4 ms·

I now check fakespot before every Amazon purchase.

• BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
  There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.
  • Applejinx 8y ago
    "markets find new ways to cheat people" This is a fascinating construction. To me, it makes perfect sense (and reality seems to be heavily underscoring this perspective) but I feel it challenges some profound assumptions very commonly held by Western culture, about how the world works. If markets replace normal transactions with the optimal ways to cheat people, as a natural consequence of what markets are, how can we disrupt that phenomenon and replace markets with something else that selects for other values?
    • BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
      > how can we disrupt that phenomenon Traditionally the answer to "How can we stop people from getting cheated?" is to introduce consumer protection regulations and actively punish the cheaters.
• bootlooped 8y ago
  Amazon should come up with a proprietary and secret algorithm (the way Google search is) to do the same thing. They are in the best position to do this, since they have all the info. They could leverage purchase history, payment methods, addresses, account age, etc...; they even have the resources to use slightly more invasive information such as credit score. It's knowable what products are having fake reviews bought for them, they could secretly flag accounts suspected of this and lower their weight. Fakespot can't get half of the information Amazon already has. Amazon needs to fix this for themselves.