6 ms·

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.

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
      What's to boost? The customer would have selected the better option and been more satisfied, and Amazon would have brokered the deal either way. They still need their hammer.
      - laughinghan 8y ago
        Maybe in A/B tests, customers who see a product with 4.9 (fake) stars are more likely to click Buy than customers who see the same product with 4.3 (honest) stars?
- ethbro 8y ago
  "We at Amazon think it would be a shame if an algorithm flagged your {insert fake 5-star Chinese product here}. Have we mentioned we offer a Premium Seller Protection service that will ensure nothing... untoward happens to your listings?"
- c2h5oh 8y ago
  They are trying and failing - my wife is a seller and easily 20-30% of completely valid positive reviews from repeat customers disappear without a trace.. at the same time a racist tyrade of a review from a buyer who has swastika as user avatar is impossible to get rid of ( 5 or 6 tries so far)
  - ccozan 8y ago
    reading this, feels like ebay is a really nice place to sell stuff. They might have their own issues, but feels more authentic.
    - educationdata 8y ago
      Really? I feel selling stuff on ebay has a 1/5 chance get scammed.
      - manmal 8y ago
        I don’t know what categories you shop there, but I have never been scammed. Often make sure to contact the seller beforehand though.
        muzika 8y ago
        It’s easy to get scammed SELLING on eBay. Buying is not much if a problem as you can get a refund easily as a buyer.
        astura 8y ago
        I've sold a couple hundred of items on eBay and I've never been scammed.
        SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        I sell a huge amount of stuff on eBay (retro computing / gaming items) and have found it to be a really fantastic and friendly community. Perhaps it depends on the items being sold?
- fma 8y ago
  I was in the market for headphones. I bought a pair and was looking for another because I was dissatisfied. I saw my exact model under another listing...but oddly it had ~150 5 stars. I thought no way in hell THESE were loved by everyone. Every single review was made in the same day, with broken English reviews. These were electronics, and knockoff airpods to boot. But if I 100% need the real thing, I buy else where. For example I just purchased several bottles of Vitamin D for my infant. I'm not trusting Amazon even though Amazon would have shipped faster.
  - BostonEnginerd 8y ago
    I never buy anything on Amazon that I put in my body. They really need to get this issue under control. It's a huge trust problem for me.
    - chadash 8y ago
      Totally agree. I won't but stuff on Amazon for ME to eat. Much more so anything that's going into a baby's body.
  - beauzero 8y ago
    Been using Swanson Vitamins for about 10 years. Decent website, excellent vitamins. Smaller mom and pop b-to-c that has been online since the first .com bubble.
    - Trisell 8y ago
      My wife uses it for our family as well. If you watch you can catch really good sales as well.
- int_19h 8y ago
  I find it unlikely, since they don't really have much customer lock-in, so reputation matters a lot. It doesn't make many disappointing purchases for customers to start looking elsewhere first.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  There are many 3rd party sites (like fakespot.com) which do a better job than Amazon does and are not incredibly sophisticated. Amazon just doesn't care, that is the only conclusion that is possible to draw from the available data. They are not even doing a half-assed job, we're talking about a fractionally-assed job here, perhaps even milli-asses. Amazon could easily do at least as good a job as fakespot, and then followup with consequences for review fraud. They could also implement various policies and use the huge amount of data they have available to go well beyond that level and make some headway against the problem. But they haven't done so. Because they can't be bothered. Because people being suckered into buying shitty products hasn't hurt their bottom line yet. They are complicit.
  - j16sdiz 8y ago
    Just because those 3rd party sites are not targeted by fake reviewers.
    - InclinedPlane 8y ago
      They are not 3rd party review sites, they are 3rd party sites for algorithmically analyzing the reviews on amazon for a given product.
    - pgrote 8y ago
      How would fakespot be targeted by fake reviewers?
      - woadwarrior01 8y ago
        Adversarial attacks. You tweak your fake reviews until fakespot is convinced your reviews aren’t fake.
        therein 8y ago
        Like not post them at once.
- swiley 8y ago
  I felt like they know there's a large industry built around it and now that it will likely just adapt to taking simple measures like that. By leaving it the way it is for now it's super easy to spot product pages with fake reviews by anyone that cares to look.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"and was so beyond the pale obvious fraudulent that I felt the need to email jeff@amazon." Obviously Jeff is well aware, and could do a lot more about it, but doesn't, ergo he is complicit. Fake Reviews are 100% supported by Amazon and Bezos. It's basically full on fraud, right out in the open.
thinkloop 8y ago
> 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. Then they would stagger the days. The issue is that human adversaries are formidable and you start approaching generalized AI to defeat them.
- ethbro 8y ago
  The issue the tech community has is that Amazon doesn't even appear to be doing the bare minimum.
  - cure 8y ago
    It's either that, or they are failing really miserably at controlling the flood of bogus/fraudulent review. I find the latter hard to believe. We're not talking about a mom-and-pop shop here. This is Amazon, they employ many thousands of very smart people that could no doubt build solutions that are better than the status quo.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    Absolutely. And note that in other areas (such as payment fraud) they put in a lot more legwork because the consequences actually hit them directly instead of just their customers.
- ALittleLight 8y ago
  You're right that there is an arms race between fake reviewers and Amazon, but the conclusion - that because it's a race Amazon shouldn't try, is spurious. Amazon should pursue the race aggressively, and because they can allocate more money and software developers to the contest than any one group of fake reviewers, they should also ultimately win.
  - thinkloop 8y ago
    You're right. Is Amazon not applying any machine learning to their reviews? Google solved spam email and that seems similar.
PorterDuff 8y ago
I think that food supplements/vitamins are the worst. My one and only email to jeff@amazon.com was on that. It probably didn't do any good, but I felt better. Luckily, they don't appear to be of any value anyway.
nkrisc 8y ago
I would not buy anything that is meant to be consumed on Amazon.
esalman 8y ago
These kind of review patterns are easy to spot. I used to read through recent review etc. These days when I find a product on Amazon that I feel like buying, I go to reviewmeta.com and check the review trend before deciding.
m3nu 8y ago
Surely their advanced machine learning would see such an obvious pattern?
- doctorpangloss 8y ago
  There are more fake reviews than real ones. Due to this inversion, it is practically intractable for Amazon to detect fake reviews in a fully automated way. They must, at some point, be human moderated.
  - pigscantfly 8y ago
    The class imbalance might make the modeling slightly more difficult but certainly not 'practically intractable.'
  - harshreality 8y ago
    Is it so difficult? Amazon already has the number of helpful vs unhelpful votes for each review. They could start with that voting data, and then use metadata (geoip, account usage/posting timing, client fingerprinting) to create quality metrics for each user. They could even have separate trustworthiness ratings per product category (a good book reviewer might not be so good at rating appliances). From there, they'd have a rough idea of which reviews are real and fake, and they could start training a NN on the text. Figuring out when sellers are complicit, and when it's competitor sabotage, is more difficult, but Amazon has a ton of data about sellers and reviewers and buyers and the social/commercial graph connecting them. Amazon doesn't appear to be working on solving simpler problems, such as incorrect product/book comingling. Therefore, I have trouble giving them the benefit of the doubt that they're working on hard problems like addressing fraudulent ratings/sellers.
    - dfraser992 8y ago
      Good plan. See my previous comment; I did my MSc on classifying fake reviews. The behavioral / non-text features are far more useful than the text, based on all the research. There is no technical reason Amazon could not capture all the signals, except for the scale of the effort. So I'd say someone has decided it is not worth the effort/cost given the likelihood it won't improve sales that much. As for NNs, .... an ensemble of classifiers would be best (but of course I'd say that).
madsprite 8y ago
It gets even worse that true 5 stars and low ratings can get flagged for false review by Amazon's algo. Last year there was a posting on hackernews how this person lost his Amazon account as it got flagged on its first review with a long history of purchases.
chrischen 8y ago
> 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. Maybe that's bad for business if they did. People see a < 5 star review and may not purchase it, even if it is a lie.
stebann 8y ago
Capitalism dynamics indicates that they DO KNOW that some reviews are fake.

_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
    What's to boost? The customer would have selected the better option and been more satisfied, and Amazon would have brokered the deal either way. They still need their hammer.
    - laughinghan 8y ago
      Maybe in A/B tests, customers who see a product with 4.9 (fake) stars are more likely to click Buy than customers who see the same product with 4.3 (honest) stars?
ethbro 8y ago
"We at Amazon think it would be a shame if an algorithm flagged your {insert fake 5-star Chinese product here}. Have we mentioned we offer a Premium Seller Protection service that will ensure nothing... untoward happens to your listings?"
c2h5oh 8y ago
They are trying and failing - my wife is a seller and easily 20-30% of completely valid positive reviews from repeat customers disappear without a trace.. at the same time a racist tyrade of a review from a buyer who has swastika as user avatar is impossible to get rid of ( 5 or 6 tries so far)
- ccozan 8y ago
  reading this, feels like ebay is a really nice place to sell stuff. They might have their own issues, but feels more authentic.
  - educationdata 8y ago
    Really? I feel selling stuff on ebay has a 1/5 chance get scammed.
    - manmal 8y ago
      I don’t know what categories you shop there, but I have never been scammed. Often make sure to contact the seller beforehand though.
      - muzika 8y ago
        It’s easy to get scammed SELLING on eBay. Buying is not much if a problem as you can get a refund easily as a buyer.
        astura 8y ago
        I've sold a couple hundred of items on eBay and I've never been scammed.
        SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        I sell a huge amount of stuff on eBay (retro computing / gaming items) and have found it to be a really fantastic and friendly community. Perhaps it depends on the items being sold?
fma 8y ago
I was in the market for headphones. I bought a pair and was looking for another because I was dissatisfied. I saw my exact model under another listing...but oddly it had ~150 5 stars. I thought no way in hell THESE were loved by everyone. Every single review was made in the same day, with broken English reviews. These were electronics, and knockoff airpods to boot. But if I 100% need the real thing, I buy else where. For example I just purchased several bottles of Vitamin D for my infant. I'm not trusting Amazon even though Amazon would have shipped faster.
- BostonEnginerd 8y ago
  I never buy anything on Amazon that I put in my body. They really need to get this issue under control. It's a huge trust problem for me.
  - chadash 8y ago
    Totally agree. I won't but stuff on Amazon for ME to eat. Much more so anything that's going into a baby's body.
- beauzero 8y ago
  Been using Swanson Vitamins for about 10 years. Decent website, excellent vitamins. Smaller mom and pop b-to-c that has been online since the first .com bubble.
  - Trisell 8y ago
    My wife uses it for our family as well. If you watch you can catch really good sales as well.
int_19h 8y ago
I find it unlikely, since they don't really have much customer lock-in, so reputation matters a lot. It doesn't make many disappointing purchases for customers to start looking elsewhere first.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
There are many 3rd party sites (like fakespot.com) which do a better job than Amazon does and are not incredibly sophisticated. Amazon just doesn't care, that is the only conclusion that is possible to draw from the available data. They are not even doing a half-assed job, we're talking about a fractionally-assed job here, perhaps even milli-asses. Amazon could easily do at least as good a job as fakespot, and then followup with consequences for review fraud. They could also implement various policies and use the huge amount of data they have available to go well beyond that level and make some headway against the problem. But they haven't done so. Because they can't be bothered. Because people being suckered into buying shitty products hasn't hurt their bottom line yet. They are complicit.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  Just because those 3rd party sites are not targeted by fake reviewers.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    They are not 3rd party review sites, they are 3rd party sites for algorithmically analyzing the reviews on amazon for a given product.
  - pgrote 8y ago
    How would fakespot be targeted by fake reviewers?
    - woadwarrior01 8y ago
      Adversarial attacks. You tweak your fake reviews until fakespot is convinced your reviews aren’t fake.
      - therein 8y ago
        Like not post them at once.
swiley 8y ago
I felt like they know there's a large industry built around it and now that it will likely just adapt to taking simple measures like that. By leaving it the way it is for now it's super easy to spot product pages with fake reviews by anyone that cares to look.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"and was so beyond the pale obvious fraudulent that I felt the need to email jeff@amazon." Obviously Jeff is well aware, and could do a lot more about it, but doesn't, ergo he is complicit. Fake Reviews are 100% supported by Amazon and Bezos. It's basically full on fraud, right out in the open.

thinkloop 8y ago

> 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. Then they would stagger the days. The issue is that human adversaries are formidable and you start approaching generalized AI to defeat them.

ethbro 8y ago
The issue the tech community has is that Amazon doesn't even appear to be doing the bare minimum.
- cure 8y ago
  It's either that, or they are failing really miserably at controlling the flood of bogus/fraudulent review. I find the latter hard to believe. We're not talking about a mom-and-pop shop here. This is Amazon, they employ many thousands of very smart people that could no doubt build solutions that are better than the status quo.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Absolutely. And note that in other areas (such as payment fraud) they put in a lot more legwork because the consequences actually hit them directly instead of just their customers.
ALittleLight 8y ago
You're right that there is an arms race between fake reviewers and Amazon, but the conclusion - that because it's a race Amazon shouldn't try, is spurious. Amazon should pursue the race aggressively, and because they can allocate more money and software developers to the contest than any one group of fake reviewers, they should also ultimately win.
- thinkloop 8y ago
  You're right. Is Amazon not applying any machine learning to their reviews? Google solved spam email and that seems similar.

PorterDuff 8y ago

I think that food supplements/vitamins are the worst. My one and only email to jeff@amazon.com was on that. It probably didn't do any good, but I felt better. Luckily, they don't appear to be of any value anyway.

nkrisc 8y ago

I would not buy anything that is meant to be consumed on Amazon.

esalman 8y ago

These kind of review patterns are easy to spot. I used to read through recent review etc. These days when I find a product on Amazon that I feel like buying, I go to reviewmeta.com and check the review trend before deciding.

m3nu 8y ago

Surely their advanced machine learning would see such an obvious pattern?

doctorpangloss 8y ago
There are more fake reviews than real ones. Due to this inversion, it is practically intractable for Amazon to detect fake reviews in a fully automated way. They must, at some point, be human moderated.
- pigscantfly 8y ago
  The class imbalance might make the modeling slightly more difficult but certainly not 'practically intractable.'
- harshreality 8y ago
  Is it so difficult? Amazon already has the number of helpful vs unhelpful votes for each review. They could start with that voting data, and then use metadata (geoip, account usage/posting timing, client fingerprinting) to create quality metrics for each user. They could even have separate trustworthiness ratings per product category (a good book reviewer might not be so good at rating appliances). From there, they'd have a rough idea of which reviews are real and fake, and they could start training a NN on the text. Figuring out when sellers are complicit, and when it's competitor sabotage, is more difficult, but Amazon has a ton of data about sellers and reviewers and buyers and the social/commercial graph connecting them. Amazon doesn't appear to be working on solving simpler problems, such as incorrect product/book comingling. Therefore, I have trouble giving them the benefit of the doubt that they're working on hard problems like addressing fraudulent ratings/sellers.
  - dfraser992 8y ago
    Good plan. See my previous comment; I did my MSc on classifying fake reviews. The behavioral / non-text features are far more useful than the text, based on all the research. There is no technical reason Amazon could not capture all the signals, except for the scale of the effort. So I'd say someone has decided it is not worth the effort/cost given the likelihood it won't improve sales that much. As for NNs, .... an ensemble of classifiers would be best (but of course I'd say that).

madsprite 8y ago

It gets even worse that true 5 stars and low ratings can get flagged for false review by Amazon's algo. Last year there was a posting on hackernews how this person lost his Amazon account as it got flagged on its first review with a long history of purchases.

chrischen 8y ago

> 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. Maybe that's bad for business if they did. People see a < 5 star review and may not purchase it, even if it is a lie.

stebann 8y ago

Capitalism dynamics indicates that they DO KNOW that some reviews are fake.