there secure / private browser extensions that might cross-reference those reviews to other sites? Is everything fake news now?
minimaxir 8y ago
Similar discussion about the fake Amazon review economy a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022215
ilamont 8y ago
According to outside auditors like Fakespot and ReviewMeta, more than half the reviews for certain popular products are questionable. Amazon disputes those estimates. "Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon. She adds that "sometimes individual products have more suspicious activity." The disparity in what outside services observe and users experience vs. what Amazon claims, and the increasing press coverage and online discussion of the problem, will force Amazon to take increasingly drastic measures to crack down on bogus reviews. There is also the issue of increasing levels of returns for 5-star crap. But, while Amazon can absorb the costs of returns, Bezos truly hates negative press, and the Amazon PR machine will go to great lengths to get high-profile news orgs repeating the official Amazon line. If they can't tamp down negative coverage, the best hope for generating positive press is to announce action - a crackdown, lawsuits against fake reviewers, or other evidence that they are "doing something" about the issue. Unfortunately for Amazon, they've done this in the past (1, 2) and the problem appears to have gotten worse. 1. October 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/18/amazon-sues-1000-fake-reviewers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/18/amazon-su... 2. April 2016: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-sues-alleged-providers-of-fake-reviews/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-sues-all...
- Terretta 8y ago
  > Bezos truly hates negative press I'm not sure that's true. I think they pride themselves on not worrying about being understood, in other words, not pandering to the press or Wall Street.
jameslk 8y ago
There will always be a desire to pay for reviews, since 70%-80% of shoppers check reviews before buying[0][1] (and growing[2]). Amazon could help fix this problem by creating "sponsored" reviews. This way a company can pay for reviews in a non-scummy way, a reviewer (and Amazon) gets paid, and a customer can tell whether the review was paid for or not. Or just pass laws to regulate reviews. 0. http://www.peopleclaim.com/blog/index.php/the-review-of-ratings/ http://www.peopleclaim.com/blog/index.php/the-review-of-rati... 1. https://www.chainstoreage.com/news/study-81-research-online-making-big-purchases/ https://www.chainstoreage.com/news/study-81-research-online-... 2. https://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/2016/11/01/media-device-habits-of-the-modern-consumer/ https://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/2016/11/01/media-device-habits-...
- treebeard901 8y ago
  > and a customer can tell whether the review was paid for or not. Isn't this what the companies are paying for?
  - jameslk 8y ago
    Given the opportunity to pay for sponsored reviews or risk getting perma banned from Amazon, I'm guessing a lot of companies would choose the former. Regardless, it's not an idea I have seen tested yet anywhere, so it's hard to know.
- cmplxconjugate 8y ago
  The fundamental problem though is that companies want to discretely inject these overly positive reviews. If users can identify these “paid-for” reviews, they will most likely treat them with distrust. I really can’t see a way around this.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I doubt that sponsored reviews would solve it - if they wanted to be shady they would astroturf it anyway. Marketing departments with multimillion dollar budgets still engage in that. As for regulating reviews what could possibly work for that? Real ID would be unduly oppressive in chilling effects in addition to opening up barratry and harassment of reviewers. Even if fake reviews fall under false advertising laws good luck enforcing it.
msikora 8y ago
ReviewMeta has a great Chrome plugin that shows the "real" score (after removing all even slightly suspicious reviews) right in the toolbar https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-review-anal/fjifglfkcaipnmhngbigdebkoikioend?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-revi...
- y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
  The funny thing is I think Chrome plugins suffer from a similar problem and quite dangerous too because they can steal your information. I reported a fake clone of Privacy Badger a while back - positive reviews with the only difference being the fake one had a very low number of reviews/downloads. I'm very conservative with the extensions I use now
  - r00fus 8y ago
    I only use chrome extensions in a containerized fashion (i.e. on an instance where chrome is used for nothing else)
netinstructions 8y ago
And I've had issues trying to leave less than perfect reviews - seems like only after I spend time typing up the review (and sometimes uploading photos) does Amazon come back and say, sorry can't publish this. Seems like a dark pattern to encourage only positive reviews. http://www.netinstructions.com/amazon-dark-patterns/ http://www.netinstructions.com/amazon-dark-patterns/
- y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
  YES! I have this happen to and notice the same patterns. I honestly think there is grounds for a lawsuit here. Whether or not that would be a successful lawsuit is another question, but the threat of one could get Amazon to change its tune.
EnderWT 8y ago
This topic keeps coming up in the news, and I've altered my shopping habits because of it. The competition has gotten tougher with Google Express, Walmart delivery and pickup, Target pickup, etc. When I order from one of them or make a trip to the store, I can at least verify the item I'm purchasing is from the manufacturer. When looking at the reviews on Amazon, countless times I've seen reviewers mention to not buy the item from a particular seller because it was not genuine or was defective. If I'm not sure about the brand, I'll search it to see if its legitimate and if there are reviews/complaints on other sites. I'll also use buying guides when determining what to buy instead of Amazon reviews.
- entee 8y ago
  This is a huge issue, several times I've received fraudulent goods when shopping at Amazon. It has made me completely avoid shopping for certain items there and makes me wary of trusting anything on the site where quality/reliability is an issue.
- NTARelix 8y ago
  Makes me wonder how many of those guides have been paid for, or at least what level of influence advertisers have on them. Nevertheless, I agree that a quality guide is well appreciated, however hard to come by.
  - EnderWT 8y ago
    Many "guides" just end up being affiliate marketing link aggregators. I appreciate The Wirecutter's About[1] page where they tell how they review products. [1]https://thewirecutter.com/about/ https://thewirecutter.com/about/
- AlexB138 8y ago
  Avoiding particular sellers is no guarantee, since Amazon comingles inventory in the warehouse. You can order from seller A, who is completely legitimate, and receive fraudulent goods seller B supplied.
awinder 8y ago
"We have built a lot of technology to assess whether or not we think a review is authentic” Really now? Has amazon considered firing those teams? Because that tech is beyond broken.
ashelmire 8y ago
"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic" Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  The fakes are a relatively new phenomena. A book like say 1984 has thousands of reviews over twenty years that are legit. They don’t break down fakes by year or tell you that 1% of new reviews are fake. Also you have grey fakes with solicited reviews. I have a few vendors who offer significant discounts in exchange for reviews.
  - castlecrasher2 8y ago
    Fakes are at least three years old. At least, that's when the great I Was Given This Product For Free Or At A Discount plague started. Plus these Chinese companies just rebrand and post new product listings free of the bad reviews, leaving the old ones to die.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      Agreed -- but keep in mind that Amazon is old -- over 20 years old. There are billions of reviews.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  There are three possible scenarios. 1. Amazon uses good ML techniques, and they don't work. 2. Amazon is doing something else to detect fraud, and it doesn't work. 3. Amazon is lying about the issue.
  - dalore 8y ago
    All 3 could be possible.
caseydm 8y ago
One of the many reasons I let my Amazon Prime subscription expire last month. Amazon is selling convenience. But it's not convenient to: 1. Filter out products full of Vine program reviews, which I believe are completely skewed due to the reviewers receiving the products for free 2. Read between the lines to filter out paid/bias reviews that are NOT part of the Vine program 3. Research to ensure the product itself is not fake or counterfeit Feel like I'm shopping at the shadiest flea market in town.
ngoel36 8y ago
http://www.thewirecuttter.com http://www.thewirecuttter.com
- neilprosser 8y ago
  Be careful clicking the above link. Note the three 't' characters.
tananaev 8y ago
I usually just ignore 5-star and 1-star reviews. Many of five stars are either fake or people who just bought the product and are too excited to leave an unbiased review. Many of one stars are from people who are not satisfied with the purchase process (slow delivery / fake reviews / broken item), so they leave bad review that doesn't really reflect product quality itself.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  I rarely leave reviews, but there has been a case where I had to threaten to sue a company before they'd hold up their end of an agreement. And 'threatening' is not just mentioning "I'll sue you!" but actually researching applicable law, what prerequisites I needed to be able to sue (e.g. I needed to hire a debt collector first, which would have cost me money as well), applicable court, what the bailiff would cost, court fees, etc. Some fourty phone calls and a few emails and letters later, spread out over half a year, I finally got the money back on the day before I would have had grounds to sue them. That was more than half a year of stress and them having both the product and my money. To be honest it was kind of disappointing that they paid up in the end, as I was finally well-prepared and wanted them to have to pay the fees that debt collection etc. would have incurred. You bet that after it was all over and done, I wrote that one-star review. While writing it, I noticed that other people had the same issue. One person also had to cite court fees before they paid up, and some others didn't know enough about applicable law or had amounts that were just too low to go to court over (like $50-$250). I usually don't put much stock in such reviews, but it turns out I should have read and considered them. There are definitely legitimate cases for one-star reviews.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
markdown 8y ago
News from Australia today: Australia's largest apartment developer Meriton fined $3 million for misleading consumers on TripAdvisor by preventing guests Meriton suspected would give negative reviews from receiving TripAdvisor’s ‘Review Express’ prompt email. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912
chrissnell 8y ago
I've been burned multiple times by this; the worst was a pair of remote control off-road trucks for my sons' Christmas presents. They had hundreds of 5-star reviews and both units worked for maybe 5 minutes each. Within days of Christmas, the listing was flooded with 1-star reviews from other conned parents with very similar stories. The number of products impacted must be far over the 1% claimed. There are whole categories that have been ruined by Fake China and kids' toys is probably the worst. Headphones, as mentioned by another commenter here, are another. This problem is quickly destroying Amazon's credibility with a lot of customers. I went to a Best Buy for the first time in a decade to buy a pair of iPhone headphones, just so I'd be assured a genuine product. I now buy my kids' toys at Target, just so I can be assured that there's a reasonable chance that they aren't crap.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I can handle getting some crappy set of headphones but a big let down for a child's Christmas is just so upsetting to a point that maybe I've got unaddressed issues. I have a toddler and I think I'll gladly pay the premium to buy Toys R Us stuff I can touch and play with in the store.
  - monocularvision 8y ago
    > Toys R Us Um, I have some bad news for you.
    - sebastianavina 8y ago
      wut?
    - Waterluvian 8y ago
      They seem to be strong here in Canada. I hope that lasts. Walmart is the only other option and it's not really an enjoyable experience.
      - kurthr 8y ago
Eleopteryx 8y ago
I've found that it's more useful to sort by negative reviews. It's reasonable to assume that the product is what it appears to be at face value, but customers tend to speak up if they feel like they got cheated. On the other hand, I believe I read that some fake reviews are actually negative, as a means to funnel users to competing products. So who knows? Can't trust anything I read on the internet concerning a product or service.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  > some fake reviews are actually negative, as a means to funnel users to competing products Oh, right. I often look for a few positive ones (to find what people thought was positive enough about this product to mention it) as well as the negative ones (to see if they complain about defect units and other one-off issues, or if there are actually real issues with a product), sorted by newest in the hopes that I don't happen to be looking right after a batch of paid reviews were added. But you're right, there is a reason why negative ones would be fake as well. Seems to be less common, though, but still.
andreygrehov 8y ago
Google SEO, Amazon Reviews, AppStore Reviews, Facebook News. Fakes are everywhere. Fake it till you make it [0]. If you really think about it, everything around us has a grain of fake. Ads, startup pitch desks, TV, people relationships, politics. Everything! I almost feel like we're fighting the wrong problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_it_till_you_make_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_it_till_you_make_it
Zelphyr 8y ago
There was a great Reply All podcast on this topic. Between it and this NPR article, and recent personal experience, I'm seriously questioning whether I want to continue my Prime account.
plainOldText 8y ago
I use fakespot for analyzing Amazon reviews. It’s better than nothing.
fapjacks 8y ago
Jeez, I don't think it's possible for this writer (Ryan Kailath) to be any more milquetoast if he tried. Amazon's reviews are completely bullshit. I never buy anything from Amazon (or Yelp, or...) without running the product page through Fakespot.com to check for fake reviews.
Regardsyjc 8y ago
On a positive note, Amazon has been wiping out thousands of reviews this month. Whether blatant manipulations or legitimate reviews, dozens of sellers have lost their reviews. Amazon has been cracking down hard this month, and erring on the better safe than sorry side as usual with their wide nets. The only problem is that Amazon can't keep up with China.
uptown 8y ago
Try to get a valid review on a forehead thermometer on Amazon. It can’t be done.
paul7986 8y ago
Simple hack to this problem is forget about buying stuff online.. go to the store and get it right away. The Internet can not believed for much and is easily manipulated for the better of those smart or immoral enough (however you view it) to use it to line their pockets.
greggman 8y ago
I hate it too but rather than just complain is it a solvable problem? Reply All had an resent episode about it https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player first they had fake reviews. Amazobn required actual purchases so companies would pay people to purchase and return. you can't ban returns otherwise there would be no negative reviews. how can this be solved? some kind of reputation system? how would you lose rep? I love to hear your ideas?
- ralfd 8y ago
  Tag the review with the info if the item was returned.
makecheck 8y ago
“Reviews”, in general, are absurdly misleading on any site; Amazon is just prominent. I’ve given real reviews on Yelp of businesses that had real problems. These negative ratings were shuffled off into their special bucket of maybe-less-reliable reviews, well under pages of HIGHLY questionable 5-star reviews. I also have a friend with a business who was plainly told that he needs to pay to ensure good reviews. Yelp is a scam, and wins by being a virtual monopoly (as Amazon reviews do). It is also amazingly hard to get reviews on the App Store from real users, for instance. I imagine you pretty much have to ask 60 friends to “help” you, or pay somebody, either of which creates a pool of fake reviews. It really changes your perspective on any other “ratings” you see. In the end, I think society will learn that this is another example of buyer beware, and you get out of it what you put into it. Since looking over “reviews” for 30 seconds is low-effort, it is low-value. If you want good results, you need to spend a good amount of time and effort researching products.
redgetan 8y ago
I've actually very interested in finding a solution to this problem as well. I think the issue is that regular users who are more likely to give honest reviews currently don't have an incentive to write one as there's nothing to gain, but potentially something to lose. If everyone is rewarded instead of just the ones who give positive reviews (i.e ones who receive free stuff, getting paid for etc,), then the ratio of fake/legit reviews might balance out. And we just need a better UI to show the most relevant + recent reviews for each star rating. For example, in https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DNTWTKH#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DNTWTKH#customerReviews someone mentioned "All the reviews are non verified!! 5 starts with 100+ reviews...... something is fishy!!". It also shows that 54 people found it helpful. So think that's a neat feature. I think blockchain might be a good use case for this. Cencorship resistant, decentralized review, not controlled by a single company, and anyone can contribute, and see the reviews (i.e via browser extension). And everyone is rewarded by currency when they provide a review. Just not sure how to prevent spam, and deal with people gaming the system. Perhaps a staking system could be introduced wherein a user would lose their stake if the review proved to be inauthentic (proving it comes with its own problems). Anyway, these are just some of things I've been pondering about before.
- tim333 8y ago
  Not sure about blockchain but contacting the odd person who has the buying pattern of a regular customer and asking them what they think might work.
1024core 8y ago
Anecdata, sample size 1. I bought some toy for a toddler. Upon receiving it, I realized that the description was misleading; many of the "pieces" they had listed boldly were just cheap plastic pieces of crap that had no useful functionality. So I returned it, and wrote a 1-star review. A few weeks later, I got an email from them: they were offering $30 if I took down the review. I ignored the email. Several weeks later, another email: this time offering $40. And so on. Their latest email is offering me $70 to take down the review. I still haven't. I'd forward the email to Amazon if (a) I knew they'd do something, and, more importantly, (b) I knew WHERE to send it! Basically, Amazon has no interest in making sure that the reviews are not being gamed. Since the email goes through Amazon servers, they should be able to at least make an attempt at catching such people!
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Holy crap, $70 to remove a review. I'm pretty sure one could find a law under which it's illegal to offer relatively large incentives to silence negative publications. By the way, care to link the product so I can write a couple 1-star reviews as well? /s
- timcederman 8y ago
  Have you ever tried reviewing a seller instead of the product? Amazon reviews almost every single negative review.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  > Basically, Amazon has no interest in making sure that the reviews are not being gamed. Since the email goes through Amazon servers, they should be able to at least make an attempt at catching such people! Short-term, no. Long-term, it harms their credibility until they're past being the status quo because people go to alternatives which aren't as popular or infested with this crap. In short, this is good for competition. But the real problem, as I already wrote in another post, is the fact that Amazon isn't held accountable for this. And if that's currently not possible, it should become by law. After all, they're hosting deceiving misinformation and facilitating a platform for sales. Its easy to get away being the middle man but that doesn't mean its fair.
- 8y ago
sasaf5 8y ago
I find that even books are plagued with this issue. Some obscure technical books selling for more than 80$ will come in a very poor quality print, like they had been printed from a scan. Clearly the book has ran out of original prints, and somewhere they print it cheaply just to make the sell.
- fapjacks 8y ago
  Actually these books are likely counterfeit, being produced overseas and sold on Amazon as the real deal. It's easy because neither the publisher nor Amazon (nor the customer for that matter) can know that someone listing a product is shipping a fraud.
  - sasaf5 8y ago
    What would be the right way to check that? Perhaps sending a mail to the publisher?
    - fapjacks 8y ago
      That sounds reasonable, sure. You might also try contacting the author directly. Authors tend to know way more about their books than the person answering your email at the publisher, and certainly would have a good idea what their print editions are supposed to look like. I've actually found emailing book authors about their books in niche fields to be usually really easy and interesting in its own right.
CodeCube 8y ago
I'm honestly starting to believe that the "wisdom of the crowds" that so many startups and businesses rely on to reach "internet scale", is exactly the wrong approach. Between recommendation algorithms that can be gamed, content that can be paid for, and social media sentiment that can prove to be entirely manufactured, we need to come up with a new paradigm for our products (where "our" is the tech industry at large). The days of allowing what are essentially anonymous sources to dictate what we do, where we go, what we buy, and how we think are coming to an end.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Interesting to ponder that half of the population is of below average intelligence, and that the other half is generally too busy to be writing reviews.
nfoz 8y ago
I'm not really sure why there are any real reviews on sites like Amazon, Yelp etc. Why do people leave reviews; what's in it for them? Is it some strange form of altruism where they're helping their fellow anonymous shopper while also helping out one of the world's most successful megacorporations? Writing this comment has made me re-think why I'm writing this comment.
- rlv-dan 8y ago
  I'm not sure people know what reviews are anymore. I often see people giving 5 stars to a product they have not received yet, or a game they barely played.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  > Why do people leave reviews; what's in it for them? Me? Because I enjoy helping others - and it is my best way of punishing bad actors and supporting good ones, hopefully helping to balance the market in the long run. Actually a bit of the same reason as why I'm writing here: help people by providing facts, add some balance and maybe sometimes a new perspective.
- amorphous 8y ago
  I write reviews usually only in extreme cases if something is either exceptionally good or bad. In the positive case, I want to help the creator/owner having the deserved success, in the negative prevent fellow customers getting ripped off. The problem is, my review might appear fake.
- antpls 8y ago
  You have to look at the alternatives : - you can post a review - you can talk about your disfunctional item to the next person in the room - you can stay silent Staying silent is often a mental burden, because you invested time and energy to buy something that doesn't work, and you feel betrayed. You can keep silent only a finite quantity of such "betrayals", before it adds up and starts affecting your mood and social interactions. Talking about it to the next person in the room is a quick way of getting rid of that mental burden, at the cost of your social interaction with that person. Most people don't want to listen to other's problems/failures, especially if it regards an item they will never use. Or you can leave a review. That way, you can get rid of the mental burden, and the review targets the most pertinent people : the seller and the future buyers (which include yourself maybe). At best, the business will iterate on a new product, taking into account some of the reviews. Edit : just writing that comment to convince myself here ;-)
chx 8y ago
The trick on Amazon is to read the two star reviews. The one star can be PEBKAC, competitor stuffing and a lot of nonsense. The real deal very often is in the two star reviews.
Biba89 8y ago
As a marketer I'm already familiar with fake/paid reviews. It's the way to manipulate and it will be used whenever there is an opportunity for that. On the other hand review.network works on solution for fake reviews
amorphous 8y ago
Providing authenticity, in whatever form, is a huge business opportunity, and it's only going to grow.
- bastijn 8y ago
  That is what VeChain is aiming at [0]. One of the better blockchain incentives around if you ask me. [0] https://www.vechain.org/ https://www.vechain.org/
Giho 8y ago
Why don't they make a review system where the products with fewest bad reviews gets rated the best. If the reviews have to go through Amazon's system it should be hard enough to fake. The "true" customers will make bad reviews if they didn't like the product. The "fake" reviewer can't rate their own products to make them get a better review, an they have to buy the competitors product x times to give x bad reviews.
- Giho 8y ago
  And to further secure it, the amount of buys can be compared to amount of negative reviews. Because who will in their right mind buy a product with a lot of negative reviews, to later give a negative review?
jfrumar 8y ago
Fakespot.com is your friend. I'm fast finding their service indispensable. Also their iOS app is super convenient - you just share a link in the Amazon app with it, and you unmask all the fake reviews.
singularity2001 8y ago
Amazon really lost me when they shadow banned me for writing a (very) negative review. They sell me crap and I can't even complain about it?
trophycase 8y ago
Always always always, read the negative reviews, NOT the positive reviews. If the worst you find is "shipped broken" or something, it's probably ok. If you're reading negative product reviews instead, stay away.
chha 8y ago
I generally avoid looking at good reviews when shopping due to this. Instead I assume that whatever doohickey I want to buy works as advertised, and look for reasons not to buy. Bad reviews are much more helpful in this regard, as they pinpoint weaknesses or other issues.
- fireflash38 8y ago
  It's also much easier to filter the bad reviews. There's fewer reviews to sort through, and you can dismiss the PEBKAC or DOA (except as a data point to see if there's a whole bunch of DOAs).
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think this issue is most interesting to look at from the other side. Imagine your goal was to create fake reviews for a product you created. How difficult do you think it would be to achieve given you expect a substantial economic reward for success? This is why I find it difficult to blame Amazon for things like this - though that is not to say they shouldn't try, but I don't think anybody is saying they're not. It's just that this is something you might call a game of cat and mouse, but I think it may be borderline impossible to detect fake reviews if done well. Imagine I somehow get 500 confederates from geographically diverse regions, and pay them each a substantial amount of money to purchase a product and give a positive review. How do you prove those reviews are fake?
Lio 8y ago
Just bought a rotating bike wheel light from Amazon Marketplace. It's a novelty item that draws images as a bike wheel rotates using persistence of vision. I don't think anyone has every heard of the "brand" but it was sent from "the UK" allegedly. It came with a US plug (I'm in the UK) and software on an 80mm mini-cd. That software is riddled with malware. It also has one of those comedy auto-translated user manuals. Some of these trade offs I can forgive for the price. I can't forgive the malware at any price.
jvz 8y ago
Reviews on sites like Amazon or Yelp are a monoculture: everyone sees the same set of reviews and the same ratings. This creates leverage that makes it worthwhile for shills to spend large amounts of effort "infecting" those sites with bad information, since once they find effective ways of doing so it affects everyone. So the solution must be a review system that works like Twitter, where each user has a unique "view" composed of sources they've selected, directly or indirectly. This diversity would make infection much more difficult and less rewarding for shills and other attackers. I'm still trying to figure out the best design for such a system. The requirements and usage patterns would be quite different from Twitter's, and I'm not aware of any existing attempts that I can learn from.
- Toenex 8y ago
  Yes, tie the review more personally to the reviewer. I guess this is more like the influencer culture we see a on Instagram and YouTube.
- not_a_terrorist 8y ago
  > I'm still trying to figure out the best design for such a system. Easy answer: distributed consensus, à la Bitcoin.
saturdaysaint 8y ago
This is why I am starting to do almost all of my shopping by googling "Wirecutter [product category]". Or CNET for electronics. Amazon's reviews have become so useless and corrupted that I question why anyone would even bother with a genuine review. Luckily, Wirecutter gives fantastic, detailed guidance in just about any category you can think of. I'm finding them so valuable that I believe this would be a great space for more sites to compete in.
davidmurdoch 8y ago
My own anecdote hints that it's even worse than just fake reviews... I actually just wrote a detailed multi paragraph 1-star review of auto parts I received from Amazon, with several photos, too. They, Amazon, would not post it because they claim it doesn't "adhere to the guidelines". The review was exactly as follows: These are "SURTRACK/TRAKMOTIVE" brand axles, part numbers BM-8040 and BM-8041. I only installed the left side but since it didn't fit properly on my 2006 BMW 530xi I'm returning them. The OE part number is: 31607570275 and MFG part number is: BM-8041. The problem was that the inner boot fits improperly and deforms/creases from being stretched when installed (see images). Looking at the product images for this product on Amazon, as well as elsewhere online, you can tell the boot is very different from the product I received. /end Can anyone find anything that goes against their review guidelines in above?
Bedon292 8y ago
I have found https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ to be an interesting place to look at the reviews and get a bit more insight into them.
johnmarcus 8y ago
Shocking! Next they are going to tell me the sky is blue!
aj7 8y ago
Always look for that extra gratituitous detail, a common trait in fabricated stories.
rednerrus 8y ago
Amazon should buy Fakespot and integrate into their reviews.
dspillett 8y ago
https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775 - plain text article (sans tracking etc.)
netrap 8y ago
What if you just removed the stars and only had text? Makes buying based on "reviews" harder... Could also do something like upvotes but then that just ends up with the same problems as stars.

455 points by EnderWT 8y ago

Hmm, I had (apparently wrongly) assumed this had become common knowledge. Now I am beginning to wonder what percentage of people are aware of this issue. On a different note, I saw elsewhere (Axiom perhaps? I cannot remember) that amazon claimed it was only roughly 1% of all reviews that were paid for. Which based on my past experience in E-Commerce, seems significantly lower than would be estimates.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
> Hmm, I had (apparently wrongly) assumed this had become common knowledge. me too. maybe NPR is behind the times. also: Amazon is a sponsor of NPR (just sayin') > amazon claimed it was only roughly 1% of all reviews that were paid for. yes. that's right. the 1% figure also appears in the NPR article: "Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon.
- toss1 8y ago
  Even if we make the (dubious, imo) assumption that the low 1% figure is accurate, it can still be a huge problem. There are 480 million products on Amazon, many in somewhat obscure categories. Seems that if the fake reviews are simply concentrated in a popular 1% slice, we've got almost 5 million popular products with ~~100% fake reviews. Obviously oversimplified, but the likelihood is that the reviews are sufficiently concentrated to be a problem using their own figures, and the real figures are likely higher
  - canes123456 8y ago
    I would not assume that. The impact of a paid review decreases as the number of reviews increases. ie it probably better to pay for reviews for a low volume or new product

JohnTHaller 8y ago

It's common knowledge among most techies that the majority of Amazon reviews are fake and that counterfeit items are a big issue, but most of the general population is completely unaware. I was searching for an inexpensive pair of polarized sunglasses last week and the "Amazon Recommended" ones had an F on FakeSpot with 70%+ fake reviews.

prolikewh0a 8y ago
How legitimate is FakeSpot though? I find nearly everything has an F with a high amount of fake reviews when I use it.
- zaksoup 8y ago
  Is that a sign of illegitimate fake-spotting, or a sign of just how widespread fake reviews are? Personally I'm quite inclined to believe an extremely high fail rate.
  - 394549 8y ago
    > Is that a sign of illegitimate fake-spotting, or a sign of just how widespread fake reviews are? Personally I'm quite inclined to believe an extremely high fail rate. I think fake reviews are pretty widespread. This Washington Post story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-merchants-secretly-use-facebook-to-flood-amazon-with-fake-reviews/2018/04/23/5dad1e30-4392-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-merchant...) talks about how Facebook groups are used trade free stuff in exchange for good reviews. I joined some, and they seemed to have a lot of traffic. FakeSpot seems to put a lot of emphasis on analyzing the reviewers, probably looking for accounts who appear to be participating in one of these review rings.
    - corin_ 8y ago
      > FakeSpot seems to spend put a lot of emphasis on analyzing the reviewers, probably looking for accounts who appear to be participating in one of these review rings. Presumably this (and the fact that Amazon can analyse them too) leads to a wider spread of fake reviews even on legitimate items, as having fake accounts write generic reviews on a random selection of items they don’t care about would make them harder to detect.

oceanghost 8y ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the Amazon Vine program which sends products to well-standing reviewers in order to seed reviews.

jackdh 8y ago

"Some"

riazrizvi 8y ago

I've been using https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to flag bullshit reviews for a few months now. After many happy purchases informed by its review analysis, I believe it works.

drewr 8y ago
How can we believe you?
- riazrizvi 8y ago
  : ) Well don't take it on trust, validate it works. And keep validating it still works, because one day it won't. Everyone seems to sell out in the end.
  - wuliwong 8y ago
    What do you mean by "validate it"?
    - loco5niner 8y ago
      I've used fakespot for purchases for a while now. I feel that it's helped me avoid bad products. Thus... it's validated (at lease for myself)
  - endorphone 8y ago
    It's impossible to validate. Further for all we know Fakespot (which curiously has been mentioned multiple times) might itself be a fake that undermines products that are sponsored, etc. It probably isn't, I'm just saying.
    - riazrizvi 8y ago
      ? You could manually analyze the reviewers for suspicious non-specificity, typical of paid reviewers for whom it is not cost effective to write a tailored review when they are being paid pennies per post. Also over time you could compare the quality of products that it says have fake reviews vs ones it says does not.

bob_theslob646 8y ago

How are there not laws that enforce companies to verify there reviews. I understand it is a complex problem, but first it was our elections were manipulated via spam advertising and now, most of the products that we buy are going to be.

wuliwong 8y ago
Don't worry, they will eventually regulate that too.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Well such moderation requirements would be massively impractical and run afoul of safe harbor. Not to mention being defacto prior restraint. Besides even if money was no object it isn't possible to always and definitively prove truth or falsehood. Even if someone posts a five star review of chalky dry chocolate they may just have crappy taste.
- tim333 8y ago
  Don't worry. The EU will probably mandate something massively impractical anyway.

dawhizkid 8y ago

I'm glad the media seems to finally be paying attention to a problem most people know/have suspected for a long time, though I wonder if Amazon will ever be held accountable in the same way FB has with Cambridge Analytica...seems like it will take a major crisis (someone dying or getting seriously injured buying a fake product on Amazon) for something to actually happen.

laurex 8y ago

There was a great Planet Money podcast on the genesis of ReviewMeta which I've been using on Amazon reviews since. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370 https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

394549 8y ago
I've been using https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ to check review for fakes on Amazon.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  And I've started using BOTH reviewmeta and fakespot. Good results so far.
throwaway287391 8y ago
Since listening to that podcast a few weeks ago I've also started checking both ReviewMeta and FakeSpot for every Amazon listing I think about buying. It's really made shopping on Amazon a frustrating experience -- well over half the products I've checked (in a couple specific product categories) have had F or D ratings according to both sites. I've wondered if some of these are false positives (i.e. ReviewMeta flags a product's reviews as fake but they're actually legitimate), but when you look at their reasoning in the breakdown they give, it's usually pretty convincing that many/most of the reviews are indeed fake. I feel like this might be a case where ignorance is (mostly) bliss ... when I naively thought the vast majority of reviews on Amazon were genuine, shopping was much faster and simpler, and I mostly had good experiences buying well-reviewed products despite that many of those reviews were probably fake.
- Jach 8y ago
  Consider that if you go buy an equivalent item at a box store, there aren't any reviews, the company (sometimes companies) with products on offer just happens to have enough money to get the stores to stock them over any potential competition. Similarly with fake and paid reviews, those companies happen to have money to do it (and do it better than competition, they can't all be using the same github script). A company with money to do things like that surely has some amount of money in the product itself, so what you get will probably work out as well as what you'd get from the store... The bigger problem for Amazon I think is fake products and inventory co-mingling, rather than fake reviews per se. But while others are complaining about the 5-star system not being very good (there's a fancy Bayesian system I've seen before that's better..), at least Amazon shows you the distribution, reviewers can upload photos, and it lets you filter by star count to get a sense of the things said for various ratings. I'll have to start trying out the fake review spotting tools. But I don't think my current behavior will change that much...

snegu 8y ago

Last night I finally abandoned a book that was absolute trash, but had 83% 5-star reviews on Amazon. Looking at the reviews now, I see that most of them are written by people who only write 5-star reviews (it has an F-rating on Fakespot). Feeling like kind of a dummy right now.

whitepoplar 8y ago
Name and shame!
- 13of40 8y ago
  The Art of the Deal has an F, with 57% low quality reviews. "Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is high deception involved."
  - nasredin 8y ago
    Shouldn't it be around 49%? Or is it just bumped up due to an old electoral algorithm Amazon uses? Hmmm...
  - 13of40 8y ago
    Hmmm...can't edit, but: I just looked at this again, and it's interesting to note that the Kindle version has an A rating and the print version has an F rating, even though they appear to share the same set of reviews. Scroll down to see the first two entries in the product list here: https://www.fakespot.com/company/donald-j-trump https://www.fakespot.com/company/donald-j-trump
  - tibarion 8y ago
    If you are solely posting just to make a political jab then there are more appropriate places to make such comments that are not Hacker News
- qzw 8y ago
  Not the OP, but this reminds me of a similar experience I had with a book called Space Opera a few months ago. Don't remember where I first heard of it, but it was being touted as comparable to the Hitchhiker's Guide. All the reviews on Amazon were 5 stars, and since the kindle version was only $5, I bought it without checking further. It turned out to be a pretty disappointing read, and nowhere near the caliber of anything in the Hitchhiker's series. I remember while reading it wondering how could all the reviews have been so good. I just checked fakespot, and it had an F rating with 92% low quality reviews as of April 25 [0]. I then had fakespot update the analysis, and it's now a D, with 41% low quality reviews [1]. So it seems like the fake reviews were bought to get things jump started, and now real reviews are catching up. Now that I think about it, it's probably a fairly common way for authors and/or their publishers/publicists to get the early sales and hype going. [0] https://imgur.com/a/PWFTTbV https://imgur.com/a/PWFTTbV [1] https://www.fakespot.com/product/space-opera-7ea7cc4e-4bae-4574-a18b-fe84448d3abf https://www.fakespot.com/product/space-opera-7ea7cc4e-4bae-4...

jwilk 8y ago

Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775

barbegal 8y ago

Star ratings in general are just poor. In a 1 to 5 star rating, 3 is average but most people would perceive 3 stars to be above average. People tend to leave reviews only when they are displeased with the product, really pleased with the product or get something in return for making the review, in this case free products. I tend to just filter on reviews that are 2 or 3 stars and use those to work out the cons of the product. These reviews are the most likely to be honest and can often give you the information that other reviewers forget to mention. Unfortunately, 2 and 3 star reviews are the least likely to be posted so you can only find them on products that have been reviewed hundreds of times.

fireattack 8y ago
Really? I think most people perceive anything less than 4 stars (or even 4.5 stars for some) as "bad". I for one won't buy anything that are "merely" 3-stars.
- malnourish 8y ago
  I think the issue, for me, is not that 3 stars is bad. I probably use a number of products each day that are legitimately 3-star worthy. It's that 3 stars on Amazon et al are an amalgam of 1 and 5 star reviews. There is then a risk, is this product bad but propped up by low reviews? Can I expect poor quality control? Etc
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  True, I gave a tech book 3 stars once and the author contacted me to request that I reconsider, explaining that anything less than 5 stars could doom a brand new tech book on Amazon. He offered personal support and training in return for raising the score. It didn't work, but it also convinced me that he has a good point regarding the score: Reviews are difficult ground due to their subjective nature, and a lot of reviewers are simply qualitatively bad at writing reviews. If an author just sits back and does nothing, they are risking their brand on the individuals who take the time to write reviews, and that set of individuals could be--even randomly--pretty bad. For example: I've seen many, many 1-star "product was damaged in shipping" and similar e.g. "received wrong product" one-reviews for products that were absolutely stellar. Getting into even more tricky ground, I've seen 1-star "product is unscientific" reviews left on books containing information that is mainly intractable to science, like studies in history.

BadassFractal 8y ago

How does one protect oneself from these? Are there secure / private browser extensions that might cross-reference those reviews to other sites? Is everything fake news now?

minimaxir 8y ago

Similar discussion about the fake Amazon review economy a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022215

ilamont 8y ago

According to outside auditors like Fakespot and ReviewMeta, more than half the reviews for certain popular products are questionable. Amazon disputes those estimates. "Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon. She adds that "sometimes individual products have more suspicious activity." The disparity in what outside services observe and users experience vs. what Amazon claims, and the increasing press coverage and online discussion of the problem, will force Amazon to take increasingly drastic measures to crack down on bogus reviews. There is also the issue of increasing levels of returns for 5-star crap. But, while Amazon can absorb the costs of returns, Bezos truly hates negative press, and the Amazon PR machine will go to great lengths to get high-profile news orgs repeating the official Amazon line. If they can't tamp down negative coverage, the best hope for generating positive press is to announce action - a crackdown, lawsuits against fake reviewers, or other evidence that they are "doing something" about the issue. Unfortunately for Amazon, they've done this in the past (1, 2) and the problem appears to have gotten worse. 1. October 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/18/amazon-sues-1000-fake-reviewers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/18/amazon-su... 2. April 2016: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-sues-alleged-providers-of-fake-reviews/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-sues-all...

Terretta 8y ago
> Bezos truly hates negative press I'm not sure that's true. I think they pride themselves on not worrying about being understood, in other words, not pandering to the press or Wall Street.

jameslk 8y ago

There will always be a desire to pay for reviews, since 70%-80% of shoppers check reviews before buying[0][1] (and growing[2]). Amazon could help fix this problem by creating "sponsored" reviews. This way a company can pay for reviews in a non-scummy way, a reviewer (and Amazon) gets paid, and a customer can tell whether the review was paid for or not. Or just pass laws to regulate reviews. 0. http://www.peopleclaim.com/blog/index.php/the-review-of-ratings/ http://www.peopleclaim.com/blog/index.php/the-review-of-rati... 1. https://www.chainstoreage.com/news/study-81-research-online-making-big-purchases/ https://www.chainstoreage.com/news/study-81-research-online-... 2. https://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/2016/11/01/media-device-habits-of-the-modern-consumer/ https://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/2016/11/01/media-device-habits-...

treebeard901 8y ago
> and a customer can tell whether the review was paid for or not. Isn't this what the companies are paying for?
- jameslk 8y ago
  Given the opportunity to pay for sponsored reviews or risk getting perma banned from Amazon, I'm guessing a lot of companies would choose the former. Regardless, it's not an idea I have seen tested yet anywhere, so it's hard to know.
cmplxconjugate 8y ago
The fundamental problem though is that companies want to discretely inject these overly positive reviews. If users can identify these “paid-for” reviews, they will most likely treat them with distrust. I really can’t see a way around this.
Nasrudith 8y ago
I doubt that sponsored reviews would solve it - if they wanted to be shady they would astroturf it anyway. Marketing departments with multimillion dollar budgets still engage in that. As for regulating reviews what could possibly work for that? Real ID would be unduly oppressive in chilling effects in addition to opening up barratry and harassment of reviewers. Even if fake reviews fall under false advertising laws good luck enforcing it.

msikora 8y ago

ReviewMeta has a great Chrome plugin that shows the "real" score (after removing all even slightly suspicious reviews) right in the toolbar https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-review-anal/fjifglfkcaipnmhngbigdebkoikioend?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-revi...

y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
The funny thing is I think Chrome plugins suffer from a similar problem and quite dangerous too because they can steal your information. I reported a fake clone of Privacy Badger a while back - positive reviews with the only difference being the fake one had a very low number of reviews/downloads. I'm very conservative with the extensions I use now
- r00fus 8y ago
  I only use chrome extensions in a containerized fashion (i.e. on an instance where chrome is used for nothing else)

netinstructions 8y ago

And I've had issues trying to leave less than perfect reviews - seems like only after I spend time typing up the review (and sometimes uploading photos) does Amazon come back and say, sorry can't publish this. Seems like a dark pattern to encourage only positive reviews. http://www.netinstructions.com/amazon-dark-patterns/ http://www.netinstructions.com/amazon-dark-patterns/

y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
YES! I have this happen to and notice the same patterns. I honestly think there is grounds for a lawsuit here. Whether or not that would be a successful lawsuit is another question, but the threat of one could get Amazon to change its tune.

EnderWT 8y ago

This topic keeps coming up in the news, and I've altered my shopping habits because of it. The competition has gotten tougher with Google Express, Walmart delivery and pickup, Target pickup, etc. When I order from one of them or make a trip to the store, I can at least verify the item I'm purchasing is from the manufacturer. When looking at the reviews on Amazon, countless times I've seen reviewers mention to not buy the item from a particular seller because it was not genuine or was defective. If I'm not sure about the brand, I'll search it to see if its legitimate and if there are reviews/complaints on other sites. I'll also use buying guides when determining what to buy instead of Amazon reviews.

entee 8y ago
This is a huge issue, several times I've received fraudulent goods when shopping at Amazon. It has made me completely avoid shopping for certain items there and makes me wary of trusting anything on the site where quality/reliability is an issue.
NTARelix 8y ago
Makes me wonder how many of those guides have been paid for, or at least what level of influence advertisers have on them. Nevertheless, I agree that a quality guide is well appreciated, however hard to come by.
- EnderWT 8y ago
  Many "guides" just end up being affiliate marketing link aggregators. I appreciate The Wirecutter's About[1] page where they tell how they review products. [1]https://thewirecutter.com/about/ https://thewirecutter.com/about/
AlexB138 8y ago
Avoiding particular sellers is no guarantee, since Amazon comingles inventory in the warehouse. You can order from seller A, who is completely legitimate, and receive fraudulent goods seller B supplied.

awinder 8y ago

"We have built a lot of technology to assess whether or not we think a review is authentic” Really now? Has amazon considered firing those teams? Because that tech is beyond broken.

ashelmire 8y ago

"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic" Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.

Spooky23 8y ago
The fakes are a relatively new phenomena. A book like say 1984 has thousands of reviews over twenty years that are legit. They don’t break down fakes by year or tell you that 1% of new reviews are fake. Also you have grey fakes with solicited reviews. I have a few vendors who offer significant discounts in exchange for reviews.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  Fakes are at least three years old. At least, that's when the great I Was Given This Product For Free Or At A Discount plague started. Plus these Chinese companies just rebrand and post new product listings free of the bad reviews, leaving the old ones to die.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Agreed -- but keep in mind that Amazon is old -- over 20 years old. There are billions of reviews.
dsr_ 8y ago
There are three possible scenarios. 1. Amazon uses good ML techniques, and they don't work. 2. Amazon is doing something else to detect fraud, and it doesn't work. 3. Amazon is lying about the issue.
- dalore 8y ago
  All 3 could be possible.

caseydm 8y ago

One of the many reasons I let my Amazon Prime subscription expire last month. Amazon is selling convenience. But it's not convenient to: 1. Filter out products full of Vine program reviews, which I believe are completely skewed due to the reviewers receiving the products for free 2. Read between the lines to filter out paid/bias reviews that are NOT part of the Vine program 3. Research to ensure the product itself is not fake or counterfeit Feel like I'm shopping at the shadiest flea market in town.

ngoel36 8y ago

http://www.thewirecuttter.com http://www.thewirecuttter.com

neilprosser 8y ago
Be careful clicking the above link. Note the three 't' characters.

tananaev 8y ago

I usually just ignore 5-star and 1-star reviews. Many of five stars are either fake or people who just bought the product and are too excited to leave an unbiased review. Many of one stars are from people who are not satisfied with the purchase process (slow delivery / fake reviews / broken item), so they leave bad review that doesn't really reflect product quality itself.

lucb1e 8y ago
I rarely leave reviews, but there has been a case where I had to threaten to sue a company before they'd hold up their end of an agreement. And 'threatening' is not just mentioning "I'll sue you!" but actually researching applicable law, what prerequisites I needed to be able to sue (e.g. I needed to hire a debt collector first, which would have cost me money as well), applicable court, what the bailiff would cost, court fees, etc. Some fourty phone calls and a few emails and letters later, spread out over half a year, I finally got the money back on the day before I would have had grounds to sue them. That was more than half a year of stress and them having both the product and my money. To be honest it was kind of disappointing that they paid up in the end, as I was finally well-prepared and wanted them to have to pay the fees that debt collection etc. would have incurred. You bet that after it was all over and done, I wrote that one-star review. While writing it, I noticed that other people had the same issue. One person also had to cite court fees before they paid up, and some others didn't know enough about applicable law or had amounts that were just too low to go to court over (like $50-$250). I usually don't put much stock in such reviews, but it turns out I should have read and considered them. There are definitely legitimate cases for one-star reviews.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

markdown 8y ago

News from Australia today: Australia's largest apartment developer Meriton fined $3 million for misleading consumers on TripAdvisor by preventing guests Meriton suspected would give negative reviews from receiving TripAdvisor’s ‘Review Express’ prompt email. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912

chrissnell 8y ago

I've been burned multiple times by this; the worst was a pair of remote control off-road trucks for my sons' Christmas presents. They had hundreds of 5-star reviews and both units worked for maybe 5 minutes each. Within days of Christmas, the listing was flooded with 1-star reviews from other conned parents with very similar stories. The number of products impacted must be far over the 1% claimed. There are whole categories that have been ruined by Fake China and kids' toys is probably the worst. Headphones, as mentioned by another commenter here, are another. This problem is quickly destroying Amazon's credibility with a lot of customers. I went to a Best Buy for the first time in a decade to buy a pair of iPhone headphones, just so I'd be assured a genuine product. I now buy my kids' toys at Target, just so I can be assured that there's a reasonable chance that they aren't crap.

Waterluvian 8y ago
I can handle getting some crappy set of headphones but a big let down for a child's Christmas is just so upsetting to a point that maybe I've got unaddressed issues. I have a toddler and I think I'll gladly pay the premium to buy Toys R Us stuff I can touch and play with in the store.
- monocularvision 8y ago
  > Toys R Us Um, I have some bad news for you.
  - sebastianavina 8y ago
    wut?
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    They seem to be strong here in Canada. I hope that lasts. Walmart is the only other option and it's not really an enjoyable experience.
    - kurthr 8y ago

Eleopteryx 8y ago

I've found that it's more useful to sort by negative reviews. It's reasonable to assume that the product is what it appears to be at face value, but customers tend to speak up if they feel like they got cheated. On the other hand, I believe I read that some fake reviews are actually negative, as a means to funnel users to competing products. So who knows? Can't trust anything I read on the internet concerning a product or service.

lucb1e 8y ago
> some fake reviews are actually negative, as a means to funnel users to competing products Oh, right. I often look for a few positive ones (to find what people thought was positive enough about this product to mention it) as well as the negative ones (to see if they complain about defect units and other one-off issues, or if there are actually real issues with a product), sorted by newest in the hopes that I don't happen to be looking right after a batch of paid reviews were added. But you're right, there is a reason why negative ones would be fake as well. Seems to be less common, though, but still.

andreygrehov 8y ago

Google SEO, Amazon Reviews, AppStore Reviews, Facebook News. Fakes are everywhere. Fake it till you make it [0]. If you really think about it, everything around us has a grain of fake. Ads, startup pitch desks, TV, people relationships, politics. Everything! I almost feel like we're fighting the wrong problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_it_till_you_make_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_it_till_you_make_it

Zelphyr 8y ago

There was a great Reply All podcast on this topic. Between it and this NPR article, and recent personal experience, I'm seriously questioning whether I want to continue my Prime account.

plainOldText 8y ago

I use fakespot for analyzing Amazon reviews. It’s better than nothing.

fapjacks 8y ago

Jeez, I don't think it's possible for this writer (Ryan Kailath) to be any more milquetoast if he tried. Amazon's reviews are completely bullshit. I never buy anything from Amazon (or Yelp, or...) without running the product page through Fakespot.com to check for fake reviews.

Regardsyjc 8y ago

On a positive note, Amazon has been wiping out thousands of reviews this month. Whether blatant manipulations or legitimate reviews, dozens of sellers have lost their reviews. Amazon has been cracking down hard this month, and erring on the better safe than sorry side as usual with their wide nets. The only problem is that Amazon can't keep up with China.

uptown 8y ago

Try to get a valid review on a forehead thermometer on Amazon. It can’t be done.

paul7986 8y ago

Simple hack to this problem is forget about buying stuff online.. go to the store and get it right away. The Internet can not believed for much and is easily manipulated for the better of those smart or immoral enough (however you view it) to use it to line their pockets.

greggman 8y ago

I hate it too but rather than just complain is it a solvable problem? Reply All had an resent episode about it https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player first they had fake reviews. Amazobn required actual purchases so companies would pay people to purchase and return. you can't ban returns otherwise there would be no negative reviews. how can this be solved? some kind of reputation system? how would you lose rep? I love to hear your ideas?

ralfd 8y ago
Tag the review with the info if the item was returned.

makecheck 8y ago

“Reviews”, in general, are absurdly misleading on any site; Amazon is just prominent. I’ve given real reviews on Yelp of businesses that had real problems. These negative ratings were shuffled off into their special bucket of maybe-less-reliable reviews, well under pages of HIGHLY questionable 5-star reviews. I also have a friend with a business who was plainly told that he needs to pay to ensure good reviews. Yelp is a scam, and wins by being a virtual monopoly (as Amazon reviews do). It is also amazingly hard to get reviews on the App Store from real users, for instance. I imagine you pretty much have to ask 60 friends to “help” you, or pay somebody, either of which creates a pool of fake reviews. It really changes your perspective on any other “ratings” you see. In the end, I think society will learn that this is another example of buyer beware, and you get out of it what you put into it. Since looking over “reviews” for 30 seconds is low-effort, it is low-value. If you want good results, you need to spend a good amount of time and effort researching products.

redgetan 8y ago

I've actually very interested in finding a solution to this problem as well. I think the issue is that regular users who are more likely to give honest reviews currently don't have an incentive to write one as there's nothing to gain, but potentially something to lose. If everyone is rewarded instead of just the ones who give positive reviews (i.e ones who receive free stuff, getting paid for etc,), then the ratio of fake/legit reviews might balance out. And we just need a better UI to show the most relevant + recent reviews for each star rating. For example, in https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DNTWTKH#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DNTWTKH#customerReviews someone mentioned "All the reviews are non verified!! 5 starts with 100+ reviews...... something is fishy!!". It also shows that 54 people found it helpful. So think that's a neat feature. I think blockchain might be a good use case for this. Cencorship resistant, decentralized review, not controlled by a single company, and anyone can contribute, and see the reviews (i.e via browser extension). And everyone is rewarded by currency when they provide a review. Just not sure how to prevent spam, and deal with people gaming the system. Perhaps a staking system could be introduced wherein a user would lose their stake if the review proved to be inauthentic (proving it comes with its own problems). Anyway, these are just some of things I've been pondering about before.

tim333 8y ago
Not sure about blockchain but contacting the odd person who has the buying pattern of a regular customer and asking them what they think might work.

1024core 8y ago

Anecdata, sample size 1. I bought some toy for a toddler. Upon receiving it, I realized that the description was misleading; many of the "pieces" they had listed boldly were just cheap plastic pieces of crap that had no useful functionality. So I returned it, and wrote a 1-star review. A few weeks later, I got an email from them: they were offering $30 if I took down the review. I ignored the email. Several weeks later, another email: this time offering $40. And so on. Their latest email is offering me $70 to take down the review. I still haven't. I'd forward the email to Amazon if (a) I knew they'd do something, and, more importantly, (b) I knew WHERE to send it! Basically, Amazon has no interest in making sure that the reviews are not being gamed. Since the email goes through Amazon servers, they should be able to at least make an attempt at catching such people!

lucb1e 8y ago
Holy crap, $70 to remove a review. I'm pretty sure one could find a law under which it's illegal to offer relatively large incentives to silence negative publications. By the way, care to link the product so I can write a couple 1-star reviews as well? /s
timcederman 8y ago
Have you ever tried reviewing a seller instead of the product? Amazon reviews almost every single negative review.
Fnoord 8y ago
> Basically, Amazon has no interest in making sure that the reviews are not being gamed. Since the email goes through Amazon servers, they should be able to at least make an attempt at catching such people! Short-term, no. Long-term, it harms their credibility until they're past being the status quo because people go to alternatives which aren't as popular or infested with this crap. In short, this is good for competition. But the real problem, as I already wrote in another post, is the fact that Amazon isn't held accountable for this. And if that's currently not possible, it should become by law. After all, they're hosting deceiving misinformation and facilitating a platform for sales. Its easy to get away being the middle man but that doesn't mean its fair.
8y ago

sasaf5 8y ago

I find that even books are plagued with this issue. Some obscure technical books selling for more than 80$ will come in a very poor quality print, like they had been printed from a scan. Clearly the book has ran out of original prints, and somewhere they print it cheaply just to make the sell.

fapjacks 8y ago
Actually these books are likely counterfeit, being produced overseas and sold on Amazon as the real deal. It's easy because neither the publisher nor Amazon (nor the customer for that matter) can know that someone listing a product is shipping a fraud.
- sasaf5 8y ago
  What would be the right way to check that? Perhaps sending a mail to the publisher?
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    That sounds reasonable, sure. You might also try contacting the author directly. Authors tend to know way more about their books than the person answering your email at the publisher, and certainly would have a good idea what their print editions are supposed to look like. I've actually found emailing book authors about their books in niche fields to be usually really easy and interesting in its own right.

CodeCube 8y ago

I'm honestly starting to believe that the "wisdom of the crowds" that so many startups and businesses rely on to reach "internet scale", is exactly the wrong approach. Between recommendation algorithms that can be gamed, content that can be paid for, and social media sentiment that can prove to be entirely manufactured, we need to come up with a new paradigm for our products (where "our" is the tech industry at large). The days of allowing what are essentially anonymous sources to dictate what we do, where we go, what we buy, and how we think are coming to an end.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Interesting to ponder that half of the population is of below average intelligence, and that the other half is generally too busy to be writing reviews.

nfoz 8y ago

I'm not really sure why there are any real reviews on sites like Amazon, Yelp etc. Why do people leave reviews; what's in it for them? Is it some strange form of altruism where they're helping their fellow anonymous shopper while also helping out one of the world's most successful megacorporations? Writing this comment has made me re-think why I'm writing this comment.

rlv-dan 8y ago
I'm not sure people know what reviews are anymore. I often see people giving 5 stars to a product they have not received yet, or a game they barely played.
reitanqild 8y ago
> Why do people leave reviews; what's in it for them? Me? Because I enjoy helping others - and it is my best way of punishing bad actors and supporting good ones, hopefully helping to balance the market in the long run. Actually a bit of the same reason as why I'm writing here: help people by providing facts, add some balance and maybe sometimes a new perspective.
amorphous 8y ago
I write reviews usually only in extreme cases if something is either exceptionally good or bad. In the positive case, I want to help the creator/owner having the deserved success, in the negative prevent fellow customers getting ripped off. The problem is, my review might appear fake.
antpls 8y ago
You have to look at the alternatives : - you can post a review - you can talk about your disfunctional item to the next person in the room - you can stay silent Staying silent is often a mental burden, because you invested time and energy to buy something that doesn't work, and you feel betrayed. You can keep silent only a finite quantity of such "betrayals", before it adds up and starts affecting your mood and social interactions. Talking about it to the next person in the room is a quick way of getting rid of that mental burden, at the cost of your social interaction with that person. Most people don't want to listen to other's problems/failures, especially if it regards an item they will never use. Or you can leave a review. That way, you can get rid of the mental burden, and the review targets the most pertinent people : the seller and the future buyers (which include yourself maybe). At best, the business will iterate on a new product, taking into account some of the reviews. Edit : just writing that comment to convince myself here ;-)

chx 8y ago

The trick on Amazon is to read the two star reviews. The one star can be PEBKAC, competitor stuffing and a lot of nonsense. The real deal very often is in the two star reviews.

Biba89 8y ago

As a marketer I'm already familiar with fake/paid reviews. It's the way to manipulate and it will be used whenever there is an opportunity for that. On the other hand review.network works on solution for fake reviews

amorphous 8y ago

Providing authenticity, in whatever form, is a huge business opportunity, and it's only going to grow.

bastijn 8y ago
That is what VeChain is aiming at [0]. One of the better blockchain incentives around if you ask me. [0] https://www.vechain.org/ https://www.vechain.org/

Giho 8y ago

Why don't they make a review system where the products with fewest bad reviews gets rated the best. If the reviews have to go through Amazon's system it should be hard enough to fake. The "true" customers will make bad reviews if they didn't like the product. The "fake" reviewer can't rate their own products to make them get a better review, an they have to buy the competitors product x times to give x bad reviews.

Giho 8y ago
And to further secure it, the amount of buys can be compared to amount of negative reviews. Because who will in their right mind buy a product with a lot of negative reviews, to later give a negative review?

jfrumar 8y ago

Fakespot.com is your friend. I'm fast finding their service indispensable. Also their iOS app is super convenient - you just share a link in the Amazon app with it, and you unmask all the fake reviews.

singularity2001 8y ago

Amazon really lost me when they shadow banned me for writing a (very) negative review. They sell me crap and I can't even complain about it?

trophycase 8y ago

Always always always, read the negative reviews, NOT the positive reviews. If the worst you find is "shipped broken" or something, it's probably ok. If you're reading negative product reviews instead, stay away.

chha 8y ago

I generally avoid looking at good reviews when shopping due to this. Instead I assume that whatever doohickey I want to buy works as advertised, and look for reasons not to buy. Bad reviews are much more helpful in this regard, as they pinpoint weaknesses or other issues.

fireflash38 8y ago
It's also much easier to filter the bad reviews. There's fewer reviews to sort through, and you can dismiss the PEBKAC or DOA (except as a data point to see if there's a whole bunch of DOAs).

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I think this issue is most interesting to look at from the other side. Imagine your goal was to create fake reviews for a product you created. How difficult do you think it would be to achieve given you expect a substantial economic reward for success? This is why I find it difficult to blame Amazon for things like this - though that is not to say they shouldn't try, but I don't think anybody is saying they're not. It's just that this is something you might call a game of cat and mouse, but I think it may be borderline impossible to detect fake reviews if done well. Imagine I somehow get 500 confederates from geographically diverse regions, and pay them each a substantial amount of money to purchase a product and give a positive review. How do you prove those reviews are fake?

Lio 8y ago

Just bought a rotating bike wheel light from Amazon Marketplace. It's a novelty item that draws images as a bike wheel rotates using persistence of vision. I don't think anyone has every heard of the "brand" but it was sent from "the UK" allegedly. It came with a US plug (I'm in the UK) and software on an 80mm mini-cd. That software is riddled with malware. It also has one of those comedy auto-translated user manuals. Some of these trade offs I can forgive for the price. I can't forgive the malware at any price.

jvz 8y ago

Reviews on sites like Amazon or Yelp are a monoculture: everyone sees the same set of reviews and the same ratings. This creates leverage that makes it worthwhile for shills to spend large amounts of effort "infecting" those sites with bad information, since once they find effective ways of doing so it affects everyone. So the solution must be a review system that works like Twitter, where each user has a unique "view" composed of sources they've selected, directly or indirectly. This diversity would make infection much more difficult and less rewarding for shills and other attackers. I'm still trying to figure out the best design for such a system. The requirements and usage patterns would be quite different from Twitter's, and I'm not aware of any existing attempts that I can learn from.

Toenex 8y ago
Yes, tie the review more personally to the reviewer. I guess this is more like the influencer culture we see a on Instagram and YouTube.
not_a_terrorist 8y ago
> I'm still trying to figure out the best design for such a system. Easy answer: distributed consensus, à la Bitcoin.

saturdaysaint 8y ago

This is why I am starting to do almost all of my shopping by googling "Wirecutter [product category]". Or CNET for electronics. Amazon's reviews have become so useless and corrupted that I question why anyone would even bother with a genuine review. Luckily, Wirecutter gives fantastic, detailed guidance in just about any category you can think of. I'm finding them so valuable that I believe this would be a great space for more sites to compete in.

davidmurdoch 8y ago

My own anecdote hints that it's even worse than just fake reviews... I actually just wrote a detailed multi paragraph 1-star review of auto parts I received from Amazon, with several photos, too. They, Amazon, would not post it because they claim it doesn't "adhere to the guidelines". The review was exactly as follows: These are "SURTRACK/TRAKMOTIVE" brand axles, part numbers BM-8040 and BM-8041. I only installed the left side but since it didn't fit properly on my 2006 BMW 530xi I'm returning them. The OE part number is: 31607570275 and MFG part number is: BM-8041. The problem was that the inner boot fits improperly and deforms/creases from being stretched when installed (see images). Looking at the product images for this product on Amazon, as well as elsewhere online, you can tell the boot is very different from the product I received. /end Can anyone find anything that goes against their review guidelines in above?

Bedon292 8y ago

I have found https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ to be an interesting place to look at the reviews and get a bit more insight into them.

johnmarcus 8y ago

Shocking! Next they are going to tell me the sky is blue!

aj7 8y ago

Always look for that extra gratituitous detail, a common trait in fabricated stories.

rednerrus 8y ago

Amazon should buy Fakespot and integrate into their reviews.

dspillett 8y ago

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=629800775 - plain text article (sans tracking etc.)

netrap 8y ago

What if you just removed the stars and only had text? Makes buying based on "reviews" harder... Could also do something like upvotes but then that just ends up with the same problems as stars.