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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 rea

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...
- throwaway287391 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. Well, I know that there aren't any reviews in a B&M store, but (1) I've been checking online reviews (usually Amazon) for non-trivial purchases at B&M stores for a while now (either before I go or at the store on my phone), and (2) B&M stores do usually have at least one human employee in the loop signing off on a product going onto the shelves, and at the very least the "big name" ones (almost) never sell blatantly bogus/fraudulent products (fake Apple-branded MacBook chargers, etc.). Amazon has pretty much been the Wild West ever since they started allowing third party sellers, which I used to be fine with, back when I was under the impression that the reviews were generally pretty reliable, and sure that something that said "Shipped from and sold by Amazon" (or whatever) was a safe bet.

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...

throwaway287391 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. Well, I know that there aren't any reviews in a B&M store, but (1) I've been checking online reviews (usually Amazon) for non-trivial purchases at B&M stores for a while now (either before I go or at the store on my phone), and (2) B&M stores do usually have at least one human employee in the loop signing off on a product going onto the shelves, and at the very least the "big name" ones (almost) never sell blatantly bogus/fraudulent products (fake Apple-branded MacBook chargers, etc.). Amazon has pretty much been the Wild West ever since they started allowing third party sellers, which I used to be fine with, back when I was under the impression that the reviews were generally pretty reliable, and sure that something that said "Shipped from and sold by Amazon" (or whatever) was a safe bet.