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Amazon ‘flooded by fake five-star reviews’ – report

579 points by drugme 8y ago

tlrobinson 8y ago
Why even bother allowing unverified purchase reviews?
- rlayton2 8y ago
  I think there can be lots of value in them, but only in the long-form review, where the product is described and evaluated. Aggregating the numbers makes no sense.
- dingaling 8y ago
  That really only works for high-demand, current products. Back when I used to be engaged with Amazom I wrote a lot of reviews for out-of-print secondhand books that I borrowed from libraries or bought from specialist shops. I was usually quite harsh with my reviews but was often the only reviewer and usually the book was out of stock at the time. People seemed to appreciate the long-tail reviews and I was up in the top 100 UK 'most helpful' reviewer list. If I had only reviewed books I'd bought on Amazon I would have written about 10% as many reviews.
cptskippy 8y ago
I received an email at least once a month, to an address I used exclusively for Amazon purchases, inviting me to join a website that will reimburse me via PayPal if I purchase products and review them. I have forwarded the emails to Amazon a couple times explaining that my email address is used exclusively for them making it easier to narrow down who might be sending these emails. They always respond with a warning that my account might be suspended if I partake in such sites.
- urda 8y ago
  E-mail jeff@amazon.com
  - swiley 8y ago
    Any particular reason this is down voted? I guess he doesn't give us any reason to believe it's a good idea to do that either.
    - shard972 8y ago
      I think some people are just mad for whatever reason. Maybe they really like amazon? Or maybe jeff? Or maybe they find the idea of a CEO email address that is never actually read by the CEO to be just silly in general. I don't know for sure, someone will need to speak up.
    - luckylion 8y ago
      I didn't downvote it, but it sounds a bit like "learn to code" to me. "Go tell amazon" isn't a feasible strategy when Amazon's general disinterest is a big part of the problem.
- harry8 8y ago
  Blog it with any specific info you want to protect redacted. Give newspapers and equity analysts a chance to find what you are saying backed by evidence. This is the only way $BIGCO will ever care. Do you care enough to do it. I probably wouldn't.
- luckylion 8y ago
  Same here. Cryptic alias on my own domain that I never use for anything else. It's rare though, I get one spam email to that address once every few months now, and it's always shopping/review-related. I've contacted Amazon to ask how, when and with whom they shared my email address and their response was basically "we don't ever, but here's a month of free prime for your trouble".
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    I wonder what you're saying that I'm not, I never managed to unlock a free month of prime.
- helloindia 8y ago
  There are public facebook groups, where sellers buy Amazon reviews. https://outline.com/qTE2TY https://outline.com/qTE2TY
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
News at 11. Seriously? Go hang out at Amazon for a hot second. You'll see: 1. Fraudulent products 2. Fake products 3. Ripoff obvious clones 4. Fake stores 5. Fake reviews (5 star AND good 1 star like the bot got mixed up) 6. Bad of the above mixed in the supply of the "good" legit products 7. Amazon Piss bottles (0) Amazon is now, what Walmart was 10 years ago - a scourge and a horror to work at for any length of time. It's no surprise that a company that was to sell off even more underlying ethics would be walmart at their own game.(1) In that, Walmart only has the upper hand because of local stores... (0) https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-into-bottles-to-avoid-wasting-time-undercover-investigator/ https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i... (1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- int_19h 8y ago
  You forgot another category: products that are outright illegal. For example, "oil filters" that are basically silencers, or Glock full auto conversion parts. https://smile.amazon.com/JINJULI-Tactical-Semi-Automatic-Cover-Plate/dp/B07Q146R99 https://smile.amazon.com/JINJULI-Tactical-Semi-Automatic-Cov... (google "Glock FSSG" to see what this actually is) https://smile.amazon.com/Filter-Aluminum-24003-Durable-Construction/dp/B079KT7NWZ/ https://smile.amazon.com/Filter-Aluminum-24003-Durable-Const... (note the reviews and questions on this one) Now, to Amazon's credit, when you report these, they do take the ones that are unambiguously illegal down. The problem is that they get re-posted under a slightly different title within a few hours.
  - groby_b 8y ago
    "will this make a .223 lawn mower engine quieter" O_o
    - int_19h 8y ago
      To clarify, 1/2"x28 is the standard thread pitch used on most .22 and 9mm caliber firearms for muzzle attachments. In most cases it's a flash hider or a recoil compensator, but suppressors can attach in the same way. Also, this one is an example of an "ambiguously legal" listing. The thing is, after all, an actual oil filter, albeit a poorly made one. Owning it alongside with a firearm it can attach to would likely constitute constructive possession of an unregistered NFA item, but that's buyer's problem. Although I would imagine the seller can still be sued if it can be proven that they knew how most of their customers are using them (which is evident from reviews), and intentionally designed them for that purpose. But, well, good luck suing a noname Chinese merchant.
matthewfcarlson 8y ago
My issue with Amazon reviews is the ease that sellers are able to change the product and keep the reviews. I recently tried to buy a decent pair of USB C headphones. The top two recommended products both had 5 starts with hundreds of verified reviews... for a dvd copy of a classic movie. I've decided I just can't trust Amazon reviews anymore.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  This is yet again another, surely well-known 'leak' in how products are presented and displayed, since it can still happen, Amazon is tacitly complicit with the fraud. Most of these issues could be mostly cleared up with some basic operational policies: purchase only reviews (or sideline the others), no 'changing the product', some degree of manufacturer verification etc.. But they chose not to do it.
  - lugg 8y ago
    Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products. Manufacturers don't get to claim this year's junk is so much better than last year's junk that I just have to buy it all the while claiming it's the same product. What a joke.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      "Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products." Because Amazon has chosen to allow that, for reasons which probably have to do with money. The comments here indicate a surprising degree of naivte on this issue i.e. "I head to email jeff@amazon.com about this" - as if after 20 years of operations Amazon isn't 100% aware of all of these issues. Of course they know what's going on. In detail. If Amazon were some old, big, dumb company with slow moving ops, barely competent staff, then we could write all this off as lack of operational competence - but it's not. Amazon is actually a very well run and operationally competent company from top to bottom, and Bezos is a hands-on leader, intimately involved. Folks: Bezos knows exactly what is happening. Since they haven't made very small adjustments which could help fix a variety of these issues, it's not due to 'lack of will' - it's a choice that Amazon has made. Amazon wants lots of 5 star fake reviews by unverified sources or they would just get rid of them, which they could do, instantly, by sidelining reviews with no purchase, for example. Among a variety of other things. It's unbelievable the level of hagiography that goes on with these 'industry leaders' that we build up like Jobs, Zuck, Bezos, Welch etc. - especially when we have issues waiving us right in the face. I accept that business at scale is 'making sausage' and there will be unpleasant things. Factory workers can't make $80K (probably). We inherently lose some privacy on social media. There will be some fake reviews and fraud no matter what. Surely. But the scope and level of chicanery, combined with the fact these companies haven't made obvious changes proves they are complicit and it should definitely weigh into how we think of these companies and individuals. FYI people can do 'good stuff' and 'bad stuff' at the same time. Bezos and Zuck can build/fund schools for kids at the same time they are doing totally unscrupulous stuff, it's not a paradox. Fraud, fake reviews etc. is a problem not dealt with remotely enough by Amazon, this is obvious and the fault/concern is theirs, and it's Jeff Bezos - as founder, owner, CEO world's richest person to do it. Literally the richest guy in the world is gaining this wealth in part by promoting tons of counterfeit goods with fake reviews - 2019.
apacheCamel 8y ago
Like everything else online, do your research. I assume we all know plenty of people who have taken online reviews at face value, I have done it myself. Like most other things on the internet, they can be faked. It is sad that people take advantage of good faith systems like this and do not feel the consequences. Side note: Having the consumer group be named "Which?" and to include the question mark in it makes it jolting to read in the middle of a sentence. I can't tell if I like the name or dislike it a lot.
- acdha 8y ago
  > Like everything else online, do your research. There are many categories where this advice sounds a lot easier than it is. There’s a whole industry creating fake review sites, farming things out to people for favorable social media reviews, etc. and it takes a non-trivial amount of time and skill to figure out which sources are reliable. As long as the internet runs on advertising there’s no reason to expect this to get easier since companies like Google make considerable amounts of money from all of those ads.
  - apacheCamel 8y ago
    While I agree with you, I am not sure what the alternative you are searching for is. Either you don't buy it, or put in enough diligence to find out more about the product you are purchasing. I would assume a normal person would put in the amount of effort that somewhat equates to the value of what they are buying. I would never spend days researching the best brand of umbrella to buy (not knocking umbrellas) but I would if it was a mouse or maybe keyboard. The mouse has a higher perceived value to me and makes it worth it. Also, word of mouth is still relevant and probably always will be. If my friends/family enjoy a product, I am inclined to believe I will too.
l8nite 8y ago
I've started using fakespot.com for every purchase from Amazon, has saved me from making a bad purchase more than once.
- drexlspivey 8y ago
  I love this kind of market based solutions. I entered the product from the other comment and it gave it an F. https://www.fakespot.com/product/kuppet-macbook-pro-charger-85w-macbook-charger-with-t-tip-85w-charger-power-adapter-for-macbook-pro-air-13-inch-15-inch-17inch-compatible-with-all-macbooks-produced-after-mid-2012-44deeb43-5dbc-42d5-9903-44a178309d8f https://www.fakespot.com/product/kuppet-macbook-pro-charger-...
- anitil 8y ago
  Do they have a plugin? I feel like that would make life a lot easier - you don't have to go to a second domain, just look at the listing and the plugin puts a big "Don't Buy" banner over it
  - bruxis 8y ago
    There is a Chrome extension[0] available. I personally find FakeSpot best used to help avoid bad buys -- not to ensure that buys are going to be good (due to adversarial gaming, or FakeSpot itself being targeted). [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-fake-ama/nakplnnackehceedgkgkokbgbmfghain https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- sytelus 8y ago
  Even better is "Made in XYZ" in description. If you are putting something in/on your body, this is absolutely important. But even if you are not, my experience is that products made in countries with trustworthy legal systems lasts 2X to 10X longer. One thing that surprises me is that why online stores are not forced to display this explicitly. When you go to brick-and-mortar store, you can almost always look for this label but Amazon doesn't enforce it on their listing.
externalreality 8y ago
It's not just Amazon its everything. Companies spend large quantities of money on media control, we all know this. I probably a hand full of media companies in the USA, China, and India that are selling a review control service.
- BenoitEssiambre 8y ago
  Yeah and I feel the bots or human assisted bots are getting more and more sophisticated. Even here on hacker news it feels like there is something less organic than before about posts and comments rankings. It may be that I am getting old and that the culture has changed but I'm not sure...
  - externalreality 8y ago
    If I was to setup such a service I would have a simple text bot scanning popular sites for occurrences of my brand name and when a hit occurs it would make an Amazon Mechanical Turk ticket so that workers in Nepal could log a system that cycles accounts to that service so that they can leave a good review to counter the bad one. 10 cents a "counter" review. Why spend a bunch of money for in-organic robo-reviews when you can have real people writing reviews for dirt cheap. A second service would be to have Americans pressure a site to have detrimental user content removed. For example, if someone starts a thread about how the name of my product was stolen from an indigenous community's recipe, our service would nip that in the bud. Your brand management department would love us. These services already exist.
jiveturkey 8y ago
unverified != fake!! Most of my reviews are "unverified", because I purchase elsewhere. But because amazon is a great aggregator of reviews, I want to pay it back by helping others. Now of course, there are indeed many fake reviews, but this article does a terrible job of explaining the situation.
- dRaBoQ 8y ago
  The article mentions a case where 439 unverified reviews were all posted on the same day for one kind of not-known brand headphones.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Not really. Unverified de-facto = fake. Because unverified reviews are easy to make, then it follows manufacturers will just flood the system with fake one's. Which they do. Unverified boils down to fake.
dRaBoQ 8y ago
What bothers more even more is the injection of sponsored ads that ignore not just the keywords you search for, but even the filters like price. I search for a brand name watch or camera with a price of 300$+ and half of the results are no-name knockoff 25$ watches without even an easy visual way to distinguish them. They just put a very faint "Sponsored" that you have to squint hard to see it.
mmanfrin 8y ago
A couple months ago, I googled 'whiteboard amazon', clicked the first result, and was taken to a well structured amazon page for a whiteboard that had 5 stars. Looking at it a little closer, I noticed that of the 143 reviews, 143 were 5 star reviews. On top of it, every review followed a similar structure, was made by an account that had thousands of 5 star reviews, and was so beyond the pale obvious fraudulent that I felt the need to email jeff@amazon. Today I was looking at some vitamins, and I checked every single result for a certain supplement that was 4 or 5 stars and every single one of them ranked D or worse on FakeSpot. How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? 100% of reviews coming in for a product on the same day? MAYBE THAT'S A SIGN, AMAZON. Amazon reviews are worse than garbage now.
- _jal 8y ago
  > How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? How do you know they don't, and have via whatever mechanism decided that they make more money if they choose not to?
  - thinkloop 8y ago
    It's impossible that giving customers sub-optimal recommendations is good for amazon.
    - zwkrt 8y ago
      My theory is that they have metrics for selection they are trying to optimize. If customers only bought the 10 best of any item, how could some PM get a promotion for increasing phone charger selection 100x?
    - tspike 8y ago
      Definitely not, long-term. But plug it into a product manager's A/B test and I guarantee it boosts things short-term.
      - thinkloop 8y ago
gesman 8y ago
'r/flooded by/depends on/'
ginger123 8y ago
If you are buying electronics, buy it from Best Buy, Costco, Target, Walmart or another retailer with a physical store. Best Buy matches Amazon's prices and their merchandise is not fake.
- dRaBoQ 8y ago
  and it has US warranty. When I had an issue with my MotoZ (which I got through same-day Prime delivery), Motorolla told me they won't cover it because the IMEI said its from India and can only be covered if I send it to India.
- russdill 8y ago
  B&H
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    True. they seem pretty solid. Do they do price matching?
    - Causality1 8y ago
      They have a good return policy. They let me return three LG V30's in a row purely on the basis of customer dissatisfaction(LG's shite poled technology creating areas of uneven color temperature.)
  - PenguinCoder 8y ago
    B&H is my go to got certain electronics these days. I've always gotten exactly what I expected. Shipping cost seem higher, but I can deal with it for most part.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    We've gone with B&H in the last year and they are great. They also have educational institution discounts. Plus, they don't do strange things with the shipping.
  - imjk 8y ago
will_pseudonym 8y ago
"ReviewMeta, a US-based website that analyses online reviews, said it was shocked at the scale of the unverified reviews, saying they were "obvious and easy to prevent"." Unverified reviews may be easy to prevent by disabling unverified reviews, but then the scam just includes one extra step, having each account reviewing a product purchase the item on Amazon, then reimburse the account. Easy verified purchase. You also would lose out on actual purchasers who bought it elsewhere than Amazon who would want to leave reviews. The problem of bad reviews is definitely an unsolved problem, as even if you build in trust mechanisms (and Amazon surely does this already), the scammers will build networks of self-reinforcing bots. You could calibrate the system to heavily discount reviews of reviewers which have any "scam" tags, but then the networks would just take longer to build, leaving legit reviews to build up trust, and then leaving false reviews after having built up that trust. These cat and mouse games will go on a long time. The same issues happen across every open network where identity isn't verified. As much as I (and others historically) have benefited from pseudonymity, it's definitely being weaponized (Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc) to benefit certain entities (companies, governments, etc), and the ultimate result is a loss of trust in the networks at large. I don't know what the solution will be, but the solution will be incredibly valuable. I've thought about some sort of hybrid account handle system where you have one account that has two handles associated with it -- one, your real-world name, and another your pseudonym, but the single account is verified by real-world ID. As a contributor to the network, you could post as your pseudonym or your real world name, depending on the contribution that you are comfortable making, and as a consumer of the network, you could choose at any time to only view content of the network posted by real-world names, or pseudonyms. This would limit the number of possible astroturfed accounts, but still allow for sensitive discussion of heated matters. Just throwing the idea out there because the need for some kind of solution to this destruction in network quality is something that affects us all.
- 8note 8y ago
  the problem you'll run into is making sure those "real IDs" are actually real IDs
gringoDan 8y ago
Reply All did a great podcast in Amazon's recent drop in quality: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 Highly recommend.
taytus 8y ago
I'm always on the boat of: "The community votes what to read" but I've seen this subject on the HN's home page over and over and over. Isn't this an old story? Are people discovering this about Amazon's reviews and upvoting out of curiosity or am I reading HN way too frequently?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
steve19 8y ago
How about simply filtering amazon reviews that are only left by people with a wide variety of expenditure and who spend over $500/year?
- russdill 8y ago
  Even if you add the ability to filter, it won't help unless it's the default. You'll still have a huge number of buyers choosing the product due to fake reviews and driving up the sales numbers. Since they aren't the smartest shoppers, they're also likely to leave their own review and be influenced by the other 5 star reviews.
blibble 8y ago
I no longer buy from Amazon: batteries, chargers, flash drives/SD cards, any sort of food (or container for food) essentially only stuff that's completely obvious if it's fake, or if it's too expensive/niche to bother counterfeiting
- weiming 8y ago
  Have you had actual experiences with fake food? Some reviews for bottles of Evian or Fiji water sounded alarming when I wanted to order from Amazon (labels attached incorrectly, bottle cap unusual tint, things like that), so we just stuck with local supermarket delivery.
  - blibble 8y ago
    not personally but a work colleague had an experience with a load of fake tea bags (big saving on amazon? I wonder why!)
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  batteries, chargers, flash drives/SD cards, any sort of food Also printer toner. The asking price is close to the price quoted on the manufacturer's website, but you never know if you'll get an original, a half-empty or a remanufactured cartridge, and the reviews reflect that. The cherry on top is that if you try to sell a spare cartridge yourself Amazon won't let you sell toner, you need to apply for permission!
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  For batteries, AmazonBasics is pretty reliable
  - blibble 8y ago
    it's an awful state of affairs if you can only buy Amazon own branded goods because everything else is potentially fake I'm not rewarding them for their incompetence
wetpaws 8y ago
This is my go to tool when dealing with Amazon reviews: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ 99% of products feature a least some of fake 5 stars. Only very good brands don't rely on them, I usually buy from them even if they have 4-star rating.
tasty_freeze 8y ago
I wish I kept a link, but there was looking to buy a book on music theory or something similar. One of the books had 13 or so reviews, all glowing. Many were of the form "Exactly what I was looking for!" or "Just perfect!" with nothing more. Two of them had the same surprising word that made no sense in the context of the sentence: both reviews used the word "goal." Then it hit me: either the directions telling them what to review or in their own attempt to translate to English, the auto-translation picked the wrong synonym, choosing "goal" instead of "score."
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Yea, and spurious reviews are egregious on other markets such as booking.com, etc. Booking sites dont just use fake reviews, but also hide or even delete bad reviews. I've personally seen this because I travel a lot. As much as I dislike Google, they act as a neutral third-party for hosting hotel and restaurant reviews. Amazon howrver wants good reviews on products to make sales.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  Or the reviews were being run through an overeager text spinner.
- tapland 8y ago
  I sometimes miss my browser translating reviews on amazon.de and get very, very confused.
sundayedition 8y ago
One product (power bricks for MacBooks) had over 1000 5 stars, then the 1 star reviews came in where people actually had their power adapters catch on fire. Amazon, or maybe the seller, shut the review/product down. Now, it's back: https://www.amazon.com/KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacBooks-Produced/dp/B07P56DJLV/ref=mp_s_a_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Kuppet+macbook&qid=1555375810&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull https://www.amazon.com/KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacB... Lots of verified purchases. All the reviews are within the same date range. It doesn't take machine learning or advanced AI to catch this; a simple SQL statement should be enough to flag these. But still, they persist.
- harry8 8y ago
  Ergo, Amazon cannot do Stats/ML/AI/call it what you will. The claims that they have an AI advantage don't pass the sniff test.
  - sytelus 8y ago
    It's not ML/AI problem. The problem is that Amazon wasn't able to punish counterfeiters financially or legally which in turn may be because they don't have a process to ensure seller identity that is legally traceable. This is equivalent to someone coming to BestBuy, sell to them bunch of fake products and get away with it without a scratch every single time. You wouldn't blame that BestBuy doesn't have AI system, would you?
    - shrikant 8y ago
      It doesn't actually what the nature of the problem domain itself is, in this case -- you can't solve a problem that you don't want to.
technofiend 8y ago
My cynical nature assumes some Amazon MBA has done the math and concluded that the gain in revenue from Amazon-only brands will exceed that lost from people abandoning the rest. This is based on the assumption that Amazon's Fulfilled By Amazon cobranding program does not allow third party participation for Amazon's in-house brands like Amazon Basic. In light of that admittedly negative view what's Amazon's motivation to limit fake reviews since it doesn't damage their own brands, albeit at the cost of damaging their brand as a whole.
- tracker1 8y ago
  At this point, I trust the Amazon brands less than the knockoffs. Half of the amazon labelled products I've used didn't work well or very long.
  - technofiend 8y ago
    Really? My experience has been universally positive so far. To be fair to Amazon and maybe I've just drunk too much SV koolaid but I assume there are some very smart people actually working on the two related problems: validating both reviewers and supply-chain members to reduce fraud. It just remains to be seen how they solve the problem.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
maxxxxx 8y ago
I never thought it would get that way but I feel more comfortable now buying from ebay from a seller with good feedback. Amazon is such a cesspool of weird sellers. For example I looked for flashes of Godox brand. Listings had "Godox" in the title but when I looked at the listings they were all from different sellers and not from Godox. I think is intentionally misleading by Amazon. As a tech person I sort of understand what's going on but a lot of people trust Amazon and don't understand that Amazon isn't really the seller and does nothing against sleazy listings.
jerkstate 8y ago
The only reviews worth reading on any site are 1 and 2-star reviews. I honestly don’t care if someone is happy with a product, I want to know what the problems might happen or what situations it doesn’t work for. I recently paid for a Consumer Reports digital subscription to get reviews for appliances and it’s been worth every penny of the very reasonable $35 annual subscription.
- int_19h 8y ago
  I disagree. Most 5-star reviews are garbage, but sometimes you find one that goes into great detail about real-world device specs from their own measurements, and even disassemble them and note various upsides and downsides of the design. And conversely, many 1- and 2-star reviews are also garbage - the most common case is when the reviewer complains about item not being delivered or delivered late, or not what they wanted due to some misunderstanding. What's really needed IMO is some kind of reputation for reviewers, that is easy to track.
psadri 8y ago
My theory is that amazon’s new business model is increasingly going to be based on advertising. Reliable reviews are incompatible with advertising revenue (why else would you have to advertise heavily if your products are really the best). The same observation may explain the doscountinuation of Amazon Button. Button would reorder the same product/brand over and over again - not compatible with advertising by competitors.
- luckylion 8y ago
  Amazon is making money on all sides: ads, "amazon's choice", and when you buy something that will break soon, you buy twice, and Amazon gets their commission twice. So far, I don't see any incentive for them to change anything.
52-6F-62 8y ago
Is it possible there's a gulf between Amazon.com and Amazon.ca when it comes to these issues? Maybe it's just in what I shop for but I haven't received a single counterfeit item, or come across fraudulent listings. I've seen my fair share of imitation (and probably trademark-infringing) products and cheap crap, but I try and avoid that stuff. So my experience has largely been positive—but there's no shortage of horror stories. That seems the norm around this board. So I wonder is it just worse on the American side? (for reasons of volume or targeted marketing or whatever)
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  I’m in America and I too am confused at all the negative comments about counterfeits. I’ve personally ordered hundreds of items from Amazon, but never a counterfeit
  - rattlesnakedave 8y ago
    HN is legitimately the only place I’ve seen this complaint. I really wonder if it’s HNs buying practices that are the problem.
    - daniel-cussen 8y ago
      Well I suppose this comment is HN too from your perspective, but I also thought it was all HN until it happened to me. I was looking for Apple earphones, and found Apple earphones, and ordered them and it all looked great until they showed up, with a little cable tie in a clear plastic bag. And they worked, but when I then ordered Apple earphones off the Apple Apple branded Apple part of Amazon (which took a while to find and is covered in ads of knockoff Apple) I ordered them at the much higher price of $29.99. They arrived packaged in legit Apple trade dress, and I unfolded them from the cardboard packaging which I then used for the first Apple-but-not-Apple-Apple earphones. I first compared the two and sure enough they had minute differences and the Apple-Apple earphones sounded better...hard to say why but noticeably, and were louder at max volume, which is a difficult technical accomplishment. And the mic and buttons worked properly. Plus that packaging was as beautiful as Apple packaging has always been, I regarded it when it was empty as a paper insect that could be pinned to framed insectologist menagerie. At any rate, I didn't lose much money and got more or less what I wanted, but... Acting as a basic Joe Consumer I can tell fakes from reals with nothing but a browser, three minutes, and a simple checklist. Why can't Amazon which has a fucking battalion of mercenary machine learning cyborgs do the same a trillion times faster and cheaper and save me the (I can't believe I'm logging on to Amazon to check how much I wasted...) $12.70 I blew buying from "CR Land"?
Causality1 8y ago
Amazon needs to disallow unverified reviews. Their current acceptance is a holdover from a time where people were much more likely to have bought a product somewhere other than Amazon. Amazon needed these outside reviews to curate its own offerings and give customers confidence in their shopping choices. That hasn't been the case for a decade now. Amazon should delete all non-verified reviews entirely.
burlesona 8y ago
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but at some point in the last year or so I completely lost trust in purchasing goods on Amazon. I’ve been a Prime customer since Prime launched. I loved it for a decade. It used to be an automatic reflex for me: need something? Type it in Amazon and click buy. But now I don’t trust Amazon search results at all, and when I do purchase I only do it via direct product links from other sites I trust (like Wirecutter or the manufacturer’s site). Increasingly I buy direct from the brands websites. I wanted to drop Prime this year. My wife argued we should keep it because the kids watch a lot of Prime Video. But we’ve already got Netflix, and with Disney launching their thing I think I’d rather buy that than stick with Prime any longer. Not sure where Amazon is headed, and I wish the fate of AWS and Whole Foods weren’t at least somewhat tied up in the fate of Amazon’s retail operation.
- istjohn 8y ago
  AWS is wildly profitable for Amazon. I don't think you need to worry about AWS going anywhere. It's the goose that lays the golden eggs.
  - empath75 8y ago
    Kubernetes is going to absolutely wreck aws’s profit margins on the 3-5 year time frame, imo.
    - xfkechyk 8y ago
      How so?
- Theodores 8y ago
  Find Lock Picking Lawyer on YouTube and his reviews of the locks Amazon recommend. See him open them in seconds. Share videos with wife. She will be with you on cutting the umbilical cord to Amazon after that. The locks they recommend in 'Amazon Choice' have known vulnerabilities that design solutions were found for many decades ago so the products are essentially naive. If Amazon deliberately set out to hype the most useless locks so you would have your stuff stolen (and have to buy more from Amazon) then they would struggle to do a better job. Of course the locks come with hundreds of five star reviews even though they can be opened in seconds with low skill attacks.
innocentoldguy 8y ago
After receiving fake items a few times, I just stopped buying from Amazon altogether. Especially now that Amazon collects taxes for my state, it is just easier to go to a brick and mortar store and buy legitimate products in person.
ghobs91 8y ago
www.fakespot.com is your friend.
sergiotapia 8y ago
Is there an extension that just hides all non-verified reviews? I want reviews from people who at least paid for the item.
nelzya 8y ago
Not only fake positive reviews, amazon postings are saturated with fake negative reviews and counterfeit and knock-off products (95% of cheap electronics). But it's not an amazon problem, it's a customer problem. Amazon monopolized online market and destroyed other sellers. If they bring order it would lead to honest prices for honest products and would allow other sellers back to the market. Why should amazon do so? It's better for them to forfeit this market than give up a share of it.
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randomacct3847 8y ago
I’ve commented on how scammy Amazon is multiple times on here. For whatever reason I feel like there are more people on HN ready to defend Amazon than not and call out those who say it’s become scammy as “overreacting.”
dwighttk 8y ago
"Online retail giant Amazon's website is flooded with fake five-star reviews for products from brands it has never heard of, consumer group Which? has claimed." Took me about 5 times reading that to realize "it" referred to "consumer group Which?" I think the question mark in the name helped throw me off...
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sadlion 8y ago
I buy my supplements like vitamins, protein bars and powder from Amazon. The stock mingling and counterfeits is worrying me now. Should I switch to local shops or am i being too paranoid? For non edibles, with all the fake review sites out there, are sites like the wirecutter and consumer report still trust worthy?
- 80mph 8y ago
  I've switched to Vitacost for my supplements, and am very satisfied. I'm in CA, and they have a warehouse in NV, so I often get my stuff within 48 hours. They have a decent selection, and frequently offer promo codes. Currently, some promo codes can even be combined, although that might not last much longer. I should add, I don't rely on Vitacost reviews either. I use ConsumerLab to narrow down my choices.
  - sadlion 8y ago
    Wow, thanks for Vitacost; it seems to have all my favorite brands with good discounts. I'll check out ConsumerLab. What do you think of labdoor reviews?
    - 80mph 8y ago
      I've also heard many good things about Labdoor. I only use ConsumerLab because I've been a member for years.
- masonic 8y ago
  I bought Schiff's sleep aid from Amazon, and when I compared the bottle with a Costco-purchased one, there were clear differences and an overlaid UPC label.
  - sadlion 8y ago
    The overlaid label is suspicious. It reminds me of the whole Chinese baby formula crisis. Amazon needs to add rigorous control before someone gets severely ill or even dies. It looks like a giant liability for legitimate sellers and Amazon itself to me.
d0m 8y ago
When buying on Amazon, I'm mostly interested in the 2-4 range reviews; I find this is where people discuss the pros/cons instead of just the pros (5 - best product ever!1!) and just the worst (1 - it had a defect because I threw it in the pool even though it said don't throw it in the pool and the company doesn't want to reimburse me, never buying from it again yadayada - kind of reviews).
- jay_kyburz 8y ago
  Note to self: When writing fake reviews, just make them 4 stars.
  - novaleaf 8y ago
    but if you do that, you'll rank somewhere on page 4 or 5 of the listings.
tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
Forgive me for being naive, but isn't this an easy problem to solve? Amazon tracks shipments, I assume. Couldn't they just create a mechanism where a completed shipment gives the purchaser one allowance for adding a review? This way you can only review if Amazon has verified that you bought the product. I must be missing something crucial here.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  How it typically works is the company requests that you buy the product and tells you they will refund your purchase if you leave a 5 star review. On Amazons side it looks like these people really did buy the product. Fake reviewers get paid in free stuff and the company just uses their marketing budget to give stuff away.
- avhon1 8y ago
  It's reasonable to review a product on amazon that you bought somewhere else.
dontbenebby 8y ago
Ignore the score - pull up the critical reviews and look for common themes.
danschumann 8y ago
What about the dating sites flooded with scammers pretending to be women, trying to make you visit porn sites. They are pretty easy to spot after a little bit.
mef 8y ago
lots of examples of fake reviews on goods that show up in common search results: e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Bluetooth-Headphones-Sweatproof-Compatible-Smartphones/dp/B07PG3QXBP/ https://www.amazon.ca/Bluetooth-Headphones-Sweatproof-Compat... clicking through on a reviewer shows, for example, an account with 82 5-star reviews, all posted today, April 15th: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFZWITCLSKYQHSYAVPNXTZZH2FMQ/ https://www.amazon.ca/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFZWITCLSKYQH... Seems like posting 82 5-star reviews in a single day should probably trigger some sort of anti-fraud mechanism?
notacoward 8y ago
It's not just the fake reviews that bug me. I can use fakespot to weed through a few of those. The thing that has really made Amazon less usable for me in the last year or so is seeing the exact same product twenty times under different nonsense-word brands. Recalling a recent example, in about a minute I can find the exact same pair of water shoes sold as: gracosy, MAYZERO, LINGTOM, Wonesion, JointlyCreating, Centipede Demon, hiitave, and more. Another one is Belilent, Alibress, SUOKENI, Zhuanglin, Dreamcity, and so on. Same pictures, almost same descriptive text, with only minor cosmetic differences. Are these different companies that happen to use the same supplier? It's possible, but it could also be one company creating multiple pseudo-brands to game the system. I could probably even find out, but I don't care. The same physical thing shipped for the same price from the same Chinese factory shouldn't show up twenty times. As long as search results are filled with crap, they're useless. It's the combination of fake reviews and this kind of flooding that makes me want to leave and never come back.
- panic 8y ago
  "There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch" by Jenny Odell is a deep investigation of this phenomenon and a really good read: http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf.
- asdff 8y ago
  The store is an absolute mess, even with major brands. The exact same pair of Nikes could be listed in a half dozen separate categories sold by two dozen different sellers at shipping speeds ranging from two hours to two months and prices ranging from $0.06 - $649.58. You end up having to spend 10x the amount of time down the rabbit hole of different categories, vaguely different product titles, different sizes ("size 10", "size TEN" "10(m)", etc.), and different names for the same color shoe, all to desperately find that low price/size/color combination that drew you in from the search results in the first place. The store desperately needs moderation to tidy it up. I'm sure the devs are patting themselves on the back for all the extra engagement they are milking out of me, but frankly I'm using the site less and less to the point where I've cancelled my prime membership. The only thing keeping me is milking their free shipping and 3% back card, and only if local alternatives fail me.
harry8 8y ago
This is the sound of one of the AI bubbles going POP Expect more frequency to come. Expect it to overcorrect so that AI is a dirty word sometime soon and fantastic uses of statistical learning will be poison in funding. It's all so predictable even an algo can see it coming.
coleifer 8y ago
I bought some cologne from Amazon, (seller was listed as "Amazon") which turned out to be fake. The scent was wrong, the bottle... except the box which seemed authentic but had the barcode excised with a razor and covered up with a sticker. When I left a straightforward review, it was taken down with no explanation and no recourse. I called and got a refund, but the fake 5-star reviews are all still up.
bkraz 8y ago
I once wrote an Amazon review in which I said that the other reviews followed a pattern of manipulation. Amazon deleted my review, and sent me a warning letter : https://twitter.com/BenKrasnow/status/1106385729435787264?s=19 https://twitter.com/BenKrasnow/status/1106385729435787264?s=...
- delecti 8y ago
  I'm with Amazon on this one. Reviews are for the product, not to side-talk other reviews. Report the other reviews if there's a problem. Of course they probably aren't likely to do anything even then, but cross chatter between reviews is not a trend they'd want to allow either.
throwmeawayl8r 8y ago
1. Bots 2. Click-farms buying clicks from humans in India, Malaysia, countries in Africa, etc. 3. Mostly, but not all, Chinese distributers and manufacturers offering inducements, bonuses and generally cajoling customers for 5 star reviews.
throwmeawayl8r 8y ago
AliExpress is worse. Fake/low-quality products just disappear completely and there's very few, short reviews. It's almost as bad as eBay.
twblalock 8y ago
I use Amazon a lot but I won't buy expensive brand-name stuff there anymore. Case in point: I am going to buy a Starrett combination square and Amazon has a nice price with free shipping, but I'd bet there is a 50/50 chance I get a counterfeit. I'd also put your chances of getting a fake $9 Casio watch on Amazon at 50/50. As a software engineer I kinda sympathize with Amazon -- no matter what system you come up with, people are going to game it. It's a very complex moving target and you will never be able to eradicate all of the scammers. At the same time, I think they could do a lot better than they do today, and I wonder if they actually try.
- sytelus 8y ago
  Weeding out fake products is not a software or machine learning issue. It's a process issue and much simpler to solve. You require all your merchants to provide their legally traceable identity. Your agreement should require merchants to put payments on hold when fake product complaints are received with arbitration fees. All big brick-and-mortar shops do this. It would be very hard to introduce fake product in Fred Meyers or Costco by any merchant without financial and potentially legal consequences. Amazon just needs electronic version of that process.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    The trick is to implement such a process without the overhead the process has at a place like Costco. Keep in mind that Amazon operates in many countries. There is also significantly more incentive to fake a legal identity for sellers at Amazon than at brick and mortar stores. Even if it costs a million dollars it might still be worth doing -- you might make a lot more than that by the time you get caught.
    - fmajid 8y ago
      The overhead is exactly what keeps the bad guys out. Without it, the spam and counterfeit problem will continue. Amazon can't have its cake and eat it too.
    - sytelus 8y ago
Scapeghost 8y ago
Is there any facet of human society that hasn't been subverted by the relentless pursuit of profit? Other than heavy-handed regulation (like verifying each and every account as unique), some form of guaranteed minimum income may be the only way to buffer people from resorting to such deceptive tactics in order to get by in the world.
dmolony 8y ago
Amazon - the company that broke online shopping.
bunderbunder 8y ago
Breaking: President Kennedy has been shot. Details at 10.
fmajid 8y ago
They are trying to fix the problem, but the number of scammers dwarfs the number of Amazon employees: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/04/what-is-amazon.html https://blog.dshr.org/2019/04/what-is-amazon.html That said, Amazon could buy Fakespot or one of its competitors with small change from Jeff Bezos' sofa, and they are clearly doing a better job than Amazon at rooting out fraudulent reviews. Ironically, Amazon's enforcement was turned against them. Unscrupulous merchants are planting obviously fake five-star reviews on their competitors. Amazon then takes down the framed competitor. Genius!
- luckylion 8y ago
  > They are trying to fix the problem doubt. Amazon has unlimited data on everything, they could fix that if they wanted to. They just have zero incentive to: the sales happen on Amazon's platform, a lot of them use FBA, so Amazon is getting paid.
spurgu 8y ago
I check everything on Reviewmeta.com because of this. Wish they a bit better search/categorization though. Awesome site nonetheless, filtering out suspicious reviews to provide a "true rating".
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gigatexal 8y ago
I trust the verified reviewers especially those that post pictures of the item. For example if I am buying a computer case and someone posts a review with the case and their system inside and they say the airflow is good and the build experience is great too then that adds a lot more weight than 100 five star reviews.
juskrey 8y ago
I am always starting from bad reviews. Ironically, very often they are the source of the information which makes me buy a product immediately. E.g. if the book author is "arrogant", or most product problems are coming from hysterical idiots with none of them due to the manufacturer.
- ikeboy 8y ago
  Yes, I've heard this recommended as a strategy for sellers - leave yourself negative reviews that are clearly not issues with the product.
  - juskrey 8y ago
    I believe this is pretty hard to fake realistically, plus it goes with the necessity of significantly lowering your own product score, so..
    - ikeboy 8y ago
      Doesn't have to be significant, and it can be done by upvoting those reviews so they rise to the top without leaving any reviews yourself (and I've heard people talk about using this specific tactic). Conversely, I've heard people complaining their competition left negative reviews and/or upvoted their bad reviews to the top.
    - ikeboy 8y ago
      Personally, I look for history - if something's been around for at least 1-2 years I figure true negative reviews would have surfaced. So look at dates of oldest reviews.
shard972 8y ago
Look, mahcine learning is hard guys, we need to give amazon another few years to work out the kinks and then no more false reviews ever again...
adrian_mrd 8y ago
I recently ordered a small device from Amazon, it was poor, so I gave it a 1 star rating with a short, negative review. About a week later, I received an e-mail from the seller (via Amazon's payments communication system) asking for me to delete my review in return for being refunded the total amount, and stating that I could keep the device. Whilst I didn't take up their offer, I assume many others did which shows how Amazon is 'not flooded with one-star reviews'.
- GordonS 8y ago
  I had exactly the same thing happen recently with a light bulb that wasn't nearly as bright as advertised. Seller said they'd refund me, let me keep the crappy bulb and send me a brighter and more expensive bulb for free. I didn't take them up on this, as it wouldn't be fair for future customers; after all, I'd bought the crappy bulb because there were no bad reviews...
makecheck 8y ago
Star-based reviews basically need to go away. There just isn’t any reasonable way to process the information contained in the rating itself. I know that I always think twice about a purchase when there are mediocre reviews, despite knowing all the ways that the reviews could be basically outright lies, because I know I don’t plan to spend all the time it would require to actually discern real from fake. I was thinking about how even simplified systems like thumbs-up/thumbs-down for music don’t make sense either. In my car, there is a great way that they could infer what I like: how long is it playing? I essentially will let at least half a song keep playing if I like it, whereas I will quickly flip away from one I don’t want. I am more likely to flip to the next song than click a thumbs-down, especially while driving. “Time actually played”, perhaps as a percentage of total song length, would probably be a great way to automatically rank my music for me. And I think it would work for Amazon and other systems too. For example, if a product was purchased and never returned, maybe it doesn’t suck. If it’s a consumable item that was purchased again, maybe it doesn’t suck. We don’t need reviews and star ratings to figure this kind of thing out, and it’s extremely hard to fake.
Pxtl 8y ago
I would pay substantially more than Amazon prices for a store that actually curated their inventory to offer quality stuff instead of a firehose of algorithmically-reviewed trash. I shop at Amazon only for the selection, not the experience. Not even for the price.
- andrewxhill 8y ago
  If you can handle a fraction of the inventory, you can use a trusted reviewer like https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/
laughinghan 8y ago
"Bought on Amazon" is becoming the new "Made in China".
EnderWT 8y ago
Link to the actual report by Which? https://www.which.co.uk/news/2019/04/thousands-of-fake-customer-reviews-found-on-popular-tech-categories-on-amazon/ https://www.which.co.uk/news/2019/04/thousands-of-fake-custo...
garyclarke27 8y ago
Amazon should at the least stop unverified reviews.
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rhizome 8y ago
Amazon lets people sell $5 Ikea items for $45. Fuck them.
- ryacko 8y ago
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/10/24/orlando-couple-finds-65-pounds-marijuana-amazon-order/793580001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/10/24/or... Amazon lets drug dealers sell thousands of dollars of weed through their storefront. I wonder if Amazon allowed drug sniffing dogs to search the warehouse, if they didn’t, seems like an endorsement of some kind.
stebann 8y ago
We can see that the dynamics of ratings are very complicated. It's not about the system's design, but also the load and bias on decisions from the buyer and the seller.
amai 8y ago
Nice to see, that the main stream media takes note of services like https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ . There is also https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ . Both services show, how bad Amazons filter for fake reviews really are. I still believe Amazon is basically doing nothing to prevent fake reviews.
hrdwdmrbl 8y ago
For product sellers it's also very frustrating. Hard to compete against tricks. For sellers the fake reviews are only 1 of many similar problems with fraudsters, trickers, scammers, etc.
r_singh 8y ago
Fake reviews are common on Airbnb.com as well. New hosts just request their friends to book their house and then pay them back for the same. In this case Airbnb may even benefit (unlike Amazon) since they receive their non-refundable fee when a friend books the house.
amai 8y ago
If we can sort out spam emails with Naive Bayes, why can't we sort out spam reviews in similar fashion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering
jfk13 8y ago
The many problems with Amazon reviews are hardly news to most of us on HN, I'm sure. What is noteworthy, though, is to see such a report make the front page of the BBC News site. I think we easily forget just how little public awareness there is of issues that are obvious to us as "insiders" in the tech world. Anything that helps to raise awareness, even just a little, is welcome.
topicseed 8y ago
Amazon reviews are a huge issue and a huge let down from the platform. I love shopping on Amazon but today, I rarely do it due to 1) not believe any review 2) seeing the same product branded twenty times. Various teams at Amazon need to do a rewrite of the entire reviews specs and treat them like CC details. It's totally abnormal to find reviews about another product belonging to a former product from the same seller. It's unacceptable to have most of the reviews on new products coming from paid gigs and fakers. They need to sort this quick – even my mother who barely understands a thing to computers is now wary of Amazon reviews.
topicseed 8y ago
Oh, and the keyword stuffing is horribly obvious and Amazon's antispam team should get in touch with Google's. These product pages should be flagged for keyword stuffing, suspended until fixed and permanently banned for repeat offenders. It's horrible and extremely user-unfriendly.
deaps 8y ago
If the purchasing base (or potential buyers) believe the reviews to be mostly fake, they may lose trust in the service... This seems like a problem worth fixing, from Amazon's perspective.
CodeBiscuit 8y ago
I've even been offered free products by a retailer that I have purchased an item from - 'Free Dash Cam' read the email subject line and provided me with all of the instruction with what to do, and a copy and pastable bit of text to use aswell - I reported this to Amazon, and gave them copies of the emails etc too.
Yuval_Halevi 8y ago
Amazon, Booking.com/Facebook/Reddit/TripAdvisor/Twitter Fake reviews/accounts are one of the main issues social media and Content generation sites are facing these days. One of the solutions is using Blockchain/ or do a quick verification process (Like upwork for example)
davidparks21 8y ago
I reported 4 fake reviews to Amazon on a product I purchased before. The product page had changed from the old one I originally purchased on to a new one with 4 obviously fake 5-star reviews. I found this when I went to re-purchase the product after it (an eBike) was stolen. The page is here (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2VLSX5/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_HeDTCbV67NR82 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2VLSX5/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_He...) There is a review from me, calling out the fakes and providing detail, and the other 4 that are clear-as-day fakes. The previous product page, which I referenced in my report to Amazon, had numerous high quality, legit reviews averaging around 3 stars with tons of detail. Amazon has made no changes after my report.
raghavarora 8y ago
This article talks about unverified purchases, but in my experience, a lot of verified purchases are also fake. I have stopped trusting positive reviews and only go through the negative reviews and assess the product. How to spot fake reviews - They are long, explain the product in detail and similar to other fake reviews.
everdrive 8y ago
As everyone's pointing out, this problem seems to have exploded in the past 1-2 years. I myself had a few trivial counterfeit purchases (batteries, lightbulbs) and one serious one: a ladder. The rung snapped out from under me, and it was dumb luck that I wasn't seriously injured. Anyhow, it's time to move on. Amazon is moving into advertising, and the convenience no longer outweighs the other costs.
designtofly 8y ago
It has gotten awful. Every single time I've searched for a generic product (or even a specific brand + model), I'm inundated with these nonsense branded listings. I'm very close to canceling my Prime membership. I think the best thing that Amazon has accomplished is pushing other retailers to improve their fulfillment process. Just yesterday, instead of dealing with the endless stream of copycat products on Amazon, I purchased a bunch of running gear directly from Nike and it was shipped in less than 12 hours.
rchaud 8y ago
When I first heard of sites like JD.com and Alibaba, I visited out of curiosity and noped out fast. The UX was horrible, the sites were a jumbled mess, and I'd see the same product marked up at different prices, and a bunch of fake-seeming reviews. "Thank God we have Amazon here", I thought. Tried searching for bluetooth headphones on Amazon Canada (which has a much smaller selection than the US site). It was almost exactly as I remember the old Chinese ecommerce site. Wall-to-wall rows of indistinguishable products, 500+ 5 star reviews for each, many of which are obviously for other products. Lately, the Prime app hasn't even been working on my PS3, so it might be time to start moving back to brick and mortar for my purchases.
dontbenebby 8y ago
One useful hack is to use the DuckDuckGo bang command "!fake" to check the fakespot rating for a listing. If you have DDG set as your default browser you can just prepend "!fake" (no quotes) before the url and get a breakdown on the review authenticity. (Interestingly sometimes even AmazonBasics products have a bad fakespot rating...)
stefek99 8y ago
Have you been living under the rock? Since when "no news" is a news?
ccarse 8y ago
This is why I just pretend 5 star reviews don't exist. I figure all the other reviews are probably legit and look at them. If all the other reviews are 1 or 2 star I'm not going to buy it. If there are 4 star and 3 star reviews it's probably decent.

579 points by drugme 8y ago

tlrobinson 8y ago

Why even bother allowing unverified purchase reviews?

rlayton2 8y ago
I think there can be lots of value in them, but only in the long-form review, where the product is described and evaluated. Aggregating the numbers makes no sense.
dingaling 8y ago
That really only works for high-demand, current products. Back when I used to be engaged with Amazom I wrote a lot of reviews for out-of-print secondhand books that I borrowed from libraries or bought from specialist shops. I was usually quite harsh with my reviews but was often the only reviewer and usually the book was out of stock at the time. People seemed to appreciate the long-tail reviews and I was up in the top 100 UK 'most helpful' reviewer list. If I had only reviewed books I'd bought on Amazon I would have written about 10% as many reviews.

cptskippy 8y ago

I received an email at least once a month, to an address I used exclusively for Amazon purchases, inviting me to join a website that will reimburse me via PayPal if I purchase products and review them. I have forwarded the emails to Amazon a couple times explaining that my email address is used exclusively for them making it easier to narrow down who might be sending these emails. They always respond with a warning that my account might be suspended if I partake in such sites.

urda 8y ago
E-mail jeff@amazon.com
- swiley 8y ago
  Any particular reason this is down voted? I guess he doesn't give us any reason to believe it's a good idea to do that either.
  - shard972 8y ago
    I think some people are just mad for whatever reason. Maybe they really like amazon? Or maybe jeff? Or maybe they find the idea of a CEO email address that is never actually read by the CEO to be just silly in general. I don't know for sure, someone will need to speak up.
  - luckylion 8y ago
    I didn't downvote it, but it sounds a bit like "learn to code" to me. "Go tell amazon" isn't a feasible strategy when Amazon's general disinterest is a big part of the problem.
harry8 8y ago
Blog it with any specific info you want to protect redacted. Give newspapers and equity analysts a chance to find what you are saying backed by evidence. This is the only way $BIGCO will ever care. Do you care enough to do it. I probably wouldn't.
luckylion 8y ago
Same here. Cryptic alias on my own domain that I never use for anything else. It's rare though, I get one spam email to that address once every few months now, and it's always shopping/review-related. I've contacted Amazon to ask how, when and with whom they shared my email address and their response was basically "we don't ever, but here's a month of free prime for your trouble".
- cptskippy 8y ago
  I wonder what you're saying that I'm not, I never managed to unlock a free month of prime.
helloindia 8y ago
There are public facebook groups, where sellers buy Amazon reviews. https://outline.com/qTE2TY https://outline.com/qTE2TY

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

News at 11. Seriously? Go hang out at Amazon for a hot second. You'll see: 1. Fraudulent products 2. Fake products 3. Ripoff obvious clones 4. Fake stores 5. Fake reviews (5 star AND good 1 star like the bot got mixed up) 6. Bad of the above mixed in the supply of the "good" legit products 7. Amazon Piss bottles (0) Amazon is now, what Walmart was 10 years ago - a scourge and a horror to work at for any length of time. It's no surprise that a company that was to sell off even more underlying ethics would be walmart at their own game.(1) In that, Walmart only has the upper hand because of local stores... (0) https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-into-bottles-to-avoid-wasting-time-undercover-investigator/ https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i... (1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

int_19h 8y ago
You forgot another category: products that are outright illegal. For example, "oil filters" that are basically silencers, or Glock full auto conversion parts. https://smile.amazon.com/JINJULI-Tactical-Semi-Automatic-Cover-Plate/dp/B07Q146R99 https://smile.amazon.com/JINJULI-Tactical-Semi-Automatic-Cov... (google "Glock FSSG" to see what this actually is) https://smile.amazon.com/Filter-Aluminum-24003-Durable-Construction/dp/B079KT7NWZ/ https://smile.amazon.com/Filter-Aluminum-24003-Durable-Const... (note the reviews and questions on this one) Now, to Amazon's credit, when you report these, they do take the ones that are unambiguously illegal down. The problem is that they get re-posted under a slightly different title within a few hours.
- groby_b 8y ago
  "will this make a .223 lawn mower engine quieter" O_o
  - int_19h 8y ago
    To clarify, 1/2"x28 is the standard thread pitch used on most .22 and 9mm caliber firearms for muzzle attachments. In most cases it's a flash hider or a recoil compensator, but suppressors can attach in the same way. Also, this one is an example of an "ambiguously legal" listing. The thing is, after all, an actual oil filter, albeit a poorly made one. Owning it alongside with a firearm it can attach to would likely constitute constructive possession of an unregistered NFA item, but that's buyer's problem. Although I would imagine the seller can still be sued if it can be proven that they knew how most of their customers are using them (which is evident from reviews), and intentionally designed them for that purpose. But, well, good luck suing a noname Chinese merchant.

matthewfcarlson 8y ago

My issue with Amazon reviews is the ease that sellers are able to change the product and keep the reviews. I recently tried to buy a decent pair of USB C headphones. The top two recommended products both had 5 starts with hundreds of verified reviews... for a dvd copy of a classic movie. I've decided I just can't trust Amazon reviews anymore.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is yet again another, surely well-known 'leak' in how products are presented and displayed, since it can still happen, Amazon is tacitly complicit with the fraud. Most of these issues could be mostly cleared up with some basic operational policies: purchase only reviews (or sideline the others), no 'changing the product', some degree of manufacturer verification etc.. But they chose not to do it.
- lugg 8y ago
  Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products. Manufacturers don't get to claim this year's junk is so much better than last year's junk that I just have to buy it all the while claiming it's the same product. What a joke.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    "Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products." Because Amazon has chosen to allow that, for reasons which probably have to do with money. The comments here indicate a surprising degree of naivte on this issue i.e. "I head to email jeff@amazon.com about this" - as if after 20 years of operations Amazon isn't 100% aware of all of these issues. Of course they know what's going on. In detail. If Amazon were some old, big, dumb company with slow moving ops, barely competent staff, then we could write all this off as lack of operational competence - but it's not. Amazon is actually a very well run and operationally competent company from top to bottom, and Bezos is a hands-on leader, intimately involved. Folks: Bezos knows exactly what is happening. Since they haven't made very small adjustments which could help fix a variety of these issues, it's not due to 'lack of will' - it's a choice that Amazon has made. Amazon wants lots of 5 star fake reviews by unverified sources or they would just get rid of them, which they could do, instantly, by sidelining reviews with no purchase, for example. Among a variety of other things. It's unbelievable the level of hagiography that goes on with these 'industry leaders' that we build up like Jobs, Zuck, Bezos, Welch etc. - especially when we have issues waiving us right in the face. I accept that business at scale is 'making sausage' and there will be unpleasant things. Factory workers can't make $80K (probably). We inherently lose some privacy on social media. There will be some fake reviews and fraud no matter what. Surely. But the scope and level of chicanery, combined with the fact these companies haven't made obvious changes proves they are complicit and it should definitely weigh into how we think of these companies and individuals. FYI people can do 'good stuff' and 'bad stuff' at the same time. Bezos and Zuck can build/fund schools for kids at the same time they are doing totally unscrupulous stuff, it's not a paradox. Fraud, fake reviews etc. is a problem not dealt with remotely enough by Amazon, this is obvious and the fault/concern is theirs, and it's Jeff Bezos - as founder, owner, CEO world's richest person to do it. Literally the richest guy in the world is gaining this wealth in part by promoting tons of counterfeit goods with fake reviews - 2019.

apacheCamel 8y ago

Like everything else online, do your research. I assume we all know plenty of people who have taken online reviews at face value, I have done it myself. Like most other things on the internet, they can be faked. It is sad that people take advantage of good faith systems like this and do not feel the consequences. Side note: Having the consumer group be named "Which?" and to include the question mark in it makes it jolting to read in the middle of a sentence. I can't tell if I like the name or dislike it a lot.

acdha 8y ago
> Like everything else online, do your research. There are many categories where this advice sounds a lot easier than it is. There’s a whole industry creating fake review sites, farming things out to people for favorable social media reviews, etc. and it takes a non-trivial amount of time and skill to figure out which sources are reliable. As long as the internet runs on advertising there’s no reason to expect this to get easier since companies like Google make considerable amounts of money from all of those ads.
- apacheCamel 8y ago
  While I agree with you, I am not sure what the alternative you are searching for is. Either you don't buy it, or put in enough diligence to find out more about the product you are purchasing. I would assume a normal person would put in the amount of effort that somewhat equates to the value of what they are buying. I would never spend days researching the best brand of umbrella to buy (not knocking umbrellas) but I would if it was a mouse or maybe keyboard. The mouse has a higher perceived value to me and makes it worth it. Also, word of mouth is still relevant and probably always will be. If my friends/family enjoy a product, I am inclined to believe I will too.

l8nite 8y ago

I've started using fakespot.com for every purchase from Amazon, has saved me from making a bad purchase more than once.

drexlspivey 8y ago
I love this kind of market based solutions. I entered the product from the other comment and it gave it an F. https://www.fakespot.com/product/kuppet-macbook-pro-charger-85w-macbook-charger-with-t-tip-85w-charger-power-adapter-for-macbook-pro-air-13-inch-15-inch-17inch-compatible-with-all-macbooks-produced-after-mid-2012-44deeb43-5dbc-42d5-9903-44a178309d8f https://www.fakespot.com/product/kuppet-macbook-pro-charger-...
anitil 8y ago
Do they have a plugin? I feel like that would make life a lot easier - you don't have to go to a second domain, just look at the listing and the plugin puts a big "Don't Buy" banner over it
- bruxis 8y ago
  There is a Chrome extension[0] available. I personally find FakeSpot best used to help avoid bad buys -- not to ensure that buys are going to be good (due to adversarial gaming, or FakeSpot itself being targeted). [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-fake-ama/nakplnnackehceedgkgkokbgbmfghain https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sytelus 8y ago
Even better is "Made in XYZ" in description. If you are putting something in/on your body, this is absolutely important. But even if you are not, my experience is that products made in countries with trustworthy legal systems lasts 2X to 10X longer. One thing that surprises me is that why online stores are not forced to display this explicitly. When you go to brick-and-mortar store, you can almost always look for this label but Amazon doesn't enforce it on their listing.

externalreality 8y ago

It's not just Amazon its everything. Companies spend large quantities of money on media control, we all know this. I probably a hand full of media companies in the USA, China, and India that are selling a review control service.

BenoitEssiambre 8y ago
Yeah and I feel the bots or human assisted bots are getting more and more sophisticated. Even here on hacker news it feels like there is something less organic than before about posts and comments rankings. It may be that I am getting old and that the culture has changed but I'm not sure...
- externalreality 8y ago
  If I was to setup such a service I would have a simple text bot scanning popular sites for occurrences of my brand name and when a hit occurs it would make an Amazon Mechanical Turk ticket so that workers in Nepal could log a system that cycles accounts to that service so that they can leave a good review to counter the bad one. 10 cents a "counter" review. Why spend a bunch of money for in-organic robo-reviews when you can have real people writing reviews for dirt cheap. A second service would be to have Americans pressure a site to have detrimental user content removed. For example, if someone starts a thread about how the name of my product was stolen from an indigenous community's recipe, our service would nip that in the bud. Your brand management department would love us. These services already exist.

jiveturkey 8y ago

unverified != fake!! Most of my reviews are "unverified", because I purchase elsewhere. But because amazon is a great aggregator of reviews, I want to pay it back by helping others. Now of course, there are indeed many fake reviews, but this article does a terrible job of explaining the situation.

dRaBoQ 8y ago
The article mentions a case where 439 unverified reviews were all posted on the same day for one kind of not-known brand headphones.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Not really. Unverified de-facto = fake. Because unverified reviews are easy to make, then it follows manufacturers will just flood the system with fake one's. Which they do. Unverified boils down to fake.

dRaBoQ 8y ago

What bothers more even more is the injection of sponsored ads that ignore not just the keywords you search for, but even the filters like price. I search for a brand name watch or camera with a price of 300$+ and half of the results are no-name knockoff 25$ watches without even an easy visual way to distinguish them. They just put a very faint "Sponsored" that you have to squint hard to see it.

mmanfrin 8y ago

A couple months ago, I googled 'whiteboard amazon', clicked the first result, and was taken to a well structured amazon page for a whiteboard that had 5 stars. Looking at it a little closer, I noticed that of the 143 reviews, 143 were 5 star reviews. On top of it, every review followed a similar structure, was made by an account that had thousands of 5 star reviews, and was so beyond the pale obvious fraudulent that I felt the need to email jeff@amazon. Today I was looking at some vitamins, and I checked every single result for a certain supplement that was 4 or 5 stars and every single one of them ranked D or worse on FakeSpot. How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? 100% of reviews coming in for a product on the same day? MAYBE THAT'S A SIGN, AMAZON. Amazon reviews are worse than garbage now.

_jal 8y ago
> How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? How do you know they don't, and have via whatever mechanism decided that they make more money if they choose not to?
- thinkloop 8y ago
  It's impossible that giving customers sub-optimal recommendations is good for amazon.
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    My theory is that they have metrics for selection they are trying to optimize. If customers only bought the 10 best of any item, how could some PM get a promotion for increasing phone charger selection 100x?
  - tspike 8y ago
    Definitely not, long-term. But plug it into a product manager's A/B test and I guarantee it boosts things short-term.
    - thinkloop 8y ago

gesman 8y ago

'r/flooded by/depends on/'

ginger123 8y ago

If you are buying electronics, buy it from Best Buy, Costco, Target, Walmart or another retailer with a physical store. Best Buy matches Amazon's prices and their merchandise is not fake.

dRaBoQ 8y ago
and it has US warranty. When I had an issue with my MotoZ (which I got through same-day Prime delivery), Motorolla told me they won't cover it because the IMEI said its from India and can only be covered if I send it to India.
russdill 8y ago
B&H
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  True. they seem pretty solid. Do they do price matching?
  - Causality1 8y ago
    They have a good return policy. They let me return three LG V30's in a row purely on the basis of customer dissatisfaction(LG's shite poled technology creating areas of uneven color temperature.)
- PenguinCoder 8y ago
  B&H is my go to got certain electronics these days. I've always gotten exactly what I expected. Shipping cost seem higher, but I can deal with it for most part.
- protomyth 8y ago
  We've gone with B&H in the last year and they are great. They also have educational institution discounts. Plus, they don't do strange things with the shipping.
- imjk 8y ago

will_pseudonym 8y ago

"ReviewMeta, a US-based website that analyses online reviews, said it was shocked at the scale of the unverified reviews, saying they were "obvious and easy to prevent"." Unverified reviews may be easy to prevent by disabling unverified reviews, but then the scam just includes one extra step, having each account reviewing a product purchase the item on Amazon, then reimburse the account. Easy verified purchase. You also would lose out on actual purchasers who bought it elsewhere than Amazon who would want to leave reviews. The problem of bad reviews is definitely an unsolved problem, as even if you build in trust mechanisms (and Amazon surely does this already), the scammers will build networks of self-reinforcing bots. You could calibrate the system to heavily discount reviews of reviewers which have any "scam" tags, but then the networks would just take longer to build, leaving legit reviews to build up trust, and then leaving false reviews after having built up that trust. These cat and mouse games will go on a long time. The same issues happen across every open network where identity isn't verified. As much as I (and others historically) have benefited from pseudonymity, it's definitely being weaponized (Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc) to benefit certain entities (companies, governments, etc), and the ultimate result is a loss of trust in the networks at large. I don't know what the solution will be, but the solution will be incredibly valuable. I've thought about some sort of hybrid account handle system where you have one account that has two handles associated with it -- one, your real-world name, and another your pseudonym, but the single account is verified by real-world ID. As a contributor to the network, you could post as your pseudonym or your real world name, depending on the contribution that you are comfortable making, and as a consumer of the network, you could choose at any time to only view content of the network posted by real-world names, or pseudonyms. This would limit the number of possible astroturfed accounts, but still allow for sensitive discussion of heated matters. Just throwing the idea out there because the need for some kind of solution to this destruction in network quality is something that affects us all.

8note 8y ago
the problem you'll run into is making sure those "real IDs" are actually real IDs

gringoDan 8y ago

Reply All did a great podcast in Amazon's recent drop in quality: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 Highly recommend.

taytus 8y ago

I'm always on the boat of: "The community votes what to read" but I've seen this subject on the HN's home page over and over and over. Isn't this an old story? Are people discovering this about Amazon's reviews and upvoting out of curiosity or am I reading HN way too frequently?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

steve19 8y ago

How about simply filtering amazon reviews that are only left by people with a wide variety of expenditure and who spend over $500/year?

russdill 8y ago
Even if you add the ability to filter, it won't help unless it's the default. You'll still have a huge number of buyers choosing the product due to fake reviews and driving up the sales numbers. Since they aren't the smartest shoppers, they're also likely to leave their own review and be influenced by the other 5 star reviews.

blibble 8y ago

I no longer buy from Amazon: batteries, chargers, flash drives/SD cards, any sort of food (or container for food) essentially only stuff that's completely obvious if it's fake, or if it's too expensive/niche to bother counterfeiting

weiming 8y ago
Have you had actual experiences with fake food? Some reviews for bottles of Evian or Fiji water sounded alarming when I wanted to order from Amazon (labels attached incorrectly, bottle cap unusual tint, things like that), so we just stuck with local supermarket delivery.
- blibble 8y ago
  not personally but a work colleague had an experience with a load of fake tea bags (big saving on amazon? I wonder why!)
HarryHirsch 8y ago
batteries, chargers, flash drives/SD cards, any sort of food Also printer toner. The asking price is close to the price quoted on the manufacturer's website, but you never know if you'll get an original, a half-empty or a remanufactured cartridge, and the reviews reflect that. The cherry on top is that if you try to sell a spare cartridge yourself Amazon won't let you sell toner, you need to apply for permission!
colejohnson66 8y ago
For batteries, AmazonBasics is pretty reliable
- blibble 8y ago
  it's an awful state of affairs if you can only buy Amazon own branded goods because everything else is potentially fake I'm not rewarding them for their incompetence

wetpaws 8y ago

This is my go to tool when dealing with Amazon reviews: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ 99% of products feature a least some of fake 5 stars. Only very good brands don't rely on them, I usually buy from them even if they have 4-star rating.

tasty_freeze 8y ago

I wish I kept a link, but there was looking to buy a book on music theory or something similar. One of the books had 13 or so reviews, all glowing. Many were of the form "Exactly what I was looking for!" or "Just perfect!" with nothing more. Two of them had the same surprising word that made no sense in the context of the sentence: both reviews used the word "goal." Then it hit me: either the directions telling them what to review or in their own attempt to translate to English, the auto-translation picked the wrong synonym, choosing "goal" instead of "score."

wallace_f 8y ago
Yea, and spurious reviews are egregious on other markets such as booking.com, etc. Booking sites dont just use fake reviews, but also hide or even delete bad reviews. I've personally seen this because I travel a lot. As much as I dislike Google, they act as a neutral third-party for hosting hotel and restaurant reviews. Amazon howrver wants good reviews on products to make sales.
duskwuff 8y ago
Or the reviews were being run through an overeager text spinner.
tapland 8y ago
I sometimes miss my browser translating reviews on amazon.de and get very, very confused.

sundayedition 8y ago

One product (power bricks for MacBooks) had over 1000 5 stars, then the 1 star reviews came in where people actually had their power adapters catch on fire. Amazon, or maybe the seller, shut the review/product down. Now, it's back: https://www.amazon.com/KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacBooks-Produced/dp/B07P56DJLV/ref=mp_s_a_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Kuppet+macbook&qid=1555375810&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull https://www.amazon.com/KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacB... Lots of verified purchases. All the reviews are within the same date range. It doesn't take machine learning or advanced AI to catch this; a simple SQL statement should be enough to flag these. But still, they persist.

harry8 8y ago
Ergo, Amazon cannot do Stats/ML/AI/call it what you will. The claims that they have an AI advantage don't pass the sniff test.
- sytelus 8y ago
  It's not ML/AI problem. The problem is that Amazon wasn't able to punish counterfeiters financially or legally which in turn may be because they don't have a process to ensure seller identity that is legally traceable. This is equivalent to someone coming to BestBuy, sell to them bunch of fake products and get away with it without a scratch every single time. You wouldn't blame that BestBuy doesn't have AI system, would you?
  - shrikant 8y ago
    It doesn't actually what the nature of the problem domain itself is, in this case -- you can't solve a problem that you don't want to.

technofiend 8y ago

My cynical nature assumes some Amazon MBA has done the math and concluded that the gain in revenue from Amazon-only brands will exceed that lost from people abandoning the rest. This is based on the assumption that Amazon's Fulfilled By Amazon cobranding program does not allow third party participation for Amazon's in-house brands like Amazon Basic. In light of that admittedly negative view what's Amazon's motivation to limit fake reviews since it doesn't damage their own brands, albeit at the cost of damaging their brand as a whole.

tracker1 8y ago
At this point, I trust the Amazon brands less than the knockoffs. Half of the amazon labelled products I've used didn't work well or very long.
- technofiend 8y ago
  Really? My experience has been universally positive so far. To be fair to Amazon and maybe I've just drunk too much SV koolaid but I assume there are some very smart people actually working on the two related problems: validating both reviewers and supply-chain members to reduce fraud. It just remains to be seen how they solve the problem.

deleted 8y ago

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maxxxxx 8y ago

I never thought it would get that way but I feel more comfortable now buying from ebay from a seller with good feedback. Amazon is such a cesspool of weird sellers. For example I looked for flashes of Godox brand. Listings had "Godox" in the title but when I looked at the listings they were all from different sellers and not from Godox. I think is intentionally misleading by Amazon. As a tech person I sort of understand what's going on but a lot of people trust Amazon and don't understand that Amazon isn't really the seller and does nothing against sleazy listings.

jerkstate 8y ago

The only reviews worth reading on any site are 1 and 2-star reviews. I honestly don’t care if someone is happy with a product, I want to know what the problems might happen or what situations it doesn’t work for. I recently paid for a Consumer Reports digital subscription to get reviews for appliances and it’s been worth every penny of the very reasonable $35 annual subscription.

int_19h 8y ago
I disagree. Most 5-star reviews are garbage, but sometimes you find one that goes into great detail about real-world device specs from their own measurements, and even disassemble them and note various upsides and downsides of the design. And conversely, many 1- and 2-star reviews are also garbage - the most common case is when the reviewer complains about item not being delivered or delivered late, or not what they wanted due to some misunderstanding. What's really needed IMO is some kind of reputation for reviewers, that is easy to track.

psadri 8y ago

My theory is that amazon’s new business model is increasingly going to be based on advertising. Reliable reviews are incompatible with advertising revenue (why else would you have to advertise heavily if your products are really the best). The same observation may explain the doscountinuation of Amazon Button. Button would reorder the same product/brand over and over again - not compatible with advertising by competitors.

luckylion 8y ago
Amazon is making money on all sides: ads, "amazon's choice", and when you buy something that will break soon, you buy twice, and Amazon gets their commission twice. So far, I don't see any incentive for them to change anything.

52-6F-62 8y ago

Is it possible there's a gulf between Amazon.com and Amazon.ca when it comes to these issues? Maybe it's just in what I shop for but I haven't received a single counterfeit item, or come across fraudulent listings. I've seen my fair share of imitation (and probably trademark-infringing) products and cheap crap, but I try and avoid that stuff. So my experience has largely been positive—but there's no shortage of horror stories. That seems the norm around this board. So I wonder is it just worse on the American side? (for reasons of volume or targeted marketing or whatever)

colejohnson66 8y ago
I’m in America and I too am confused at all the negative comments about counterfeits. I’ve personally ordered hundreds of items from Amazon, but never a counterfeit
- rattlesnakedave 8y ago
  HN is legitimately the only place I’ve seen this complaint. I really wonder if it’s HNs buying practices that are the problem.
  - daniel-cussen 8y ago
    Well I suppose this comment is HN too from your perspective, but I also thought it was all HN until it happened to me. I was looking for Apple earphones, and found Apple earphones, and ordered them and it all looked great until they showed up, with a little cable tie in a clear plastic bag. And they worked, but when I then ordered Apple earphones off the Apple Apple branded Apple part of Amazon (which took a while to find and is covered in ads of knockoff Apple) I ordered them at the much higher price of $29.99. They arrived packaged in legit Apple trade dress, and I unfolded them from the cardboard packaging which I then used for the first Apple-but-not-Apple-Apple earphones. I first compared the two and sure enough they had minute differences and the Apple-Apple earphones sounded better...hard to say why but noticeably, and were louder at max volume, which is a difficult technical accomplishment. And the mic and buttons worked properly. Plus that packaging was as beautiful as Apple packaging has always been, I regarded it when it was empty as a paper insect that could be pinned to framed insectologist menagerie. At any rate, I didn't lose much money and got more or less what I wanted, but... Acting as a basic Joe Consumer I can tell fakes from reals with nothing but a browser, three minutes, and a simple checklist. Why can't Amazon which has a fucking battalion of mercenary machine learning cyborgs do the same a trillion times faster and cheaper and save me the (I can't believe I'm logging on to Amazon to check how much I wasted...) $12.70 I blew buying from "CR Land"?

Causality1 8y ago

Amazon needs to disallow unverified reviews. Their current acceptance is a holdover from a time where people were much more likely to have bought a product somewhere other than Amazon. Amazon needed these outside reviews to curate its own offerings and give customers confidence in their shopping choices. That hasn't been the case for a decade now. Amazon should delete all non-verified reviews entirely.

burlesona 8y ago

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but at some point in the last year or so I completely lost trust in purchasing goods on Amazon. I’ve been a Prime customer since Prime launched. I loved it for a decade. It used to be an automatic reflex for me: need something? Type it in Amazon and click buy. But now I don’t trust Amazon search results at all, and when I do purchase I only do it via direct product links from other sites I trust (like Wirecutter or the manufacturer’s site). Increasingly I buy direct from the brands websites. I wanted to drop Prime this year. My wife argued we should keep it because the kids watch a lot of Prime Video. But we’ve already got Netflix, and with Disney launching their thing I think I’d rather buy that than stick with Prime any longer. Not sure where Amazon is headed, and I wish the fate of AWS and Whole Foods weren’t at least somewhat tied up in the fate of Amazon’s retail operation.

istjohn 8y ago
AWS is wildly profitable for Amazon. I don't think you need to worry about AWS going anywhere. It's the goose that lays the golden eggs.
- empath75 8y ago
  Kubernetes is going to absolutely wreck aws’s profit margins on the 3-5 year time frame, imo.
  - xfkechyk 8y ago
    How so?
Theodores 8y ago
Find Lock Picking Lawyer on YouTube and his reviews of the locks Amazon recommend. See him open them in seconds. Share videos with wife. She will be with you on cutting the umbilical cord to Amazon after that. The locks they recommend in 'Amazon Choice' have known vulnerabilities that design solutions were found for many decades ago so the products are essentially naive. If Amazon deliberately set out to hype the most useless locks so you would have your stuff stolen (and have to buy more from Amazon) then they would struggle to do a better job. Of course the locks come with hundreds of five star reviews even though they can be opened in seconds with low skill attacks.

innocentoldguy 8y ago

After receiving fake items a few times, I just stopped buying from Amazon altogether. Especially now that Amazon collects taxes for my state, it is just easier to go to a brick and mortar store and buy legitimate products in person.

ghobs91 8y ago

www.fakespot.com is your friend.

sergiotapia 8y ago

Is there an extension that just hides all non-verified reviews? I want reviews from people who at least paid for the item.

nelzya 8y ago

Not only fake positive reviews, amazon postings are saturated with fake negative reviews and counterfeit and knock-off products (95% of cheap electronics). But it's not an amazon problem, it's a customer problem. Amazon monopolized online market and destroyed other sellers. If they bring order it would lead to honest prices for honest products and would allow other sellers back to the market. Why should amazon do so? It's better for them to forfeit this market than give up a share of it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

randomacct3847 8y ago

I’ve commented on how scammy Amazon is multiple times on here. For whatever reason I feel like there are more people on HN ready to defend Amazon than not and call out those who say it’s become scammy as “overreacting.”

dwighttk 8y ago

"Online retail giant Amazon's website is flooded with fake five-star reviews for products from brands it has never heard of, consumer group Which? has claimed." Took me about 5 times reading that to realize "it" referred to "consumer group Which?" I think the question mark in the name helped throw me off...

deleted 8y ago

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sadlion 8y ago

I buy my supplements like vitamins, protein bars and powder from Amazon. The stock mingling and counterfeits is worrying me now. Should I switch to local shops or am i being too paranoid? For non edibles, with all the fake review sites out there, are sites like the wirecutter and consumer report still trust worthy?

80mph 8y ago
I've switched to Vitacost for my supplements, and am very satisfied. I'm in CA, and they have a warehouse in NV, so I often get my stuff within 48 hours. They have a decent selection, and frequently offer promo codes. Currently, some promo codes can even be combined, although that might not last much longer. I should add, I don't rely on Vitacost reviews either. I use ConsumerLab to narrow down my choices.
- sadlion 8y ago
  Wow, thanks for Vitacost; it seems to have all my favorite brands with good discounts. I'll check out ConsumerLab. What do you think of labdoor reviews?
  - 80mph 8y ago
    I've also heard many good things about Labdoor. I only use ConsumerLab because I've been a member for years.
masonic 8y ago
I bought Schiff's sleep aid from Amazon, and when I compared the bottle with a Costco-purchased one, there were clear differences and an overlaid UPC label.
- sadlion 8y ago
  The overlaid label is suspicious. It reminds me of the whole Chinese baby formula crisis. Amazon needs to add rigorous control before someone gets severely ill or even dies. It looks like a giant liability for legitimate sellers and Amazon itself to me.

d0m 8y ago

When buying on Amazon, I'm mostly interested in the 2-4 range reviews; I find this is where people discuss the pros/cons instead of just the pros (5 - best product ever!1!) and just the worst (1 - it had a defect because I threw it in the pool even though it said don't throw it in the pool and the company doesn't want to reimburse me, never buying from it again yadayada - kind of reviews).

jay_kyburz 8y ago
Note to self: When writing fake reviews, just make them 4 stars.
- novaleaf 8y ago
  but if you do that, you'll rank somewhere on page 4 or 5 of the listings.

tenaciousDaniel 8y ago

Forgive me for being naive, but isn't this an easy problem to solve? Amazon tracks shipments, I assume. Couldn't they just create a mechanism where a completed shipment gives the purchaser one allowance for adding a review? This way you can only review if Amazon has verified that you bought the product. I must be missing something crucial here.

baroffoos 8y ago
How it typically works is the company requests that you buy the product and tells you they will refund your purchase if you leave a 5 star review. On Amazons side it looks like these people really did buy the product. Fake reviewers get paid in free stuff and the company just uses their marketing budget to give stuff away.
avhon1 8y ago
It's reasonable to review a product on amazon that you bought somewhere else.

dontbenebby 8y ago

Ignore the score - pull up the critical reviews and look for common themes.

danschumann 8y ago

What about the dating sites flooded with scammers pretending to be women, trying to make you visit porn sites. They are pretty easy to spot after a little bit.

mef 8y ago

lots of examples of fake reviews on goods that show up in common search results: e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Bluetooth-Headphones-Sweatproof-Compatible-Smartphones/dp/B07PG3QXBP/ https://www.amazon.ca/Bluetooth-Headphones-Sweatproof-Compat... clicking through on a reviewer shows, for example, an account with 82 5-star reviews, all posted today, April 15th: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFZWITCLSKYQHSYAVPNXTZZH2FMQ/ https://www.amazon.ca/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFZWITCLSKYQH... Seems like posting 82 5-star reviews in a single day should probably trigger some sort of anti-fraud mechanism?

notacoward 8y ago

It's not just the fake reviews that bug me. I can use fakespot to weed through a few of those. The thing that has really made Amazon less usable for me in the last year or so is seeing the exact same product twenty times under different nonsense-word brands. Recalling a recent example, in about a minute I can find the exact same pair of water shoes sold as: gracosy, MAYZERO, LINGTOM, Wonesion, JointlyCreating, Centipede Demon, hiitave, and more. Another one is Belilent, Alibress, SUOKENI, Zhuanglin, Dreamcity, and so on. Same pictures, almost same descriptive text, with only minor cosmetic differences. Are these different companies that happen to use the same supplier? It's possible, but it could also be one company creating multiple pseudo-brands to game the system. I could probably even find out, but I don't care. The same physical thing shipped for the same price from the same Chinese factory shouldn't show up twenty times. As long as search results are filled with crap, they're useless. It's the combination of fake reviews and this kind of flooding that makes me want to leave and never come back.

panic 8y ago
"There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch" by Jenny Odell is a deep investigation of this phenomenon and a really good read: http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf.
asdff 8y ago
The store is an absolute mess, even with major brands. The exact same pair of Nikes could be listed in a half dozen separate categories sold by two dozen different sellers at shipping speeds ranging from two hours to two months and prices ranging from $0.06 - $649.58. You end up having to spend 10x the amount of time down the rabbit hole of different categories, vaguely different product titles, different sizes ("size 10", "size TEN" "10(m)", etc.), and different names for the same color shoe, all to desperately find that low price/size/color combination that drew you in from the search results in the first place. The store desperately needs moderation to tidy it up. I'm sure the devs are patting themselves on the back for all the extra engagement they are milking out of me, but frankly I'm using the site less and less to the point where I've cancelled my prime membership. The only thing keeping me is milking their free shipping and 3% back card, and only if local alternatives fail me.

harry8 8y ago

This is the sound of one of the AI bubbles going POP Expect more frequency to come. Expect it to overcorrect so that AI is a dirty word sometime soon and fantastic uses of statistical learning will be poison in funding. It's all so predictable even an algo can see it coming.

coleifer 8y ago

I bought some cologne from Amazon, (seller was listed as "Amazon") which turned out to be fake. The scent was wrong, the bottle... except the box which seemed authentic but had the barcode excised with a razor and covered up with a sticker. When I left a straightforward review, it was taken down with no explanation and no recourse. I called and got a refund, but the fake 5-star reviews are all still up.

bkraz 8y ago

I once wrote an Amazon review in which I said that the other reviews followed a pattern of manipulation. Amazon deleted my review, and sent me a warning letter : https://twitter.com/BenKrasnow/status/1106385729435787264?s=19 https://twitter.com/BenKrasnow/status/1106385729435787264?s=...

delecti 8y ago
I'm with Amazon on this one. Reviews are for the product, not to side-talk other reviews. Report the other reviews if there's a problem. Of course they probably aren't likely to do anything even then, but cross chatter between reviews is not a trend they'd want to allow either.

throwmeawayl8r 8y ago

1. Bots 2. Click-farms buying clicks from humans in India, Malaysia, countries in Africa, etc. 3. Mostly, but not all, Chinese distributers and manufacturers offering inducements, bonuses and generally cajoling customers for 5 star reviews.

throwmeawayl8r 8y ago

AliExpress is worse. Fake/low-quality products just disappear completely and there's very few, short reviews. It's almost as bad as eBay.

twblalock 8y ago

I use Amazon a lot but I won't buy expensive brand-name stuff there anymore. Case in point: I am going to buy a Starrett combination square and Amazon has a nice price with free shipping, but I'd bet there is a 50/50 chance I get a counterfeit. I'd also put your chances of getting a fake $9 Casio watch on Amazon at 50/50. As a software engineer I kinda sympathize with Amazon -- no matter what system you come up with, people are going to game it. It's a very complex moving target and you will never be able to eradicate all of the scammers. At the same time, I think they could do a lot better than they do today, and I wonder if they actually try.

sytelus 8y ago
Weeding out fake products is not a software or machine learning issue. It's a process issue and much simpler to solve. You require all your merchants to provide their legally traceable identity. Your agreement should require merchants to put payments on hold when fake product complaints are received with arbitration fees. All big brick-and-mortar shops do this. It would be very hard to introduce fake product in Fred Meyers or Costco by any merchant without financial and potentially legal consequences. Amazon just needs electronic version of that process.
- twblalock 8y ago
  The trick is to implement such a process without the overhead the process has at a place like Costco. Keep in mind that Amazon operates in many countries. There is also significantly more incentive to fake a legal identity for sellers at Amazon than at brick and mortar stores. Even if it costs a million dollars it might still be worth doing -- you might make a lot more than that by the time you get caught.
  - fmajid 8y ago
    The overhead is exactly what keeps the bad guys out. Without it, the spam and counterfeit problem will continue. Amazon can't have its cake and eat it too.
  - sytelus 8y ago

Scapeghost 8y ago

Is there any facet of human society that hasn't been subverted by the relentless pursuit of profit? Other than heavy-handed regulation (like verifying each and every account as unique), some form of guaranteed minimum income may be the only way to buffer people from resorting to such deceptive tactics in order to get by in the world.

dmolony 8y ago

Amazon - the company that broke online shopping.

bunderbunder 8y ago

Breaking: President Kennedy has been shot. Details at 10.

fmajid 8y ago

They are trying to fix the problem, but the number of scammers dwarfs the number of Amazon employees: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/04/what-is-amazon.html https://blog.dshr.org/2019/04/what-is-amazon.html That said, Amazon could buy Fakespot or one of its competitors with small change from Jeff Bezos' sofa, and they are clearly doing a better job than Amazon at rooting out fraudulent reviews. Ironically, Amazon's enforcement was turned against them. Unscrupulous merchants are planting obviously fake five-star reviews on their competitors. Amazon then takes down the framed competitor. Genius!

luckylion 8y ago
> They are trying to fix the problem doubt. Amazon has unlimited data on everything, they could fix that if they wanted to. They just have zero incentive to: the sales happen on Amazon's platform, a lot of them use FBA, so Amazon is getting paid.

spurgu 8y ago

I check everything on Reviewmeta.com because of this. Wish they a bit better search/categorization though. Awesome site nonetheless, filtering out suspicious reviews to provide a "true rating".

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gigatexal 8y ago

I trust the verified reviewers especially those that post pictures of the item. For example if I am buying a computer case and someone posts a review with the case and their system inside and they say the airflow is good and the build experience is great too then that adds a lot more weight than 100 five star reviews.

juskrey 8y ago

I am always starting from bad reviews. Ironically, very often they are the source of the information which makes me buy a product immediately. E.g. if the book author is "arrogant", or most product problems are coming from hysterical idiots with none of them due to the manufacturer.

ikeboy 8y ago
Yes, I've heard this recommended as a strategy for sellers - leave yourself negative reviews that are clearly not issues with the product.
- juskrey 8y ago
  I believe this is pretty hard to fake realistically, plus it goes with the necessity of significantly lowering your own product score, so..
  - ikeboy 8y ago
    Doesn't have to be significant, and it can be done by upvoting those reviews so they rise to the top without leaving any reviews yourself (and I've heard people talk about using this specific tactic). Conversely, I've heard people complaining their competition left negative reviews and/or upvoted their bad reviews to the top.
  - ikeboy 8y ago
    Personally, I look for history - if something's been around for at least 1-2 years I figure true negative reviews would have surfaced. So look at dates of oldest reviews.

shard972 8y ago

Look, mahcine learning is hard guys, we need to give amazon another few years to work out the kinks and then no more false reviews ever again...

adrian_mrd 8y ago

I recently ordered a small device from Amazon, it was poor, so I gave it a 1 star rating with a short, negative review. About a week later, I received an e-mail from the seller (via Amazon's payments communication system) asking for me to delete my review in return for being refunded the total amount, and stating that I could keep the device. Whilst I didn't take up their offer, I assume many others did which shows how Amazon is 'not flooded with one-star reviews'.

GordonS 8y ago
I had exactly the same thing happen recently with a light bulb that wasn't nearly as bright as advertised. Seller said they'd refund me, let me keep the crappy bulb and send me a brighter and more expensive bulb for free. I didn't take them up on this, as it wouldn't be fair for future customers; after all, I'd bought the crappy bulb because there were no bad reviews...

makecheck 8y ago

Star-based reviews basically need to go away. There just isn’t any reasonable way to process the information contained in the rating itself. I know that I always think twice about a purchase when there are mediocre reviews, despite knowing all the ways that the reviews could be basically outright lies, because I know I don’t plan to spend all the time it would require to actually discern real from fake. I was thinking about how even simplified systems like thumbs-up/thumbs-down for music don’t make sense either. In my car, there is a great way that they could infer what I like: how long is it playing? I essentially will let at least half a song keep playing if I like it, whereas I will quickly flip away from one I don’t want. I am more likely to flip to the next song than click a thumbs-down, especially while driving. “Time actually played”, perhaps as a percentage of total song length, would probably be a great way to automatically rank my music for me. And I think it would work for Amazon and other systems too. For example, if a product was purchased and never returned, maybe it doesn’t suck. If it’s a consumable item that was purchased again, maybe it doesn’t suck. We don’t need reviews and star ratings to figure this kind of thing out, and it’s extremely hard to fake.

Pxtl 8y ago

I would pay substantially more than Amazon prices for a store that actually curated their inventory to offer quality stuff instead of a firehose of algorithmically-reviewed trash. I shop at Amazon only for the selection, not the experience. Not even for the price.

andrewxhill 8y ago
If you can handle a fraction of the inventory, you can use a trusted reviewer like https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/

laughinghan 8y ago

"Bought on Amazon" is becoming the new "Made in China".

EnderWT 8y ago

Link to the actual report by Which? https://www.which.co.uk/news/2019/04/thousands-of-fake-customer-reviews-found-on-popular-tech-categories-on-amazon/ https://www.which.co.uk/news/2019/04/thousands-of-fake-custo...

garyclarke27 8y ago

Amazon should at the least stop unverified reviews.

deleted 8y ago

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rhizome 8y ago

Amazon lets people sell $5 Ikea items for $45. Fuck them.

ryacko 8y ago
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/10/24/orlando-couple-finds-65-pounds-marijuana-amazon-order/793580001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/10/24/or... Amazon lets drug dealers sell thousands of dollars of weed through their storefront. I wonder if Amazon allowed drug sniffing dogs to search the warehouse, if they didn’t, seems like an endorsement of some kind.

stebann 8y ago

We can see that the dynamics of ratings are very complicated. It's not about the system's design, but also the load and bias on decisions from the buyer and the seller.

amai 8y ago

Nice to see, that the main stream media takes note of services like https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ . There is also https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ . Both services show, how bad Amazons filter for fake reviews really are. I still believe Amazon is basically doing nothing to prevent fake reviews.

hrdwdmrbl 8y ago

For product sellers it's also very frustrating. Hard to compete against tricks. For sellers the fake reviews are only 1 of many similar problems with fraudsters, trickers, scammers, etc.

r_singh 8y ago

Fake reviews are common on Airbnb.com as well. New hosts just request their friends to book their house and then pay them back for the same. In this case Airbnb may even benefit (unlike Amazon) since they receive their non-refundable fee when a friend books the house.

amai 8y ago

If we can sort out spam emails with Naive Bayes, why can't we sort out spam reviews in similar fashion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering

jfk13 8y ago

The many problems with Amazon reviews are hardly news to most of us on HN, I'm sure. What is noteworthy, though, is to see such a report make the front page of the BBC News site. I think we easily forget just how little public awareness there is of issues that are obvious to us as "insiders" in the tech world. Anything that helps to raise awareness, even just a little, is welcome.

topicseed 8y ago

Amazon reviews are a huge issue and a huge let down from the platform. I love shopping on Amazon but today, I rarely do it due to 1) not believe any review 2) seeing the same product branded twenty times. Various teams at Amazon need to do a rewrite of the entire reviews specs and treat them like CC details. It's totally abnormal to find reviews about another product belonging to a former product from the same seller. It's unacceptable to have most of the reviews on new products coming from paid gigs and fakers. They need to sort this quick – even my mother who barely understands a thing to computers is now wary of Amazon reviews.

topicseed 8y ago

Oh, and the keyword stuffing is horribly obvious and Amazon's antispam team should get in touch with Google's. These product pages should be flagged for keyword stuffing, suspended until fixed and permanently banned for repeat offenders. It's horrible and extremely user-unfriendly.

deaps 8y ago

If the purchasing base (or potential buyers) believe the reviews to be mostly fake, they may lose trust in the service... This seems like a problem worth fixing, from Amazon's perspective.

CodeBiscuit 8y ago

I've even been offered free products by a retailer that I have purchased an item from - 'Free Dash Cam' read the email subject line and provided me with all of the instruction with what to do, and a copy and pastable bit of text to use aswell - I reported this to Amazon, and gave them copies of the emails etc too.

Yuval_Halevi 8y ago

Amazon, Booking.com/Facebook/Reddit/TripAdvisor/Twitter Fake reviews/accounts are one of the main issues social media and Content generation sites are facing these days. One of the solutions is using Blockchain/ or do a quick verification process (Like upwork for example)

davidparks21 8y ago

I reported 4 fake reviews to Amazon on a product I purchased before. The product page had changed from the old one I originally purchased on to a new one with 4 obviously fake 5-star reviews. I found this when I went to re-purchase the product after it (an eBike) was stolen. The page is here (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2VLSX5/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_HeDTCbV67NR82 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2VLSX5/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_He...) There is a review from me, calling out the fakes and providing detail, and the other 4 that are clear-as-day fakes. The previous product page, which I referenced in my report to Amazon, had numerous high quality, legit reviews averaging around 3 stars with tons of detail. Amazon has made no changes after my report.

raghavarora 8y ago

This article talks about unverified purchases, but in my experience, a lot of verified purchases are also fake. I have stopped trusting positive reviews and only go through the negative reviews and assess the product. How to spot fake reviews - They are long, explain the product in detail and similar to other fake reviews.

everdrive 8y ago

As everyone's pointing out, this problem seems to have exploded in the past 1-2 years. I myself had a few trivial counterfeit purchases (batteries, lightbulbs) and one serious one: a ladder. The rung snapped out from under me, and it was dumb luck that I wasn't seriously injured. Anyhow, it's time to move on. Amazon is moving into advertising, and the convenience no longer outweighs the other costs.

designtofly 8y ago

It has gotten awful. Every single time I've searched for a generic product (or even a specific brand + model), I'm inundated with these nonsense branded listings. I'm very close to canceling my Prime membership. I think the best thing that Amazon has accomplished is pushing other retailers to improve their fulfillment process. Just yesterday, instead of dealing with the endless stream of copycat products on Amazon, I purchased a bunch of running gear directly from Nike and it was shipped in less than 12 hours.

rchaud 8y ago

When I first heard of sites like JD.com and Alibaba, I visited out of curiosity and noped out fast. The UX was horrible, the sites were a jumbled mess, and I'd see the same product marked up at different prices, and a bunch of fake-seeming reviews. "Thank God we have Amazon here", I thought. Tried searching for bluetooth headphones on Amazon Canada (which has a much smaller selection than the US site). It was almost exactly as I remember the old Chinese ecommerce site. Wall-to-wall rows of indistinguishable products, 500+ 5 star reviews for each, many of which are obviously for other products. Lately, the Prime app hasn't even been working on my PS3, so it might be time to start moving back to brick and mortar for my purchases.

dontbenebby 8y ago

One useful hack is to use the DuckDuckGo bang command "!fake" to check the fakespot rating for a listing. If you have DDG set as your default browser you can just prepend "!fake" (no quotes) before the url and get a breakdown on the review authenticity. (Interestingly sometimes even AmazonBasics products have a bad fakespot rating...)

stefek99 8y ago

Have you been living under the rock? Since when "no news" is a news?

ccarse 8y ago

This is why I just pretend 5 star reviews don't exist. I figure all the other reviews are probably legit and look at them. If all the other reviews are 1 or 2 star I'm not going to buy it. If there are 4 star and 3 star reviews it's probably decent.