20 ms·

Amazon Dark Patterns

k__ 8y ago
I also had to implement this pattern for app reviews. Show a custom review dialog, if the user gives 4-5 stars send them to the app store for the real review, if not just say "thank you" and close the dialog. Repeat until one day they'll give you a good review.
- NikolaNovak 8y ago
  Unless I'm missing something,that kind of masking behaviour is what typically causes me to exit an app and manually give it a low review. Are you saying you are actively gating the reviews? :-/
  - lostsock 8y ago
    Pretty much exactly what Meriton was just fined AU$3m for today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912
    - k__ 8y ago
      As far as I know, the rule is, you can only show the native app-store review dialog once, if the user cancels, you won't get any review ever. So the idea is, to show your own until the user finally decides to review. But now the growth hackers of the world had the brilliant idea to treat bad reviews like "the user isn't ready for a review"
      - dingo_bat 8y ago
        It's good that android doesn't allow this. And it doesn't give a way for the app to find out if I actually rated also. So I just click yes i want to rate. Then come back and continue as usual.
        k__ 8y ago
        Same with iOS, but I guess chances are good that people don't behave like you. (Even if I also think they should, haha)
      - l9k 8y ago
        Same with browser permissions. Websites would ask you if you're okay with the authorization and only if you answer Yes, they would trigger the browser auth prompt.
  - k__ 8y ago
    Pretty much. Some app-store marketing guru told the startup I'm contracting with, that this is the way to go, because you're pretty much f*cked if you get reviews below 4.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      This is an important point. Basically, once some start gaming the system - the others have to follow or they are dead. It's similar to how irregular migration or general screwing over of workers works: if some farmers are paying 'under wages' or some factories are 'undercutting' ... then the others stand to lose business and are sucked into the same practices. It's one thing when a massively successful entity like Amazon does shady stuff, but for most businesses ... it seems to often be kind of a quandary.
      - Kagerjay 8y ago
        everything naturally will gravitate toward people gaming the system. Its not just limited to shopping and reviews. Politics and social media behavior is not too different. If the option exist its going to be exploited, you either follow through or get left in the dust Its sad that this is the way things are done but what can you do about it really? You can't fight every battle you need to pick what matters
- Sharlin 8y ago
  I hope you at least anonymously reported that behavior to appropriate authorities. And started searching for a new job.
  - k__ 8y ago
    Sadly this isn't against the rules. Probably because the users still can go to the app-store and give you a bad review, haha
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    You don't always have the choice of just up and go. I developed a system for an american startup that gathered everything it could get its hands on through their Gmail accounts. Did I think that's unethical? Yes, but just quitting wasn't an option and it was perfectly legal. I switched to a new company when I could afford it and am now much happier. But suggesting to just quit the moment your company behaves unethical is a little optimistic.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      It's not perfectly legal if you ever do it to an EU user, now. This is why GDPR has some upsides -- it changes what was formerly just unethical into being illegal, which means that we as software engineers can push back against it more strongly.
      - akuji1993 8y ago
        We actually developed a GDPR module for about three weeks to catch that case. So we are legal again, since we provide all the tools you need to delete your data.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    What "appropriate authorities"? Shouting into the void at some google user forum?
    - mthoms 8y ago
- zelos 8y ago
  I believe recent iOS SDKs have implemented a system-controlled UI to ask for reviews to prevent apps doing this. I assume it's enforced via app-store review.
  - k__ 8y ago
    Yes, and you only call the system-controlled function if you're sure you'd get a good review. They should prohibit that function call completely and ask users randomly for reviews, maybe when they pause or close the app...
- ballenf 8y ago
  I'm more sympathetic to this behavior and developers in general than I used to be. Just seen too many quality apps get relegated to obscurity because of a few 1-star early reviews from people expecting perfection from a free or cheap app. Or needing functionality that just isn't part of the app. I don't have any apps in the store, so this really isn't personal for me. What I don't understand is why more devs don't use the API for the in-app overlay review versus a weblink that forwards to the app store. Clearly they're tracking the behavior, but not sure what is tracked via that means that can't be done in-app.
- exgamedev 8y ago
  I used to work for f2p game companies and they also used this as a standard trick. On top of suppressing negative reviews they would only ask you to rate the game immediately after something good happened in the game. You leveled up, or got a good prize, or whatever. They would craft these entire on-rails onboarding experiences where you seem to win a jackpot early on, then ask you for a review. They'd build out these flows and user test them and iterate until it psychologically produced the intended ratings
  - OkGoDoIt 8y ago
    I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but Tinder used to ask for a review right after a successful match
2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago
Having recently unsubscribed from Prime, I can say their dark patterns don't stop there. About 5 pages to complete the process, in which the CTA to confirm bumps around the page, gets less prominent, and is given such lousy loss-aversion labels as "Give up my prime benefits".
- iuguy 8y ago
  Strangely it wasn't so bad for me, I live in the UK. I wonder if EU rules are different? I have to say for all the people complaining but still staying with Amazon, there's a simple solution that will force their hand if enough people act: Stop buying from them. Personally I cancelled my Prime subscription because no service is worth enough to me to force other human beings to pee in bottles to avoid work breaks for fear of being sanctioned.
  - kennydude 8y ago
    Same. Amazon Logistics is a horrible thing and not worth the money.
  - y4mi 8y ago
    I'm from germany, cancelled two days ago and can confirm that the process was bafflingly bad. [cancel prime membership] ... "do you want to terminate your membership?" [ask me later][keep me signed up][terminate] ... "you'll lose [x], do you want to terminate?" [ask me later][terminate][keep me signed up] ... "but even shipping will cost!" [keep me signed up][ask me later][terminate] ... you're now unsubscribed [sign me back on][ok]
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  For me there was no procedure. It just ended and I got an email asking me to pay again.
- phyzome 8y ago
  They've really ramped up selling Prime in the checkout process. It's no longer easy to order from Amazon; it's this adversarial "spot the 5 traps" obstacle course where you have to avoid clicking the "sign me up for Prime" trick buttons.
arrrg 8y ago
An alternative explanation for this is that Amazon is struggling with identifying fake reviews, which could explain both why there seem to be many fake reviews and why one would get blocked from writing reviews (basically falling victim to a false positive of their fake review detection). Obviously there is also some bad UX thrown in for good measure (being able to write a review without being able to send it), but we aren’t necessarily looking at dark patterns here. This could just be Amazon struggling with and failing at a task (avoiding fake reviews). Not all bad UX is a dark pattern, sometimes it’s just bad UX … (a dark pattern is bad UX with a positive consequence for the person or company offering up the UI or maybe just and intended positive consequence, even if the UI doesn’t achieve that goal) I think it’s a stretch to argue that Amazon is really benefiting from any of this and long term this erosion of trust is not at all good for Amazon. I do honestly think that if Amazon could snap with their fingers and remove all fake reviews they would do it. (Which is not to say that Amazon does not employ dark patterns elsewhere.)
- Aeolun 8y ago
  If the person who wrote the post could immediately identify the clearly fake reviews I see no reason why Amazon could not use the same method.
  - ctvo 8y ago
    As in employ someone to go and trace users who post reviews to see if they’ve reviewed the same products? Maybe you meant make a system that can do it, and do it without false positives to not upset legitimate users when their own reviews are removed. I’m confused about the ease people expect this problem to be solved. It’s so easy to solve it exists on every popular platform: see the paid, fake reviews on the Apple App Store.
  - mike_hearn 8y ago
    I did a lot of work on anti-botting some years ago. It's not as easy as it looks. Often you spot a pattern that is obviously fake, like here, but discover it can't generalise without huge numbers of false positives. For example I would expect lots of legitimate users to review the same small set of TV shows or video games if they buy into a series or franchise.
jxdxbx 8y ago
“Arrived damaged” could be borderline as it sounds like a review of the shipping process and not the product. Not sure what’s going on with that first one though.
- tobias3 8y ago
  Maybe he left a review of the shipping process on another product, the seller reported it and now his reviews are being reviewed?
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Like it or not, people tend to review the whole purchase experience. And I can't really blame them.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    I can't blame them either, but it doesn't change the fact that his review has nothing to do with the item. He wrote a review of item X and it had nothing to do with that item. It's like writing a review of a hotel resort and giving it a 1* because the flight there was cancelled. It's just not helpful at all.
  - tobias3 8y ago
    They are kind of useless for other customers. The customer reading the review might get the product from another seller, shipped by another service (might depend on shipping address). If you think it is the sellers fault, review the seller. If you think it's the parcel delivery service's fault send it back with that as reason. That is signal enough.
    - Sharlin 8y ago
      Yes, agreed. But if Amazon only prompts you to give a single type of review (and makes reviewing the seller/delivery not nearly as discoverable), they shouldn't be surprised if people "misuse" the feature.
- numbsafari 8y ago
rkachowski 8y ago
An interesting dark pattern (albeit unrelated to the review flow) is during the standard checkout process. on the last screen before the purchase, the Amazon logo image / header no longer links back to the Amazon homepage like the rest of the site. I guess keeping the user captive leads to more sales
- sigotirandolas 8y ago
  I’ve also noticed that they don’t let me ship a lot of products (mostly food, but also random harmless electronics) to shipping points or Amazon boxes in my city (in Spain), telling me they are full (they are not, they let me ship other products there and it tells me it’s full with literally any shipping point or Amazon box). They only let me ship it to a home address. I can’t prove it’s not a bug, but it seems such a blaring issue that it’s impossible that they haven’t been noticed, specially since some people can’t ever ship to a home address.
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    What benefit would they get from this though?
    - RugnirViking 8y ago
      Potentially they are worried about food going bad while left in a drop-off box. I don't think that is very sinister, but they could have a better UI for it.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    Understandable why they won't ship food to Amazon boxes. No idea about electronics though, and they should have a better error message than just "it's full".
  - CannisterFlux 8y ago
    I don't like to defend Amazon because they are getting shadier all the time, but I always ship to a Correos office near my flat from amazon.es and haven't had this problem (yet?). Maybe it isn't the same thing as the box though. I've seen random 3rd party items that can't be left at Correos, but they do tell you at the start of the process.
ramblerman 8y ago
> Note that I only got this message AFTER trying to leave a 2 star review. What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed? This is highly speculative, and without evidence it's pretty shady to suggest it, imo.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
Author doesn't know what dark patterns means.
- amelius 8y ago
  Here's a good site explaining it. https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern Their homepage video starts with a bunch of examples from Amazon: https://darkpatterns.org https://darkpatterns.org
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    Google has one built into mobile Youtube with Chromecast. When you open a video and go to click the cast button, the "visit advertiser" button immediately shifts right into the place of the cast button, causing you to click into an advertiser website.
    - tk75x 8y ago
      That gets me at least once per viewing session.
TorKlingberg 8y ago
This rant is not well written. The first issue looks like a bug on Amazon's side. I'm not going to assume malice without something pointing in that direction. The author writes "What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed?" Well, would it? I see no indication it would. Those reviews are indeed suspicious, and Amazon should do a better job of detecting fake review accounts. The third issue is the author complaining about the shipping in a product review. An understandable mistake, but Amazon is right not to publish it. When trying to learn about a product it's annoying to scroll past shipping reviews like "Arrived quickly, five stars!" In total, I see no dark pattern at all.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  I can actually verify and tell you why. Amazon will not allow you to criticize Amazon or their platform in a review (they said as much). Only the product. They probably do automatic sentiment detection for negative phrases containing Amazon and don’t allow them to be posted. The platform and shipping are relevant in a product review.
  - carlmr 8y ago
    To a certain degree. There really should be two ratings. Shipment rating and product rating. I don't want to get a TV that gets shipped badly, sure. But if the only problem with shipping is that it is slow, maybe I'm still interested in the product because I don't get it anywhere else and I can wait. In that case I'm mostly interested in the product review.
    - ashelmire 8y ago
      Which is why you, as a human, can read the review and ignore the part where a reviewer says “the shipping was slow”. I recently ordered a poster through Amazon. They sent me the wrong item 3 times. I gave up. And I can’t post a negative review despite it clearly being Amazons fault (not the shipper). I tried. Couldn’t. At least they have excellent customer service, they didn’t jerk me around and each resolved the issue as best they could.
nebulous1 8y ago
Although they should have let him write the review, I don't think people should leave reviews for damaged/broken items before they've tried to remedy the situation with the supplier.
- tmalsburg2 8y ago
  Why? When I receive a damaged product, this causes me substantial hassle (communicate with customer support, send item back, order replacement, ...). It seems very natural to write a review that reflects the poor quality of the product in this situation, and this review would be a useful signal to others.
  - nebulous1 8y ago
    My take is that damaged and broken items happen, particularly when items are new. I'm not saying that this information is irrelevant, but as a review of the product it isn't valid (as it's a review of a damaged product) and as a review of the supplier it isn't that helpful either (as I'm more interested in how the supplier responds to this situation: any supplier can send you what they have in stock, the true test is what happens when things go wrong). So, as per my original comment, I think you should seek remedy before reviewing, not after.
    - Magnets 8y ago
      If a product is poorly packaged from the manufacturer or (more likely) poorly packaged by Amazon and that leads to a lot of people receiving a damaged product, then it is clearly beneficial to see that in the reviews before you purchase. Or maybe the product just has poor QC, again, it should be allowed to show up in reviews. If it's just a one-ff then it will be watered down by all of the other reviewers anyway
      - nebulous1 8y ago
        I haven't said otherwise. You haven't explained why you're writing a review before dealing with support rather than after. Also, perhaps a higher percentage of people with bad experiences will write bad reviews than people with good experiences writing good reviews, so the watered down argument isn't perfect. I would have left out the word 'perhaps' but I don't actually have any hard evidence.
aethertron 8y ago
There's an obvious conflict of interest within Amazon here. The tasks of selling products, and collecting and publishing useful criticisms and reviews of products should be performed by separate entities.
jackewiehose 8y ago
I once wrote a 1-star review on amazon for a top-selling product that had almost only positive reviews. The review was published but they quietly changed its contents. They replaced some words (I guess it was too strong language like "crap" or something) but even worse they removed at least one whole sentence and after that the review didn't make much sense anymore and it looked like I wrote it like that. Then I watched the statistics about how many people found this helpful. At that time this was in two numbers: people who think its helpful and people who don't. Over months that ratio kept the same. Started with 1 helpful, 3 not helpful. Then 10 helpful, 30 not helpful. Then 30 helpful, 90 not helpful. I found that highly suspicious. Since then, amazon reviews are dead to me.
- simias 8y ago
  Wait amazon edits your reviews? That's shaddy as hell, I can understand removing a review for "strong language" but changing its content without asking the author is borderline scammy. I couldn't find similar stories online (although admittedly that's pretty hard to search for). I'd think it would be a big deal if Amazon was caught doing that, wouldn't it be?
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I don’t think there’s anything borderline about it. Sounds like outright fraud to me.
    - taylorlunt 8y ago
      Yes, this should be criminal behavior and carry a prison sentence. I don't know if this is legally fraud, but it definitely should be.
  - jackewiehose 8y ago
    I don't know if they do that regulary but in my case they did. It was my first (and last) attempt to write a review. Maybe the amazon employee just had the best intentions and didn't want to disencourage me because it was my first review... they achieved the opposite.
SuperGent 8y ago
If I think that reviews could be suspect I use ReviewMeta[0]. The process usually indicates if the reviews are legit or not. although for this product, it claims that it passes. Might be that 99 reviews have been deleted though, and Amazon is attempting to fix those reviews. [0]https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/
stared 8y ago
I have a trick - looking at 4 star reviews. They are overally positive, but at the same time - talk about shortcomings (some of them may effect my decision, while others are not an issue). Typically, these are balanced. And totally unlikely to be faked. For the same reason I avoid 1 star reviews on some services (especially recommending books or movies). They are often related to a strong, emotional reponse, rather than a balanced option that can be reused. In general people use maximal, and minimal, score in a diffrent way that all other options. For a stricking example, see: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322441/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322441/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
- Aissen 8y ago
  A company I know was aware of this tactic, and bought their own items (through proxies) ~20 times, and two of those had to use 4-star reviews.
mrcactu5 8y ago
if you are Amazon you don't have time to read all the reviews carefully. How do you detect such artificial "gaming" behavior? It's natural behavior for the sellers to try to boost their reviews (at the consumers expense).
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  You hire developers to write code to look for patterns exactly like what was shown in the article for starters.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Bezos is the richest person on the planet. He can afford to hire people to look through the reviews.
googlemyfomato 8y ago
This kind of doesn't surprise me. I know I tend to buy what has the best price/star ratio. Whether or not Amazon is directly involved, I don't know. But given how quickly marketing got attached to social media, I imagine gaming reviews is just another part of an online presence package, along with controlling search results, and getting something popular into social outlets (a meme is highly desired). Irony being people are starting to adapt and most of these social media and reviews will just be bots commenting on each other.
ekianjo 8y ago
No need to look so far for dark patterns, the whole trick to get you to click to become a member for Amazon Prime, constantly, using all the dirty tricks in the book, should deserve a whole page in itself.
simias 8y ago
The dumbbells being damaged during delivery reminds me of an other annoyance with amazon reviews: they won't let you distinguish between actual issues with the products and issues with the delivery/Amazon after-sale services etc... I can't count the number of low-star reviews where it says something like "the guy tried to deliver at the wrong time" or "I bought the wrong product by mistake and Amazon wouldn't take it back" or whatever. That doesn't help me at all.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  You can't blame the users though. If I have a bad delivery experience, I'm going to leave a bad review. It's Amazon's problem that they don't let you differentiate between product issues and delivery issues.
  - simias 8y ago
    Oh yeah, I'm definitely blaming Amazon, they should let the user categorize their complaints.
  - acheron 8y ago
    And I'm going to mark it 'unhelpful', because I don't care about your bad delivery experience. The only people who need to hear about your bad delivery experience work for Amazon customer support.
- Lasher 8y ago
  I bought Quickbooks from Amazon a couple of years ago and what actually showed up was a very clearly burned DVD with "Quickbooks" hand-written on it. Best case was I'd received a pirated version of the software. Worst case is who knows what kind of malware might have been on that DVD. Had no choice but to leave a 1 star review to warn others but that really doesn't help anyone who wants to know if Quickbooks is good software to run a small business on or not. Between this and a few more incidents, I no longer buy anything on Amazon where getting a valid OEM brand version of an item is important to me. The good news is that for the few years I was pretty much Amazon exclusive the rest of the internet got really good at ecommerce too so it's a much better ordering from other companies online now.
ryanlol 8y ago
This guy is having some truly strange experiences with amazon. Why would he have to ship the damaged weights back? Amazon essentially never insists on that.
- thinkythought 8y ago
  This one seems to be random. I've had them insist i ship a fucking mattress back
techaddict009 8y ago
I Was recently purchasing Macbook Battery from Amazon.in it was Rs.3100 and when I checked out and reached payment it showed 4199! I said WTH did it happen? I cancelled payment and found that Prime Membership Renewal was added to the cart without my permission. When I didnt want to renew it why did Amazon add it on its own? One more similar experience with AWS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652134
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  This is better than what Google play music does. It just auto renews. Fuck 2 factor auth. At least Amazon gives you that chance.
  - JFFalcon 8y ago
    Why wouldn't you expect a subscription to auto-renew?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dingo_bat 8y ago
      I just don't like the loss of control. At least in this case, my approach seems to be beneficial. I didn't have to deal with the hassle mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651882
  - culot 8y ago
    I love how Microsoft does charges for their Office/Onedrive package: they notify me about a week in advance to let me know they're planning on charging me. I wish every service would give me days notice before a scheduled fee hits. No surprise auto-renewal would even be possible that way, no undesired continuation of subscription, all it would take is a courtesy email days in advance.
nautilus12 8y ago
Ive been saying the reviews on amazon are generated for years. Someone should do an expose on this and make a big stink. I dont think we should let them get away with this.
seren 8y ago
Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com and once translated on a local amazon site. This is slightly infuriating.
- mherrmann 8y ago
  Same for me. I wrote a 1-star review about Shelly Walling's book "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together". It simply disappeared.
- SamuelAdams 8y ago
  Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a review for Batch A, but the product being sold is now Batch C, should the review still be displayed?
  - modzu 8y ago
    i think the point is that had the review been 5 stars it would still be there...
  - iKevinShah 8y ago
    Sure they can, but what about some of the products on Amazon which are mostly immutable like for example: Books. A bad book is a bad book. Batch B of the said book is mostly a new "product" listing on Amazon with its own set of reviews and ratings. Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something
virtualritz 8y ago
I was looking for a 2nd USB C charger for my new MacBook and found one[1]. It had 378 5 star, 'verified purchase' reviews. All filed on July the 12th, 2018! I reported this to Amazon via Twitter on July the 18th [2] (Sorry, German). I checked yesterday and despite Amazon promising to look into this, all reviews where still there. So I tweeted to them again and, at last, they're deleted today. But why is this not detected automatically? 378 verified 'customers' that all review the product, with five stars, on the same day?? What are the chances? And the language of the reviews was also so similar that even a Markov model could be used to detect they must be from the same person (or bot). No machine learning needed. [1] https://www.amazon.de/MAOFINE-MacBook-Adapter-Charger-Replacement-white/dp/B07DKC7XS6 https://www.amazon.de/MAOFINE-MacBook-Adapter-Charger-Replac... [2] https://twitter.com/virtualritz/status/1019741791422173185 https://twitter.com/virtualritz/status/1019741791422173185
- Sir_Substance 8y ago
  >378 verified 'customers' that all review the product, with five stars, on the same day?? What are the chances? Depends on the product. For a highly anticipated release like a video game or an iphone, pretty high. I would say that this sort of thing should raise an automatic ticket in a moderation queue, but I wouldn't autodelete the reviews.
- patd 8y ago
  And now all of those reviews seem to have disappeared ... Maybe it's more effective to complain on HN.
- gideon_b 8y ago
  The company makes 378 real purchases then mails 378 real products to random addresses scattered throughout the US. This allows them to leave verified reviews. There's a whole industry around this - The Reply All podcast interviewed people who make these reviews. They talk about the economics of reviews and Amazon's reluctance to admit there is a problem. https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124
jglauche 8y ago
I tried to comment on a product about that I highly dislike it now as they changed ingredients a month ago. "Sorry, commenting to this product has been disabled because we're currently receiving too many reviews" .
windexh8er 8y ago
This seems to be BAU with Amazon these days and why I no longer trust their reviews en masse. You can still field high fidelity reviews, but unless it is for a large purchase it seems to be a waste of time. Amazon bolsters cheap (cost and quality) products. I wrote a 1 star for a set of poorly constructed LED bulbs where one exploded and created a fire hazard. This review was accepted, however a review of a product I purchased that came with the wrong model product (mistake or deception?) in the box was removed and it didn't matter what I tried Amazon would not give me a reason why. Amazon is a machine running off of too many fake reviews and so I've been significantly cutting back supporting them by purchasing from. I'm sure, eventually, my return requests will be revoked due to a low review or when their algorithm shows my purchase cadence declining. At that point I'll be done.
mnm1 8y ago
And if you return too many of these garbage products, they close your account. The ultimate dark pattern.
koboll 8y ago
Someone should build a News-Genius-type overlay extension with a parallel review system that's better-maintained and more difficult to game. The only way out of Amazon's shit review scheme is eschewing it entirely.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
> Or, maybe it's a low effort scam that Amazon could easily detect, prevent, or clean up! Companies like Amazon like to pound interviewees with algorithm and data structure questions, so you'd think they'd be hiring the right people to solve this. So, no, they don't really want to.
tk75x 8y ago
Whenever I see one- or two-star reviews on Amazon (or Newegg) I make sure to read as many of them as possible to gauge what the problems with the item might be. This allows me to judge whether the people reviewing the items are overreacting or if there is a legitimate defect common to all the reviewers. The fact that Amazon is removing or not posting critical reviews in the first place is a red flag for me personally.
- TheCapn 8y ago
  I'm the same way. a 5-star review saying the item works like you expect is almost useless but a 2 star review pointing out that some product uses non-standard dimensions, or uses non-replaceable batteries with a terrible lifespan is massively helpful. I always tell people who ask me for store/product recommendations that I can't really give an honest opinion of something until they've fucked up some how. Its pretty easy for a business to look good when everything goes well, but when something goes wrong it is extremely telling about how they respect their customers by how they work to remedy the situation. - Company shipped the wrong item? Keep it and we'll ship you the correct one! --> Great! - Company shipped my product with the wrong service (when I paid a premium)? Here's your refund! --> Also good! - Company failed to send half my order (or it got lost during shipping)? "You're a liar, get bent" hangup --> Avoid avoid avoid!
- pnathan 8y ago
  yes, I often read the 1-2 star reviews on Amazon. It's particularly useful for books - a positive signal for a book is "1 star - author used too many big words and complex ideas!". :-)
alanfranzoni 8y ago
One thing where they are right is your review of your weights. What has the seller/packaging to do with the product itself? You weren't reviewing the item, but the seller (which isn't allowed when the seller is Amazon itself). Unless you think that the neoprene was bad quality.
calewis 8y ago
I work at a sleep company and reviews are super important for our ecommerce site. We use: https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com to ensure that we remove fake reviews. Just paste in the Amazon link and it will check all the reviews and give you loads of stats.
vincnetas 8y ago
Is it time to start writing 5 star reviews with negative content? Lets say start review with (CAPS LOCKED): "ACTUAL RATING 1 STAR". Let's see them handle this :)
afpx 8y ago
I also see this very often with Apple’s App Store. About 30% of the time, my negative reviews are deleted. Even when I re-submit the reviews, they’re often deleted. This doesn’t happen to any of my positive reviews. I opened up several helpdesk tickets about this and got no answers. In fact, they had the audacity to tell me that it’s impossible to remove reviews and that it was probably user error.
- remir 8y ago
  I may be mistaken, but I heard reviews are deleted when the dev pushes an update to their app.
  - Aaronn 8y ago
    Yes this is correct. Apple added the option last year so developers can choose to reset all reviews when they release a new version or keep the old reviews. https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/ios-app-developers-will-be-able-to-keep-app-store-ratings-when-releasing-an-update/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/ios-app-developers-will-be...
    - distances 8y ago
      Sometimes this may make sense. I know of an app that decided to start from scratch due to the amassed bad reviews. Too bad for those who already paid for the buggy version, no updates now.
Semaphor 8y ago
Is this a US only thing? My reviews count as "verified purchase" on amazon.de, including my now 5 months old 1-star-review.
modzu 8y ago
there was a large area of forest in my town that was privately owned but part of the forest itself was protected so that it could not be developed. well a developer went ahead and bulldozed the ancient trees and put up a condo anyway -- just paid the fines. similarly with amazon, nobody is going to go to jail even though the website props itself up utterly fraudulently and criminally. someone should.
kthejoker2 8y ago
I see similar behavior on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, even Netflix - not necessarily review gaming, but just unfriendly user patterns and opaque algorithmic behavior. To me the core issue is poor communication. They could easily explain all of the processes, ML models, logic, and human interactions that are in place for review posters and readers. Then it'd be trivial to compare that with (for example) OP's experience and identify possible improvements. But the fact that they don't at all is very telling. Clearly not impeding growth or revenue.
arendtio 8y ago
Maybe we should build an independent, decentralized review page, where you can trust (PGP style) your friends and family and they can do so too. When suspicious reviews appear, everybody can track down the accounts which abuse our trust (and let the bots in). That way we could provide blacklists for accounts that are untrustworthy and everybody can decide who (or which blacklist) he wants to trust.
- ttoinou 8y ago
  This. I always have thought of something like this. Only trust person your know IRL and friends of friends... That way we could compute a "trustworthy" coefficients. Needs a good business model though
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  I love this idea. I don't see it being implemented because I don't think it's in Amazon's best interests, but I'd love to see someone do it. Goodreads does something similar, at least out to the first degree. When you're looking at a book, it shows all of your friends' reviews (if any) before all of the reviews by randoms. It's really useful because there's some of my friends whose opinions I really trust, and who I know have similar tastes. Goodreads is owned by Amazon now, it's worth pointing out.
at-fates-hands 8y ago
I recently bought some new wireless headphones. After seeing a minimal amount of bad reviews, I bought them. When they arrived, I opened the package to find a note which said if I gave them a five star review, I could use this code for a 40% discount on any of their products. Pissed, I wrote a one star review and how this was explicitly against Amazon's rules. It was up for a few weeks, then it just disappeared. I figured it would at least generate an apology via email, or something from Amazon about doing a better job of taking care of companies who do stuff like this. Never heard anything from either the company or Amazon. I guess it was easier to just take down the bad reviews or keep a few negative reviews so it doesn't look completely nefarious. Seeing as how both companies and Amazon has a vested interest in keeping companies on board, I can only assume they're passively allowing this to happen.
exgamedev 8y ago
I wonder if amazon is struggling with fake reviews and would rather have false positives on the negative side of the spectrum. To a seller there's no diff btwn their product getting a positive review and all their competitors getting negative reviews. A bot can just as easily do one or the other. But forcing the bots to be positive review bots benefits amazon in two ways. It makes all the products on their site look purchase-worthy and it contains all a product's review-warfare onto the product page itself, so they can clean it up later if they want.
superasn 8y ago
Same happened with me. Brought this shity fitness tracker called goqii from Amazon. Tried to leave a 2 star review and got the exact same message even though Amazon knows it is an amazon purchase. Similar to this article the same thing has more than 22k positive reviews which is unbelievable considering the extremely unlikely considering the quality. Also forgot to mention Amazon was also running a lightning deal on the same.
PerilousD 8y ago
Hmm - seems like Amazon is now borrowing from the EBAY playbook. My EBAY usage is maybe one or two items in a year and rarely anything high-ticket. EBAY clearly favored sellers over buyers and after one or two run-ins with (a) leaving negative reviews for poor sellers and (b) fighting their policy where you had to wait a month before even filing for a refund - I left for Amazon prime. I'm probably going to drop Amazon prime at the end of this year.
whichdan 8y ago
Speaking of bad reviews, trying to buy any kind of computer hardware off of Amazon is infuriating - all of the reviews for every version of an item are mixed together, so you'll have several motherboards treated as if they're the same, and monitors with different resolutions all lumped together.
metal 8y ago
Amazon reviews have been shady for years. To combat this I never buy without running the item link through fakespot.com. The other day I also discovered reviewmeta.com t haven't tried it yet.
iron0013 8y ago
Sorry to be pedantic (although this IS Hacker News, after all), but shouldn't the web page's title be "Censoring Unhappy Customers" rather than "Censuring Unhappy Customers"?
merb 8y ago
well one review on the blog is stupid. if an item did arrive broken, it might not only be amazon's fault, so I dislike reviews that actually review the shipment process. besides that, yeah it sucks if this is really happening.
thinkythought 8y ago
This skips/avoids another really important but bs thing they do: Reviews that mention counterfeits ALWAYS get pulled. Seemingly by some automated system, even. It's like a forbidden review topic or phrase. Yea, that's not shady at all
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
I no longer consider Amazon. Too many issues to note, but here's a few of them... 1. Counterfeits mixed in with legit supply 2. Fraud everywhere 3. Fake prices ($.99 with $30 shipping) 4. Fraudulent reviews 5. the article - Dark patterns everywhere 6. Not competitive with other e-retailers 7. Scammy and fraudulent pricing (raises prices by 10% to have a 10% off sale.. Prime Day) I've migrated to the following for my stuff: walmart online (order and pick up at store for no shipping cost) eBay for random assortments aliexpress for a direct pipeline of electronic chinese stuff mcmaster carr for hardware that lowes and menards doesn't have Misumi for aluminum extrusion IRC topic groups (like freenode #reprap) for 3d printing specific stuffs from individuals Craigslist, but this is obviously realllly spotty Amazon is unreliable, obfuscated, and scammy. I can't even guarantee that what I order is what I'll get. It's just not worth the effort or time.
ccarse 8y ago
It's gotten to the point that I no longer even pay attention to the overall score and instead I look at the reviews and ignore any review that is a 5 star review. I figure people aren't going to pay for reviews that aren't 5 star. If the only other reviews are 1 or 2 stars I know it's probably a crap product. But, if there are a decent number of 4 star reviews I know it's probably a decent product.
o_____________o 8y ago
Or how they intentionally obfuscate the unit pricing of items in the same category? One says $xx per oz, the other $xx per lb, the other $xx per kg... I've been wanting to make a userscript to fix that for a while.
mathgenius 8y ago
I wonder if this is a job for activist investors: buy a bunch of shady stuff on amazon with 5-star reviews, write a lengthy report about how bad all the product is, short AMZN... ?
nodesocket 8y ago
I actualky have those same LED lights. They have been working great for me for over fours months. No complaints.
sbjs 8y ago
At first I thought the only way to genuinely avoid these kind of bots is to have reviewers posting videos, maybe hosted on YouTube to save costs. Videos are the only thing that can't be faked as easily (but they can with 'deep fakes'). But this won't actually solve the problem. These reviews may be fake but they're probably real people being paid to write them, and those real people can just as easily make real review videos. I don't think there is an automated solution to "liars will lie for money". I think the only real solution is brand trust. We have to go back! Back to a time when you knew something was good because it proved that it was good, and word of mouth spread to let you know it was good. Don't trust anonymous word of mouth either.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  Or only allow paying Prime members to leave reviews. That would cut out the fraud pretty darn quickly.
  - sbjs 8y ago
    No, a scammer can say to 10 people "here's $10 to buy get an account, now leave 100 reviews and I'll pay you $1 for each" and that guy himself gets paid $10 per review directly from the seller. The people each made $100, and he spent $110 on each of them, losing $1,100 total, but he made $1,000 of each, so $10,000 total. At the end of the day he made $8,900 by acting as a middle man.
    - fastball 8y ago
      You're not factoring in the fact that if a Prime member participated in this, Amazon could suspend their account without any reimbursement. For most people, chump change is not worth nuking your $99 Prime account. Also, the idea that sellers would pay $10 each for a 5-star review is laughable. It's easy to make something economically viable when you're numbers are complete drivel.
moravak1984 8y ago
I had a similar experience with booking.com reviews. My less than 3 star reviews somehow don't make it, while 4-star reviews go straight to the list. Coincidence?
Animats 8y ago
Amazon's big dark pattern: "No, I don't want to save $25.72." You get that every time you order and don't pay for Prime. Also, the non-Prime "Free Shipping" option requires you to back up and click shipping type to get it. The default path makes you pay for shipping.
xster 8y ago
I loved the interest-specific Reverb.com (for selling new and used musical gear) and made a point to buy stuff there to support the community even if it was more expensive or slower than a 'corporate' alternative. All the sellers' reviews were spectacular and I just thought people would be nicer on this platform because everyone just loved music and it's one big happy family but then I received some crap recently and just realized that they do the same thing and prevent negative reviews buy externalizing the (time and emotional) cost of forcing self-mediation when things go wrong. Talk about a broken heart.
kapad 8y ago
I've also had a review rejected under very similar circumstances. Like the OP, I too was leaving a bad review on a product that I had purchased a few months back. I had purchased the item in a lightning sale though.
amai 8y ago
Please people use and support https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ .
victor106 8y ago
At this point Amazon is a monopoly. And this is exactly why monopolies don't work. Self-regulation does not work. "With great power comes great responsibility" --> We humans only like the power part. Every monopoly that ever existed abuses its monopolistic power for its own benefit.
t0astbread 8y ago
Yup, Amazon is the most unlikable tech giant
Your_Creator 8y ago
scuffed.
androtheos 8y ago
This has pissed me off in the past. My reviews getting rejected. The problem ultimately is that Amazon NOW has separate functions for reviewing a product and a seller. The product reviews are public, the seller reviews are not. If your review of a product is just bagging on the seller, it will be rejected. Like the one your wrote for the weights.
dreadpiratemiky 8y ago
What are some good alternative sites to Amazon?

k__ 8y ago

I also had to implement this pattern for app reviews. Show a custom review dialog, if the user gives 4-5 stars send them to the app store for the real review, if not just say "thank you" and close the dialog. Repeat until one day they'll give you a good review.

NikolaNovak 8y ago
Unless I'm missing something,that kind of masking behaviour is what typically causes me to exit an app and manually give it a low review. Are you saying you are actively gating the reviews? :-/
- lostsock 8y ago
  Pretty much exactly what Meriton was just fined AU$3m for today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912
  - k__ 8y ago
    As far as I know, the rule is, you can only show the native app-store review dialog once, if the user cancels, you won't get any review ever. So the idea is, to show your own until the user finally decides to review. But now the growth hackers of the world had the brilliant idea to treat bad reviews like "the user isn't ready for a review"
    - dingo_bat 8y ago
      It's good that android doesn't allow this. And it doesn't give a way for the app to find out if I actually rated also. So I just click yes i want to rate. Then come back and continue as usual.
      - k__ 8y ago
        Same with iOS, but I guess chances are good that people don't behave like you. (Even if I also think they should, haha)
    - l9k 8y ago
      Same with browser permissions. Websites would ask you if you're okay with the authorization and only if you answer Yes, they would trigger the browser auth prompt.
- k__ 8y ago
  Pretty much. Some app-store marketing guru told the startup I'm contracting with, that this is the way to go, because you're pretty much f*cked if you get reviews below 4.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    This is an important point. Basically, once some start gaming the system - the others have to follow or they are dead. It's similar to how irregular migration or general screwing over of workers works: if some farmers are paying 'under wages' or some factories are 'undercutting' ... then the others stand to lose business and are sucked into the same practices. It's one thing when a massively successful entity like Amazon does shady stuff, but for most businesses ... it seems to often be kind of a quandary.
    - Kagerjay 8y ago
      everything naturally will gravitate toward people gaming the system. Its not just limited to shopping and reviews. Politics and social media behavior is not too different. If the option exist its going to be exploited, you either follow through or get left in the dust Its sad that this is the way things are done but what can you do about it really? You can't fight every battle you need to pick what matters
Sharlin 8y ago
I hope you at least anonymously reported that behavior to appropriate authorities. And started searching for a new job.
- k__ 8y ago
  Sadly this isn't against the rules. Probably because the users still can go to the app-store and give you a bad review, haha
- akuji1993 8y ago
  You don't always have the choice of just up and go. I developed a system for an american startup that gathered everything it could get its hands on through their Gmail accounts. Did I think that's unethical? Yes, but just quitting wasn't an option and it was perfectly legal. I switched to a new company when I could afford it and am now much happier. But suggesting to just quit the moment your company behaves unethical is a little optimistic.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    It's not perfectly legal if you ever do it to an EU user, now. This is why GDPR has some upsides -- it changes what was formerly just unethical into being illegal, which means that we as software engineers can push back against it more strongly.
    - akuji1993 8y ago
      We actually developed a GDPR module for about three weeks to catch that case. So we are legal again, since we provide all the tools you need to delete your data.
- michaelt 8y ago
  What "appropriate authorities"? Shouting into the void at some google user forum?
  - mthoms 8y ago
zelos 8y ago
I believe recent iOS SDKs have implemented a system-controlled UI to ask for reviews to prevent apps doing this. I assume it's enforced via app-store review.
- k__ 8y ago
  Yes, and you only call the system-controlled function if you're sure you'd get a good review. They should prohibit that function call completely and ask users randomly for reviews, maybe when they pause or close the app...
ballenf 8y ago
I'm more sympathetic to this behavior and developers in general than I used to be. Just seen too many quality apps get relegated to obscurity because of a few 1-star early reviews from people expecting perfection from a free or cheap app. Or needing functionality that just isn't part of the app. I don't have any apps in the store, so this really isn't personal for me. What I don't understand is why more devs don't use the API for the in-app overlay review versus a weblink that forwards to the app store. Clearly they're tracking the behavior, but not sure what is tracked via that means that can't be done in-app.
exgamedev 8y ago
I used to work for f2p game companies and they also used this as a standard trick. On top of suppressing negative reviews they would only ask you to rate the game immediately after something good happened in the game. You leveled up, or got a good prize, or whatever. They would craft these entire on-rails onboarding experiences where you seem to win a jackpot early on, then ask you for a review. They'd build out these flows and user test them and iterate until it psychologically produced the intended ratings
- OkGoDoIt 8y ago
  I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but Tinder used to ask for a review right after a successful match

2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago

Having recently unsubscribed from Prime, I can say their dark patterns don't stop there. About 5 pages to complete the process, in which the CTA to confirm bumps around the page, gets less prominent, and is given such lousy loss-aversion labels as "Give up my prime benefits".

iuguy 8y ago
Strangely it wasn't so bad for me, I live in the UK. I wonder if EU rules are different? I have to say for all the people complaining but still staying with Amazon, there's a simple solution that will force their hand if enough people act: Stop buying from them. Personally I cancelled my Prime subscription because no service is worth enough to me to force other human beings to pee in bottles to avoid work breaks for fear of being sanctioned.
- kennydude 8y ago
  Same. Amazon Logistics is a horrible thing and not worth the money.
- y4mi 8y ago
  I'm from germany, cancelled two days ago and can confirm that the process was bafflingly bad. [cancel prime membership] ... "do you want to terminate your membership?" [ask me later][keep me signed up][terminate] ... "you'll lose [x], do you want to terminate?" [ask me later][terminate][keep me signed up] ... "but even shipping will cost!" [keep me signed up][ask me later][terminate] ... you're now unsubscribed [sign me back on][ok]
dingo_bat 8y ago
For me there was no procedure. It just ended and I got an email asking me to pay again.
phyzome 8y ago
They've really ramped up selling Prime in the checkout process. It's no longer easy to order from Amazon; it's this adversarial "spot the 5 traps" obstacle course where you have to avoid clicking the "sign me up for Prime" trick buttons.

arrrg 8y ago

An alternative explanation for this is that Amazon is struggling with identifying fake reviews, which could explain both why there seem to be many fake reviews and why one would get blocked from writing reviews (basically falling victim to a false positive of their fake review detection). Obviously there is also some bad UX thrown in for good measure (being able to write a review without being able to send it), but we aren’t necessarily looking at dark patterns here. This could just be Amazon struggling with and failing at a task (avoiding fake reviews). Not all bad UX is a dark pattern, sometimes it’s just bad UX … (a dark pattern is bad UX with a positive consequence for the person or company offering up the UI or maybe just and intended positive consequence, even if the UI doesn’t achieve that goal) I think it’s a stretch to argue that Amazon is really benefiting from any of this and long term this erosion of trust is not at all good for Amazon. I do honestly think that if Amazon could snap with their fingers and remove all fake reviews they would do it. (Which is not to say that Amazon does not employ dark patterns elsewhere.)

Aeolun 8y ago
If the person who wrote the post could immediately identify the clearly fake reviews I see no reason why Amazon could not use the same method.
- ctvo 8y ago
  As in employ someone to go and trace users who post reviews to see if they’ve reviewed the same products? Maybe you meant make a system that can do it, and do it without false positives to not upset legitimate users when their own reviews are removed. I’m confused about the ease people expect this problem to be solved. It’s so easy to solve it exists on every popular platform: see the paid, fake reviews on the Apple App Store.
- mike_hearn 8y ago
  I did a lot of work on anti-botting some years ago. It's not as easy as it looks. Often you spot a pattern that is obviously fake, like here, but discover it can't generalise without huge numbers of false positives. For example I would expect lots of legitimate users to review the same small set of TV shows or video games if they buy into a series or franchise.

jxdxbx 8y ago

“Arrived damaged” could be borderline as it sounds like a review of the shipping process and not the product. Not sure what’s going on with that first one though.

tobias3 8y ago
Maybe he left a review of the shipping process on another product, the seller reported it and now his reviews are being reviewed?
Sharlin 8y ago
Like it or not, people tend to review the whole purchase experience. And I can't really blame them.
- gambiting 8y ago
  I can't blame them either, but it doesn't change the fact that his review has nothing to do with the item. He wrote a review of item X and it had nothing to do with that item. It's like writing a review of a hotel resort and giving it a 1* because the flight there was cancelled. It's just not helpful at all.
- tobias3 8y ago
  They are kind of useless for other customers. The customer reading the review might get the product from another seller, shipped by another service (might depend on shipping address). If you think it is the sellers fault, review the seller. If you think it's the parcel delivery service's fault send it back with that as reason. That is signal enough.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Yes, agreed. But if Amazon only prompts you to give a single type of review (and makes reviewing the seller/delivery not nearly as discoverable), they shouldn't be surprised if people "misuse" the feature.
numbsafari 8y ago

rkachowski 8y ago

An interesting dark pattern (albeit unrelated to the review flow) is during the standard checkout process. on the last screen before the purchase, the Amazon logo image / header no longer links back to the Amazon homepage like the rest of the site. I guess keeping the user captive leads to more sales

sigotirandolas 8y ago
I’ve also noticed that they don’t let me ship a lot of products (mostly food, but also random harmless electronics) to shipping points or Amazon boxes in my city (in Spain), telling me they are full (they are not, they let me ship other products there and it tells me it’s full with literally any shipping point or Amazon box). They only let me ship it to a home address. I can’t prove it’s not a bug, but it seems such a blaring issue that it’s impossible that they haven’t been noticed, specially since some people can’t ever ship to a home address.
- akuji1993 8y ago
  What benefit would they get from this though?
  - RugnirViking 8y ago
    Potentially they are worried about food going bad while left in a drop-off box. I don't think that is very sinister, but they could have a better UI for it.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Understandable why they won't ship food to Amazon boxes. No idea about electronics though, and they should have a better error message than just "it's full".
- CannisterFlux 8y ago
  I don't like to defend Amazon because they are getting shadier all the time, but I always ship to a Correos office near my flat from amazon.es and haven't had this problem (yet?). Maybe it isn't the same thing as the box though. I've seen random 3rd party items that can't be left at Correos, but they do tell you at the start of the process.

ramblerman 8y ago

> Note that I only got this message AFTER trying to leave a 2 star review. What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed? This is highly speculative, and without evidence it's pretty shady to suggest it, imo.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

Author doesn't know what dark patterns means.

amelius 8y ago
Here's a good site explaining it. https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern Their homepage video starts with a bunch of examples from Amazon: https://darkpatterns.org https://darkpatterns.org
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Google has one built into mobile Youtube with Chromecast. When you open a video and go to click the cast button, the "visit advertiser" button immediately shifts right into the place of the cast button, causing you to click into an advertiser website.
  - tk75x 8y ago
    That gets me at least once per viewing session.

TorKlingberg 8y ago

This rant is not well written. The first issue looks like a bug on Amazon's side. I'm not going to assume malice without something pointing in that direction. The author writes "What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed?" Well, would it? I see no indication it would. Those reviews are indeed suspicious, and Amazon should do a better job of detecting fake review accounts. The third issue is the author complaining about the shipping in a product review. An understandable mistake, but Amazon is right not to publish it. When trying to learn about a product it's annoying to scroll past shipping reviews like "Arrived quickly, five stars!" In total, I see no dark pattern at all.

ashelmire 8y ago
I can actually verify and tell you why. Amazon will not allow you to criticize Amazon or their platform in a review (they said as much). Only the product. They probably do automatic sentiment detection for negative phrases containing Amazon and don’t allow them to be posted. The platform and shipping are relevant in a product review.
- carlmr 8y ago
  To a certain degree. There really should be two ratings. Shipment rating and product rating. I don't want to get a TV that gets shipped badly, sure. But if the only problem with shipping is that it is slow, maybe I'm still interested in the product because I don't get it anywhere else and I can wait. In that case I'm mostly interested in the product review.
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    Which is why you, as a human, can read the review and ignore the part where a reviewer says “the shipping was slow”. I recently ordered a poster through Amazon. They sent me the wrong item 3 times. I gave up. And I can’t post a negative review despite it clearly being Amazons fault (not the shipper). I tried. Couldn’t. At least they have excellent customer service, they didn’t jerk me around and each resolved the issue as best they could.

nebulous1 8y ago

Although they should have let him write the review, I don't think people should leave reviews for damaged/broken items before they've tried to remedy the situation with the supplier.

tmalsburg2 8y ago
Why? When I receive a damaged product, this causes me substantial hassle (communicate with customer support, send item back, order replacement, ...). It seems very natural to write a review that reflects the poor quality of the product in this situation, and this review would be a useful signal to others.
- nebulous1 8y ago
  My take is that damaged and broken items happen, particularly when items are new. I'm not saying that this information is irrelevant, but as a review of the product it isn't valid (as it's a review of a damaged product) and as a review of the supplier it isn't that helpful either (as I'm more interested in how the supplier responds to this situation: any supplier can send you what they have in stock, the true test is what happens when things go wrong). So, as per my original comment, I think you should seek remedy before reviewing, not after.
  - Magnets 8y ago
    If a product is poorly packaged from the manufacturer or (more likely) poorly packaged by Amazon and that leads to a lot of people receiving a damaged product, then it is clearly beneficial to see that in the reviews before you purchase. Or maybe the product just has poor QC, again, it should be allowed to show up in reviews. If it's just a one-ff then it will be watered down by all of the other reviewers anyway
    - nebulous1 8y ago
      I haven't said otherwise. You haven't explained why you're writing a review before dealing with support rather than after. Also, perhaps a higher percentage of people with bad experiences will write bad reviews than people with good experiences writing good reviews, so the watered down argument isn't perfect. I would have left out the word 'perhaps' but I don't actually have any hard evidence.

aethertron 8y ago

There's an obvious conflict of interest within Amazon here. The tasks of selling products, and collecting and publishing useful criticisms and reviews of products should be performed by separate entities.

jackewiehose 8y ago

I once wrote a 1-star review on amazon for a top-selling product that had almost only positive reviews. The review was published but they quietly changed its contents. They replaced some words (I guess it was too strong language like "crap" or something) but even worse they removed at least one whole sentence and after that the review didn't make much sense anymore and it looked like I wrote it like that. Then I watched the statistics about how many people found this helpful. At that time this was in two numbers: people who think its helpful and people who don't. Over months that ratio kept the same. Started with 1 helpful, 3 not helpful. Then 10 helpful, 30 not helpful. Then 30 helpful, 90 not helpful. I found that highly suspicious. Since then, amazon reviews are dead to me.

simias 8y ago
Wait amazon edits your reviews? That's shaddy as hell, I can understand removing a review for "strong language" but changing its content without asking the author is borderline scammy. I couldn't find similar stories online (although admittedly that's pretty hard to search for). I'd think it would be a big deal if Amazon was caught doing that, wouldn't it be?
- mikeash 8y ago
  I don’t think there’s anything borderline about it. Sounds like outright fraud to me.
  - taylorlunt 8y ago
    Yes, this should be criminal behavior and carry a prison sentence. I don't know if this is legally fraud, but it definitely should be.
- jackewiehose 8y ago
  I don't know if they do that regulary but in my case they did. It was my first (and last) attempt to write a review. Maybe the amazon employee just had the best intentions and didn't want to disencourage me because it was my first review... they achieved the opposite.

SuperGent 8y ago

If I think that reviews could be suspect I use ReviewMeta[0]. The process usually indicates if the reviews are legit or not. although for this product, it claims that it passes. Might be that 99 reviews have been deleted though, and Amazon is attempting to fix those reviews. [0]https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/

stared 8y ago

I have a trick - looking at 4 star reviews. They are overally positive, but at the same time - talk about shortcomings (some of them may effect my decision, while others are not an issue). Typically, these are balanced. And totally unlikely to be faked. For the same reason I avoid 1 star reviews on some services (especially recommending books or movies). They are often related to a strong, emotional reponse, rather than a balanced option that can be reused. In general people use maximal, and minimal, score in a diffrent way that all other options. For a stricking example, see: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322441/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322441/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt

Aissen 8y ago
A company I know was aware of this tactic, and bought their own items (through proxies) ~20 times, and two of those had to use 4-star reviews.

mrcactu5 8y ago

if you are Amazon you don't have time to read all the reviews carefully. How do you detect such artificial "gaming" behavior? It's natural behavior for the sellers to try to boost their reviews (at the consumers expense).

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
You hire developers to write code to look for patterns exactly like what was shown in the article for starters.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
Bezos is the richest person on the planet. He can afford to hire people to look through the reviews.

googlemyfomato 8y ago

This kind of doesn't surprise me. I know I tend to buy what has the best price/star ratio. Whether or not Amazon is directly involved, I don't know. But given how quickly marketing got attached to social media, I imagine gaming reviews is just another part of an online presence package, along with controlling search results, and getting something popular into social outlets (a meme is highly desired). Irony being people are starting to adapt and most of these social media and reviews will just be bots commenting on each other.

ekianjo 8y ago

No need to look so far for dark patterns, the whole trick to get you to click to become a member for Amazon Prime, constantly, using all the dirty tricks in the book, should deserve a whole page in itself.

simias 8y ago

The dumbbells being damaged during delivery reminds me of an other annoyance with amazon reviews: they won't let you distinguish between actual issues with the products and issues with the delivery/Amazon after-sale services etc... I can't count the number of low-star reviews where it says something like "the guy tried to deliver at the wrong time" or "I bought the wrong product by mistake and Amazon wouldn't take it back" or whatever. That doesn't help me at all.

dingo_bat 8y ago
You can't blame the users though. If I have a bad delivery experience, I'm going to leave a bad review. It's Amazon's problem that they don't let you differentiate between product issues and delivery issues.
- simias 8y ago
  Oh yeah, I'm definitely blaming Amazon, they should let the user categorize their complaints.
- acheron 8y ago
  And I'm going to mark it 'unhelpful', because I don't care about your bad delivery experience. The only people who need to hear about your bad delivery experience work for Amazon customer support.
Lasher 8y ago
I bought Quickbooks from Amazon a couple of years ago and what actually showed up was a very clearly burned DVD with "Quickbooks" hand-written on it. Best case was I'd received a pirated version of the software. Worst case is who knows what kind of malware might have been on that DVD. Had no choice but to leave a 1 star review to warn others but that really doesn't help anyone who wants to know if Quickbooks is good software to run a small business on or not. Between this and a few more incidents, I no longer buy anything on Amazon where getting a valid OEM brand version of an item is important to me. The good news is that for the few years I was pretty much Amazon exclusive the rest of the internet got really good at ecommerce too so it's a much better ordering from other companies online now.

ryanlol 8y ago

This guy is having some truly strange experiences with amazon. Why would he have to ship the damaged weights back? Amazon essentially never insists on that.

thinkythought 8y ago
This one seems to be random. I've had them insist i ship a fucking mattress back

techaddict009 8y ago

I Was recently purchasing Macbook Battery from Amazon.in it was Rs.3100 and when I checked out and reached payment it showed 4199! I said WTH did it happen? I cancelled payment and found that Prime Membership Renewal was added to the cart without my permission. When I didnt want to renew it why did Amazon add it on its own? One more similar experience with AWS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652134

dingo_bat 8y ago
This is better than what Google play music does. It just auto renews. Fuck 2 factor auth. At least Amazon gives you that chance.
- JFFalcon 8y ago
  Why wouldn't you expect a subscription to auto-renew?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    I just don't like the loss of control. At least in this case, my approach seems to be beneficial. I didn't have to deal with the hassle mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651882
- culot 8y ago
  I love how Microsoft does charges for their Office/Onedrive package: they notify me about a week in advance to let me know they're planning on charging me. I wish every service would give me days notice before a scheduled fee hits. No surprise auto-renewal would even be possible that way, no undesired continuation of subscription, all it would take is a courtesy email days in advance.

nautilus12 8y ago

Ive been saying the reviews on amazon are generated for years. Someone should do an expose on this and make a big stink. I dont think we should let them get away with this.

seren 8y ago

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com and once translated on a local amazon site. This is slightly infuriating.

mherrmann 8y ago
Same for me. I wrote a 1-star review about Shelly Walling's book "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together". It simply disappeared.
SamuelAdams 8y ago
Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a review for Batch A, but the product being sold is now Batch C, should the review still be displayed?
- modzu 8y ago
  i think the point is that had the review been 5 stars it would still be there...
- iKevinShah 8y ago
  Sure they can, but what about some of the products on Amazon which are mostly immutable like for example: Books. A bad book is a bad book. Batch B of the said book is mostly a new "product" listing on Amazon with its own set of reviews and ratings. Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something

virtualritz 8y ago

I was looking for a 2nd USB C charger for my new MacBook and found one[1]. It had 378 5 star, 'verified purchase' reviews. All filed on July the 12th, 2018! I reported this to Amazon via Twitter on July the 18th [2] (Sorry, German). I checked yesterday and despite Amazon promising to look into this, all reviews where still there. So I tweeted to them again and, at last, they're deleted today. But why is this not detected automatically? 378 verified 'customers' that all review the product, with five stars, on the same day?? What are the chances? And the language of the reviews was also so similar that even a Markov model could be used to detect they must be from the same person (or bot). No machine learning needed. [1] https://www.amazon.de/MAOFINE-MacBook-Adapter-Charger-Replacement-white/dp/B07DKC7XS6 https://www.amazon.de/MAOFINE-MacBook-Adapter-Charger-Replac... [2] https://twitter.com/virtualritz/status/1019741791422173185 https://twitter.com/virtualritz/status/1019741791422173185

Sir_Substance 8y ago
>378 verified 'customers' that all review the product, with five stars, on the same day?? What are the chances? Depends on the product. For a highly anticipated release like a video game or an iphone, pretty high. I would say that this sort of thing should raise an automatic ticket in a moderation queue, but I wouldn't autodelete the reviews.
patd 8y ago
And now all of those reviews seem to have disappeared ... Maybe it's more effective to complain on HN.
gideon_b 8y ago
The company makes 378 real purchases then mails 378 real products to random addresses scattered throughout the US. This allows them to leave verified reviews. There's a whole industry around this - The Reply All podcast interviewed people who make these reviews. They talk about the economics of reviews and Amazon's reluctance to admit there is a problem. https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124

jglauche 8y ago

I tried to comment on a product about that I highly dislike it now as they changed ingredients a month ago. "Sorry, commenting to this product has been disabled because we're currently receiving too many reviews" .

windexh8er 8y ago

This seems to be BAU with Amazon these days and why I no longer trust their reviews en masse. You can still field high fidelity reviews, but unless it is for a large purchase it seems to be a waste of time. Amazon bolsters cheap (cost and quality) products. I wrote a 1 star for a set of poorly constructed LED bulbs where one exploded and created a fire hazard. This review was accepted, however a review of a product I purchased that came with the wrong model product (mistake or deception?) in the box was removed and it didn't matter what I tried Amazon would not give me a reason why. Amazon is a machine running off of too many fake reviews and so I've been significantly cutting back supporting them by purchasing from. I'm sure, eventually, my return requests will be revoked due to a low review or when their algorithm shows my purchase cadence declining. At that point I'll be done.

mnm1 8y ago

And if you return too many of these garbage products, they close your account. The ultimate dark pattern.

koboll 8y ago

Someone should build a News-Genius-type overlay extension with a parallel review system that's better-maintained and more difficult to game. The only way out of Amazon's shit review scheme is eschewing it entirely.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

> Or, maybe it's a low effort scam that Amazon could easily detect, prevent, or clean up! Companies like Amazon like to pound interviewees with algorithm and data structure questions, so you'd think they'd be hiring the right people to solve this. So, no, they don't really want to.

tk75x 8y ago

Whenever I see one- or two-star reviews on Amazon (or Newegg) I make sure to read as many of them as possible to gauge what the problems with the item might be. This allows me to judge whether the people reviewing the items are overreacting or if there is a legitimate defect common to all the reviewers. The fact that Amazon is removing or not posting critical reviews in the first place is a red flag for me personally.

TheCapn 8y ago
I'm the same way. a 5-star review saying the item works like you expect is almost useless but a 2 star review pointing out that some product uses non-standard dimensions, or uses non-replaceable batteries with a terrible lifespan is massively helpful. I always tell people who ask me for store/product recommendations that I can't really give an honest opinion of something until they've fucked up some how. Its pretty easy for a business to look good when everything goes well, but when something goes wrong it is extremely telling about how they respect their customers by how they work to remedy the situation. - Company shipped the wrong item? Keep it and we'll ship you the correct one! --> Great! - Company shipped my product with the wrong service (when I paid a premium)? Here's your refund! --> Also good! - Company failed to send half my order (or it got lost during shipping)? "You're a liar, get bent" hangup --> Avoid avoid avoid!
pnathan 8y ago
yes, I often read the 1-2 star reviews on Amazon. It's particularly useful for books - a positive signal for a book is "1 star - author used too many big words and complex ideas!". :-)

alanfranzoni 8y ago

One thing where they are right is your review of your weights. What has the seller/packaging to do with the product itself? You weren't reviewing the item, but the seller (which isn't allowed when the seller is Amazon itself). Unless you think that the neoprene was bad quality.

calewis 8y ago

I work at a sleep company and reviews are super important for our ecommerce site. We use: https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com to ensure that we remove fake reviews. Just paste in the Amazon link and it will check all the reviews and give you loads of stats.

vincnetas 8y ago

Is it time to start writing 5 star reviews with negative content? Lets say start review with (CAPS LOCKED): "ACTUAL RATING 1 STAR". Let's see them handle this :)

afpx 8y ago

I also see this very often with Apple’s App Store. About 30% of the time, my negative reviews are deleted. Even when I re-submit the reviews, they’re often deleted. This doesn’t happen to any of my positive reviews. I opened up several helpdesk tickets about this and got no answers. In fact, they had the audacity to tell me that it’s impossible to remove reviews and that it was probably user error.

remir 8y ago
I may be mistaken, but I heard reviews are deleted when the dev pushes an update to their app.
- Aaronn 8y ago
  Yes this is correct. Apple added the option last year so developers can choose to reset all reviews when they release a new version or keep the old reviews. https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/ios-app-developers-will-be-able-to-keep-app-store-ratings-when-releasing-an-update/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/ios-app-developers-will-be...
  - distances 8y ago
    Sometimes this may make sense. I know of an app that decided to start from scratch due to the amassed bad reviews. Too bad for those who already paid for the buggy version, no updates now.

Semaphor 8y ago

Is this a US only thing? My reviews count as "verified purchase" on amazon.de, including my now 5 months old 1-star-review.

modzu 8y ago

there was a large area of forest in my town that was privately owned but part of the forest itself was protected so that it could not be developed. well a developer went ahead and bulldozed the ancient trees and put up a condo anyway -- just paid the fines. similarly with amazon, nobody is going to go to jail even though the website props itself up utterly fraudulently and criminally. someone should.

kthejoker2 8y ago

I see similar behavior on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, even Netflix - not necessarily review gaming, but just unfriendly user patterns and opaque algorithmic behavior. To me the core issue is poor communication. They could easily explain all of the processes, ML models, logic, and human interactions that are in place for review posters and readers. Then it'd be trivial to compare that with (for example) OP's experience and identify possible improvements. But the fact that they don't at all is very telling. Clearly not impeding growth or revenue.

arendtio 8y ago

Maybe we should build an independent, decentralized review page, where you can trust (PGP style) your friends and family and they can do so too. When suspicious reviews appear, everybody can track down the accounts which abuse our trust (and let the bots in). That way we could provide blacklists for accounts that are untrustworthy and everybody can decide who (or which blacklist) he wants to trust.

ttoinou 8y ago
This. I always have thought of something like this. Only trust person your know IRL and friends of friends... That way we could compute a "trustworthy" coefficients. Needs a good business model though
CydeWeys 8y ago
I love this idea. I don't see it being implemented because I don't think it's in Amazon's best interests, but I'd love to see someone do it. Goodreads does something similar, at least out to the first degree. When you're looking at a book, it shows all of your friends' reviews (if any) before all of the reviews by randoms. It's really useful because there's some of my friends whose opinions I really trust, and who I know have similar tastes. Goodreads is owned by Amazon now, it's worth pointing out.

at-fates-hands 8y ago

I recently bought some new wireless headphones. After seeing a minimal amount of bad reviews, I bought them. When they arrived, I opened the package to find a note which said if I gave them a five star review, I could use this code for a 40% discount on any of their products. Pissed, I wrote a one star review and how this was explicitly against Amazon's rules. It was up for a few weeks, then it just disappeared. I figured it would at least generate an apology via email, or something from Amazon about doing a better job of taking care of companies who do stuff like this. Never heard anything from either the company or Amazon. I guess it was easier to just take down the bad reviews or keep a few negative reviews so it doesn't look completely nefarious. Seeing as how both companies and Amazon has a vested interest in keeping companies on board, I can only assume they're passively allowing this to happen.

exgamedev 8y ago

I wonder if amazon is struggling with fake reviews and would rather have false positives on the negative side of the spectrum. To a seller there's no diff btwn their product getting a positive review and all their competitors getting negative reviews. A bot can just as easily do one or the other. But forcing the bots to be positive review bots benefits amazon in two ways. It makes all the products on their site look purchase-worthy and it contains all a product's review-warfare onto the product page itself, so they can clean it up later if they want.

superasn 8y ago

Same happened with me. Brought this shity fitness tracker called goqii from Amazon. Tried to leave a 2 star review and got the exact same message even though Amazon knows it is an amazon purchase. Similar to this article the same thing has more than 22k positive reviews which is unbelievable considering the extremely unlikely considering the quality. Also forgot to mention Amazon was also running a lightning deal on the same.

PerilousD 8y ago

Hmm - seems like Amazon is now borrowing from the EBAY playbook. My EBAY usage is maybe one or two items in a year and rarely anything high-ticket. EBAY clearly favored sellers over buyers and after one or two run-ins with (a) leaving negative reviews for poor sellers and (b) fighting their policy where you had to wait a month before even filing for a refund - I left for Amazon prime. I'm probably going to drop Amazon prime at the end of this year.

whichdan 8y ago

Speaking of bad reviews, trying to buy any kind of computer hardware off of Amazon is infuriating - all of the reviews for every version of an item are mixed together, so you'll have several motherboards treated as if they're the same, and monitors with different resolutions all lumped together.

metal 8y ago

Amazon reviews have been shady for years. To combat this I never buy without running the item link through fakespot.com. The other day I also discovered reviewmeta.com t haven't tried it yet.

iron0013 8y ago

Sorry to be pedantic (although this IS Hacker News, after all), but shouldn't the web page's title be "Censoring Unhappy Customers" rather than "Censuring Unhappy Customers"?

merb 8y ago

well one review on the blog is stupid. if an item did arrive broken, it might not only be amazon's fault, so I dislike reviews that actually review the shipment process. besides that, yeah it sucks if this is really happening.

thinkythought 8y ago

This skips/avoids another really important but bs thing they do: Reviews that mention counterfeits ALWAYS get pulled. Seemingly by some automated system, even. It's like a forbidden review topic or phrase. Yea, that's not shady at all

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

I no longer consider Amazon. Too many issues to note, but here's a few of them... 1. Counterfeits mixed in with legit supply 2. Fraud everywhere 3. Fake prices ($.99 with $30 shipping) 4. Fraudulent reviews 5. the article - Dark patterns everywhere 6. Not competitive with other e-retailers 7. Scammy and fraudulent pricing (raises prices by 10% to have a 10% off sale.. Prime Day) I've migrated to the following for my stuff: walmart online (order and pick up at store for no shipping cost) eBay for random assortments aliexpress for a direct pipeline of electronic chinese stuff mcmaster carr for hardware that lowes and menards doesn't have Misumi for aluminum extrusion IRC topic groups (like freenode #reprap) for 3d printing specific stuffs from individuals Craigslist, but this is obviously realllly spotty Amazon is unreliable, obfuscated, and scammy. I can't even guarantee that what I order is what I'll get. It's just not worth the effort or time.

ccarse 8y ago

It's gotten to the point that I no longer even pay attention to the overall score and instead I look at the reviews and ignore any review that is a 5 star review. I figure people aren't going to pay for reviews that aren't 5 star. If the only other reviews are 1 or 2 stars I know it's probably a crap product. But, if there are a decent number of 4 star reviews I know it's probably a decent product.

o_____________o 8y ago

Or how they intentionally obfuscate the unit pricing of items in the same category? One says $xx per oz, the other $xx per lb, the other $xx per kg... I've been wanting to make a userscript to fix that for a while.

mathgenius 8y ago

I wonder if this is a job for activist investors: buy a bunch of shady stuff on amazon with 5-star reviews, write a lengthy report about how bad all the product is, short AMZN... ?

nodesocket 8y ago

I actualky have those same LED lights. They have been working great for me for over fours months. No complaints.

sbjs 8y ago

At first I thought the only way to genuinely avoid these kind of bots is to have reviewers posting videos, maybe hosted on YouTube to save costs. Videos are the only thing that can't be faked as easily (but they can with 'deep fakes'). But this won't actually solve the problem. These reviews may be fake but they're probably real people being paid to write them, and those real people can just as easily make real review videos. I don't think there is an automated solution to "liars will lie for money". I think the only real solution is brand trust. We have to go back! Back to a time when you knew something was good because it proved that it was good, and word of mouth spread to let you know it was good. Don't trust anonymous word of mouth either.

coryfklein 8y ago
Or only allow paying Prime members to leave reviews. That would cut out the fraud pretty darn quickly.
- sbjs 8y ago
  No, a scammer can say to 10 people "here's $10 to buy get an account, now leave 100 reviews and I'll pay you $1 for each" and that guy himself gets paid $10 per review directly from the seller. The people each made $100, and he spent $110 on each of them, losing $1,100 total, but he made $1,000 of each, so $10,000 total. At the end of the day he made $8,900 by acting as a middle man.
  - fastball 8y ago
    You're not factoring in the fact that if a Prime member participated in this, Amazon could suspend their account without any reimbursement. For most people, chump change is not worth nuking your $99 Prime account. Also, the idea that sellers would pay $10 each for a 5-star review is laughable. It's easy to make something economically viable when you're numbers are complete drivel.

moravak1984 8y ago

I had a similar experience with booking.com reviews. My less than 3 star reviews somehow don't make it, while 4-star reviews go straight to the list. Coincidence?

Animats 8y ago

Amazon's big dark pattern: "No, I don't want to save $25.72." You get that every time you order and don't pay for Prime. Also, the non-Prime "Free Shipping" option requires you to back up and click shipping type to get it. The default path makes you pay for shipping.

xster 8y ago

I loved the interest-specific Reverb.com (for selling new and used musical gear) and made a point to buy stuff there to support the community even if it was more expensive or slower than a 'corporate' alternative. All the sellers' reviews were spectacular and I just thought people would be nicer on this platform because everyone just loved music and it's one big happy family but then I received some crap recently and just realized that they do the same thing and prevent negative reviews buy externalizing the (time and emotional) cost of forcing self-mediation when things go wrong. Talk about a broken heart.

kapad 8y ago

I've also had a review rejected under very similar circumstances. Like the OP, I too was leaving a bad review on a product that I had purchased a few months back. I had purchased the item in a lightning sale though.

amai 8y ago

Please people use and support https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ .

victor106 8y ago

At this point Amazon is a monopoly. And this is exactly why monopolies don't work. Self-regulation does not work. "With great power comes great responsibility" --> We humans only like the power part. Every monopoly that ever existed abuses its monopolistic power for its own benefit.

t0astbread 8y ago

Yup, Amazon is the most unlikable tech giant

Your_Creator 8y ago

scuffed.

androtheos 8y ago

This has pissed me off in the past. My reviews getting rejected. The problem ultimately is that Amazon NOW has separate functions for reviewing a product and a seller. The product reviews are public, the seller reviews are not. If your review of a product is just bagging on the seller, it will be rejected. Like the one your wrote for the weights.

dreadpiratemiky 8y ago

What are some good alternative sites to Amazon?