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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

by 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.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    FakeSpot and ReviewMeta seem to do a decent job of identifying obviously fake Amazon reviews. I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical to the short-term pain/long-term gain implicit in fixing their reviews problem.
    - mike_hearn 8y ago
      How do you know what their FP rate is?
      - alexgmcm 8y ago
        But equally - does it matter? I would rather have less, but more accurate, reviews than have all of them but many of them being fake. It seems like a use-case where a high false positive rate would be acceptable. Unlike say, medical diagnosis or something.
        jsight 8y ago
        The problem is that very few really "good" reviews actually get produced. If you accidentally filter out the really thorough and useful ones, you can end up with "real" reviews that aren't well written and don't really focus on actual product issues. Take, for example, the review of the weights in the article. I would have ignored his review, even if it had been posted. He reviewed Amazon's warehouse rather than the product on hand.
        mike_hearn 8y ago
        If legit reviewers have their work deleted because of FPs they get annoyed and won't write more reviews, they may even stop using the site entirely.
        8y ago
mrtksn 8y ago
If your maybes are valid it simply means that these Amazon guys are new in the business and will figure out how to design user interface once they have the resources.Lets give them a slack, aye? Seriously though, I canceled my prime after I got a fake SD Card that was sold by Amazon. There was no straightforward way of returning it, had to contact customer support. Later I looked closely and I noticed the reviews warning against fake SD Cards but these were buried in enthusiastic 5 star comments celebrating their new SD Cards and trying to tell the world what a good purchase that was. Maybe it’s just due to the scale, maybe it’s in the business model but dealing with fakes wasn’t working for me. If I wanted the eBay experience I would have been buying my SD Cards from eBay.
- SirHound 8y ago
  It's not necessarily a resource problem, from my time there there is an institutional lack of respect toward UX and front end and this is might still be the case. There's also a myriad of custom Perl templates that are essentially impossible to maintain. I once had to investigate where a feedback form sent feedback to, the answer was nowhere for about a year.
  - sizzle 8y ago
    When were you there?
- fouc 8y ago
  What? They make returns very easy to do. There's a form that pops up and many choices for reasons.
  - mrtksn 8y ago
    There was no return option on the SD Card, it was marked as "not eligible for return" so I had to deal with the customer support. I actually went ahead and dug out the conversation for you. This is my refund request: https://imgur.com/bthMMoN https://imgur.com/bthMMoN This is the response from Amazon: https://imgur.com/xWK8FVH https://imgur.com/xWK8FVH Yeah, they refunded me without a fuss but I prefer an experience where the items arrive in expected quality and I keep them. I think I actually kept the Prime membership for a while but I found myself disillusioned and felt uneasy when shopping at Amazon and later canceled as I was no longer buying stuff from Amazon.
TuringTest 8y ago
Well, this bad UX has a positive consequence for Amazon, unintended or not. Products with good reviews generate more sales than those with comments stating problems with the product or delivery process, specially among infrequent buyers. (Frequent buyers may learn to ignore comments altogether, or at least spot valuable comments from fakes). So the bad pattern is not allowing fake reviews as much as it is rejecting legitimate negative reviews.
- arrrg 8y ago
  I would, however, postulate that Amazon is aware that fake positive reviews only buy them short term benefits with long term disadvantages. Having a cheap/free way to evaluate products by letting the customers do it is an advantage, especially if your goal is to sell everything (so you have no hope to evaluate it all yourself) – but it’s only an advantage if some useful signal is provided. With strings of negative purchasing experiences customers might begin to look somewhere else. That’s why Amazon has a vested interest to provide reviews that are more signal than noise.
  - tcbawo 8y ago
    Except, will they look elsewhere? The current trend seems to suggest otherwise.
    - TuringTest 8y ago
      Also, will the sporadic negative experiences be enough for users to leave the site, if they are distributed among all the infrequent buyers?
      - insickness 8y ago
        Maybe not leave the site, but at least distrust negative reviews. I recently bought some towels that had amazing reviews. The towels sucked. That won't make me stop using Amazon for things in which I already have confidence but it will stop me from relying on their reviews. I will buy things like towels elsewhere.
Regardsyjc 8y ago
Amazon has been removing reviews and locking listings from receiving new reviews too while they investigate the past couple of weeks. This is probably the reason. I've also heard that if a listing receives too many reviews in one day, they will prevent it from receiving any new reviews. I think certain unscrupulous sellers have also figured out how to take advantage of that, which is a little funny. Just post all your fake reviews before your unhappy real American customers wake up...
modzu 8y ago
are you kidding me? the algorithm for "top" reviews is approximately synonymous with "hide negative reviews". a stretch to see how it benefits amazon? of course reviews influence purchasing, that's why they're there
leoalves 8y ago
This episode of reply all show how hard it is to identify fake reviews and what seller are doing to fake it. Really interesting in my opinion. https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player
- vxNsr 8y ago
  I actually didn't like that episode because she very clearly said she spent no time looking at the product and just clicked buy. But there are legit reasons to want a UK plug in the US (maybe you're traveling and want to have it with you when you leave). The fact that the seller is trying to game the rankings is more an issue with the rankings system than with the seller. Gaming the rankings/listings isn't an issue exclusive to amazon, every single website has this issue, in fact even phone books (remember those) had to contend with people listing their name with leading A's to try to get to the front. Gaming listings is as old as lists and until we can come up with a solution to that problem we're always gonna have problems like this.
benologist 8y ago
The only thing Amazon is struggling at is prying open their checkbook to pay for oversight and accountability because it would eat into their phenomenal profits. AWS alone generates $20+ million net profit a day (while we perpetuate the rumor it saves money LOL). It wouldn't cost very much to solve all of these problems with human labor, but not solving problems is incredibly important to companies too just like not paying taxes and not having toilet breaks for your warehouse workers.
- bmh100 8y ago
  One situation I found where AWS saves money is in over-capacity situations. If the a company builds a data center that is too large, they are incurring costs for under-utilization. Paying a 50% premium on 100% of resources might still be better than paying 0% premium on 200% of resources. The cloud versus on-premise discussion has many variables, so it all depends on the situation.
cptskippy 8y ago
> An alternative explanation for this is that Amazon is struggling with identifying fake reviews I seriously doubt this. I review most products I purchase and most of the time I leave a description and written review. I tried to leave a 1 star review on an Anker Auxilary Cable I bought that was an "Amazon's Choice" product. I tried for 3 days and every time I receive an error trying to review the product telling me reviews were unavailable. I then tried giving it a 5 star review and it was immediately accepted, at which point I immediately changed the review to 1 star and explained why. * So oddly I just tried to review a piece of electrical safety equipment I purchased through Amazon a few months back. I tried to give it a 3 Star (and 5 star) review and received the "Sorry, we are unable to accept your review of this product." notification. Oddly this product has zero reviews. Are sellers allowed to disable reviews for their product listings? If so, do the existing reviews remain visible?
s73v3r_ 8y ago
I cannot buy any argument along the lines of "maybe it's just bad UX." Amazon has the resources to study and hire the best UX people in the business. There is no excuse for them having a UX problem except that they don't want good UX.

by arrrg 8y ago

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.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  FakeSpot and ReviewMeta seem to do a decent job of identifying obviously fake Amazon reviews. I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical to the short-term pain/long-term gain implicit in fixing their reviews problem.
  - mike_hearn 8y ago
    How do you know what their FP rate is?
    - alexgmcm 8y ago
      But equally - does it matter? I would rather have less, but more accurate, reviews than have all of them but many of them being fake. It seems like a use-case where a high false positive rate would be acceptable. Unlike say, medical diagnosis or something.
      - jsight 8y ago
        The problem is that very few really "good" reviews actually get produced. If you accidentally filter out the really thorough and useful ones, you can end up with "real" reviews that aren't well written and don't really focus on actual product issues. Take, for example, the review of the weights in the article. I would have ignored his review, even if it had been posted. He reviewed Amazon's warehouse rather than the product on hand.
      - mike_hearn 8y ago
        If legit reviewers have their work deleted because of FPs they get annoyed and won't write more reviews, they may even stop using the site entirely.
        8y ago

mrtksn 8y ago

If your maybes are valid it simply means that these Amazon guys are new in the business and will figure out how to design user interface once they have the resources.Lets give them a slack, aye? Seriously though, I canceled my prime after I got a fake SD Card that was sold by Amazon. There was no straightforward way of returning it, had to contact customer support. Later I looked closely and I noticed the reviews warning against fake SD Cards but these were buried in enthusiastic 5 star comments celebrating their new SD Cards and trying to tell the world what a good purchase that was. Maybe it’s just due to the scale, maybe it’s in the business model but dealing with fakes wasn’t working for me. If I wanted the eBay experience I would have been buying my SD Cards from eBay.

SirHound 8y ago
It's not necessarily a resource problem, from my time there there is an institutional lack of respect toward UX and front end and this is might still be the case. There's also a myriad of custom Perl templates that are essentially impossible to maintain. I once had to investigate where a feedback form sent feedback to, the answer was nowhere for about a year.
- sizzle 8y ago
  When were you there?
fouc 8y ago
What? They make returns very easy to do. There's a form that pops up and many choices for reasons.
- mrtksn 8y ago
  There was no return option on the SD Card, it was marked as "not eligible for return" so I had to deal with the customer support. I actually went ahead and dug out the conversation for you. This is my refund request: https://imgur.com/bthMMoN https://imgur.com/bthMMoN This is the response from Amazon: https://imgur.com/xWK8FVH https://imgur.com/xWK8FVH Yeah, they refunded me without a fuss but I prefer an experience where the items arrive in expected quality and I keep them. I think I actually kept the Prime membership for a while but I found myself disillusioned and felt uneasy when shopping at Amazon and later canceled as I was no longer buying stuff from Amazon.

TuringTest 8y ago

Well, this bad UX has a positive consequence for Amazon, unintended or not. Products with good reviews generate more sales than those with comments stating problems with the product or delivery process, specially among infrequent buyers. (Frequent buyers may learn to ignore comments altogether, or at least spot valuable comments from fakes). So the bad pattern is not allowing fake reviews as much as it is rejecting legitimate negative reviews.

arrrg 8y ago
I would, however, postulate that Amazon is aware that fake positive reviews only buy them short term benefits with long term disadvantages. Having a cheap/free way to evaluate products by letting the customers do it is an advantage, especially if your goal is to sell everything (so you have no hope to evaluate it all yourself) – but it’s only an advantage if some useful signal is provided. With strings of negative purchasing experiences customers might begin to look somewhere else. That’s why Amazon has a vested interest to provide reviews that are more signal than noise.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  Except, will they look elsewhere? The current trend seems to suggest otherwise.
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    Also, will the sporadic negative experiences be enough for users to leave the site, if they are distributed among all the infrequent buyers?
    - insickness 8y ago
      Maybe not leave the site, but at least distrust negative reviews. I recently bought some towels that had amazing reviews. The towels sucked. That won't make me stop using Amazon for things in which I already have confidence but it will stop me from relying on their reviews. I will buy things like towels elsewhere.

Regardsyjc 8y ago

Amazon has been removing reviews and locking listings from receiving new reviews too while they investigate the past couple of weeks. This is probably the reason. I've also heard that if a listing receives too many reviews in one day, they will prevent it from receiving any new reviews. I think certain unscrupulous sellers have also figured out how to take advantage of that, which is a little funny. Just post all your fake reviews before your unhappy real American customers wake up...

modzu 8y ago

are you kidding me? the algorithm for "top" reviews is approximately synonymous with "hide negative reviews". a stretch to see how it benefits amazon? of course reviews influence purchasing, that's why they're there

leoalves 8y ago

This episode of reply all show how hard it is to identify fake reviews and what seller are doing to fake it. Really interesting in my opinion. https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player

vxNsr 8y ago
I actually didn't like that episode because she very clearly said she spent no time looking at the product and just clicked buy. But there are legit reasons to want a UK plug in the US (maybe you're traveling and want to have it with you when you leave). The fact that the seller is trying to game the rankings is more an issue with the rankings system than with the seller. Gaming the rankings/listings isn't an issue exclusive to amazon, every single website has this issue, in fact even phone books (remember those) had to contend with people listing their name with leading A's to try to get to the front. Gaming listings is as old as lists and until we can come up with a solution to that problem we're always gonna have problems like this.

benologist 8y ago

The only thing Amazon is struggling at is prying open their checkbook to pay for oversight and accountability because it would eat into their phenomenal profits. AWS alone generates $20+ million net profit a day (while we perpetuate the rumor it saves money LOL). It wouldn't cost very much to solve all of these problems with human labor, but not solving problems is incredibly important to companies too just like not paying taxes and not having toilet breaks for your warehouse workers.

bmh100 8y ago
One situation I found where AWS saves money is in over-capacity situations. If the a company builds a data center that is too large, they are incurring costs for under-utilization. Paying a 50% premium on 100% of resources might still be better than paying 0% premium on 200% of resources. The cloud versus on-premise discussion has many variables, so it all depends on the situation.

cptskippy 8y ago

> An alternative explanation for this is that Amazon is struggling with identifying fake reviews I seriously doubt this. I review most products I purchase and most of the time I leave a description and written review. I tried to leave a 1 star review on an Anker Auxilary Cable I bought that was an "Amazon's Choice" product. I tried for 3 days and every time I receive an error trying to review the product telling me reviews were unavailable. I then tried giving it a 5 star review and it was immediately accepted, at which point I immediately changed the review to 1 star and explained why. * So oddly I just tried to review a piece of electrical safety equipment I purchased through Amazon a few months back. I tried to give it a 3 Star (and 5 star) review and received the "Sorry, we are unable to accept your review of this product." notification. Oddly this product has zero reviews. Are sellers allowed to disable reviews for their product listings? If so, do the existing reviews remain visible?

s73v3r_ 8y ago

I cannot buy any argument along the lines of "maybe it's just bad UX." Amazon has the resources to study and hire the best UX people in the business. There is no excuse for them having a UX problem except that they don't want good UX.