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I still don't understand why Amazon has done so little to combat the plague of fake reviews. It seems like it's something that's going to blow up eventually and

by gav 8y ago

I still don't understand why Amazon has done so little to combat the plague of fake reviews. It seems like it's something that's going to blow up eventually and bite them. Along those lines: why do they still value reviews that aren't associated with a purchase? This is the logical first step.

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
I think you can assume that Amazon operates in its own best interest. If fake reviews were hurting sales, it'd stop them within weeks. I'm guessing, for the time being, they're helping sales. Although, I haven't bought anything on Amazon in 3 years now, and I never will again. I think this problem is creating HUGE long-term downsides. Those are a lot tougher to calculate/quantify than the short-term benefits, though.
- fossuser 8y ago
  I wonder what the actual outcome is for sales - fake reviews and counterfeit products have driven me to purchase a certain class of items directly from the manufacturer and not on Amazon. Maybe most people don't bother with this though?
  - appsonify 8y ago
    I no longer have amazon prime-had an awful experience with getting shit shipped, and come to think of it most were cheap alibaba electronics with markup. but when I need some cables or other mundane things, it's convenient, although I don't really need it ASAP TMR like with Prime. I found that it puts a lot of pressure on the couriers and it just ruins the experience for everybody involved. The end of this quarter for Amazon will disappoint.
    - trumped 8y ago
      monoprice.com used to be better for cables and stuff like that... haven't use them in a while though..
jedberg 8y ago
> Along those lines: why do they still value reviews that aren't associated with a purchase? This is the logical first step. Sometimes I review products on Amazon that I purchased elsewhere to help others who might be considering the product. If we didn't have fraud, those would be really useful.
- dylan604 8y ago
  But your non-purchase review doesn't prove that the actual item sold on Amazon isn't a fake. That's the whole point of knock-offs. They want you to purchase on the expectation that reviews/experience of the real item will be all the "advertising" needed to sell their knock-off. If you haven't purchased the item, the review should not be allowed to be made.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    Yes like I said in a world where we don’t have fake products and fake reviews, there is value in a review from someone who didn’t purchase. Amazon still pretends we are in a world without fake reviews and fake products which is why they allow it.
mipmap04 8y ago
Here's a hypothesis: people are more likely to buy a product when they see it has a large number of reviews and ultimately Amazon cares about moving product.
riazrizvi 8y ago
Because 1) having any reviews at all drives purchases because of a social proof effect (see Influence - Cialdini). 2) Amazon are not liable because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (platform operators shall not be treated like the content publishers who create information on those platform).
inoop 8y ago
Because it's a really, really hard problem to solve. The sheer scale of Amazon combined with razor thin margins and the fact that Amazon isn't even the selling party on most products means that they can't just throw a bunch of manual labor at the problem. It's a similar problem to YouTube still hosting tons of copyrighted material. Fraud is just super hard to fight.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  It has to be somewhere between "not enough resources to fix" and "wow, we are making a ton of money off this 'problem!'" There are so many patterns of low-hanging fruit: "I haven't used it yet but it looks great" "Seems ok" "It's useful" "The shipping was slow" On any given product with any measure of popularity, probably 10-20% of reviews consist of those formats. One-word sentences with some kind of bland/useless assertion. You're telling me the people who have massive clusters of machines and who resell tools for machine learning can't at least pick off the easiest 20% of shitty or fake reviews? Hell, give me two days, a few regexes, and a script and I'll do it myself. It's really that easy. They just don't care. That said, yes, beyond that lower-hanging fruit, the problem is insanely hard to tackle. But why not crowdsource it? People posting reviews saying "Sandy Hook was a liberal hoax" on a book about the Sandy Hook shooting could be flagged and marked for review.
  - kian 8y ago
    If it's that easy to fix, and helpful, a chrome or firefox extension seems warranted. Do you have two days to spare? Let me know when you're finished, I'll definitely use it. ;-)
    - orthecreedence 8y ago
      It would be much harder to fix on the browser side, because you'd have to page through all the reviews (sometimes tens of thousands) and remove fakes, then re-adjust the star amounts. That said, it could be done...would probably take more than two days without direct access to the data though!
  - 8y ago
trumped 8y ago
Amazon even blocks legitimate negative reviews toward its own products... They will do whatever it takes to increase revenues.

by gav 8y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago

I think you can assume that Amazon operates in its own best interest. If fake reviews were hurting sales, it'd stop them within weeks. I'm guessing, for the time being, they're helping sales. Although, I haven't bought anything on Amazon in 3 years now, and I never will again. I think this problem is creating HUGE long-term downsides. Those are a lot tougher to calculate/quantify than the short-term benefits, though.

fossuser 8y ago
I wonder what the actual outcome is for sales - fake reviews and counterfeit products have driven me to purchase a certain class of items directly from the manufacturer and not on Amazon. Maybe most people don't bother with this though?
- appsonify 8y ago
  I no longer have amazon prime-had an awful experience with getting shit shipped, and come to think of it most were cheap alibaba electronics with markup. but when I need some cables or other mundane things, it's convenient, although I don't really need it ASAP TMR like with Prime. I found that it puts a lot of pressure on the couriers and it just ruins the experience for everybody involved. The end of this quarter for Amazon will disappoint.
  - trumped 8y ago
    monoprice.com used to be better for cables and stuff like that... haven't use them in a while though..

jedberg 8y ago

> Along those lines: why do they still value reviews that aren't associated with a purchase? This is the logical first step. Sometimes I review products on Amazon that I purchased elsewhere to help others who might be considering the product. If we didn't have fraud, those would be really useful.

dylan604 8y ago
But your non-purchase review doesn't prove that the actual item sold on Amazon isn't a fake. That's the whole point of knock-offs. They want you to purchase on the expectation that reviews/experience of the real item will be all the "advertising" needed to sell their knock-off. If you haven't purchased the item, the review should not be allowed to be made.
- jedberg 8y ago
  Yes like I said in a world where we don’t have fake products and fake reviews, there is value in a review from someone who didn’t purchase. Amazon still pretends we are in a world without fake reviews and fake products which is why they allow it.

mipmap04 8y ago

Here's a hypothesis: people are more likely to buy a product when they see it has a large number of reviews and ultimately Amazon cares about moving product.

riazrizvi 8y ago

Because 1) having any reviews at all drives purchases because of a social proof effect (see Influence - Cialdini). 2) Amazon are not liable because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (platform operators shall not be treated like the content publishers who create information on those platform).

inoop 8y ago

Because it's a really, really hard problem to solve. The sheer scale of Amazon combined with razor thin margins and the fact that Amazon isn't even the selling party on most products means that they can't just throw a bunch of manual labor at the problem. It's a similar problem to YouTube still hosting tons of copyrighted material. Fraud is just super hard to fight.

orthecreedence 8y ago
It has to be somewhere between "not enough resources to fix" and "wow, we are making a ton of money off this 'problem!'" There are so many patterns of low-hanging fruit: "I haven't used it yet but it looks great" "Seems ok" "It's useful" "The shipping was slow" On any given product with any measure of popularity, probably 10-20% of reviews consist of those formats. One-word sentences with some kind of bland/useless assertion. You're telling me the people who have massive clusters of machines and who resell tools for machine learning can't at least pick off the easiest 20% of shitty or fake reviews? Hell, give me two days, a few regexes, and a script and I'll do it myself. It's really that easy. They just don't care. That said, yes, beyond that lower-hanging fruit, the problem is insanely hard to tackle. But why not crowdsource it? People posting reviews saying "Sandy Hook was a liberal hoax" on a book about the Sandy Hook shooting could be flagged and marked for review.
- kian 8y ago
  If it's that easy to fix, and helpful, a chrome or firefox extension seems warranted. Do you have two days to spare? Let me know when you're finished, I'll definitely use it. ;-)
  - orthecreedence 8y ago
    It would be much harder to fix on the browser side, because you'd have to page through all the reviews (sometimes tens of thousands) and remove fakes, then re-adjust the star amounts. That said, it could be done...would probably take more than two days without direct access to the data though!
- 8y ago

trumped 8y ago

Amazon even blocks legitimate negative reviews toward its own products... They will do whatever it takes to increase revenues.