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I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon revi

I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably. Same question applies to Twitter. Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts and bot networks pushing spam, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859814085/researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...) while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes. ETA: Regarding comments along the lines of, "it's in their best interest to let fake reviews continue as it boosts Amazon's sales." I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors. Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.

surfmike 6y ago
It Is Difficult to Get Someone to Understand Something When Their Salary Depends Upon Their Not Understanding It
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though. If I can I am now ordering anything expensive from the vendor directly and avoid Amazon. Just two years ago, I'd have even paid a little extra to have the purchase go through Amazon due to their fast shipping, easy returns and my Amazon store card given me 5% back on purchases. Just the last three months, I probably spent $2k-3k buying directly instead of via Amazon. That was 100% driven by not wanting to get fakes
  - BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
    Amazon knows that products with no or bad reviews don't sell well. By not policing they allow more reviews and more sales.
  - dorkinspace 6y ago
    Absolutely the same for me. Amazon is the new Best Buy for me. Back when online commerce was starting to really take off, it was very common to go to Best Buy to browse then go home and buy it cheaper online. Anymore, I use Amazon for the same thing, I go there to search then go elsewhere to buy. These days, I only buy from Amazon if I need it quick and it isn't in stock locally.
    - mrfusion 6y ago
      Why? To save money?
  - Hokusai 6y ago
    > That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though. I Amazon makes 1 billion extra each year, it can use it to buy a few of the "vendors" later on. Profit now has more value than profit in 10-15 years. Also, many people will be scammed by Amazon/vendor and they will never know it. To detect a fake some times a minimum knowledge is needed. So, in the very short term, the Amazon customer is happy because he thinks that got a bargain, the seller is happy because the item is not returned, Amazon is happy because keeps their percentage. The authentic brand loses a sale and a year later it even looks bad when the fake fails and the customer blames the original brand. And, if a customer detects the fake and complains. Amazon/vendor happily apologizes and returns the money. It is just part of being in the fake business.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  How does their salary depend on them not understanding it? I would assume Amazon's bottom line would be helped by having employees who fully understand the market impact of fake reviews and can easily identify and take down fake reviews.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
When fakespot identifies a fake review there are no repercussions is they are wrong. If Amazon does it, flags or removes those it incorrectly identifies as fake, there will be repercussions with the sellers.
- dv_dt 6y ago
  Between all the great AI technologies in development, and hard feedback from decision info that Amazon could get from a fake review removal process, I believe Amazon could easily solve this problem if they wanted.
tuna-piano 6y ago
I've wondered the same thing... I've got a few theories: -Amazon could identify those fake reviews, but doesn't want to play a cat+mouse game and would rather leave the fake reviews as-is, and easier to spot. If they start targeting harder, the fake reviews will get harder and harder to spot. -Fake reviews (even 5* reviews) may be placed on products by other sellers in a product category to try and get a product banned. The top ranked seller will earn substantially more than the #2 seller. If you're the #2 seller, pay for a bunch of fake reviews on the #1 seller's product, then gather evidence and submit to Amazon to get the #1 seller's product banned. -Short-term incentive is for Amazon to leave the reviews (higher scored products get more sales). Seems not too probable, but not sure.
- pizza234 6y ago
  > -Short-term incentive is for Amazon to leave the reviews (higher scored products get more sales). Seems not too probable, but not sure. Amazon has been very fraudster friendly, and without any exaggeration, anti-customer, for a long while. There's several misbehaviors that they tolerate, while at the same time, make it difficult for customers to fight (report, etc.): - they allow flooding searches with almost-identical products (ebay doesn't) - they allow replacing a product page with a different one (ebay doesn't) - they hide shipping prices and actively confuse the customer (ebay doesn't) - they don't do anything against fakes, even when there are multiple reports (ebay is not great on this, either, though) There's no reason why Amazon should not (by their strategy, certainly not mine) take advantage of fake reviews.
  - jonhohle 6y ago
    I worked on this at Amazon a long time ago. One of the goals was to identify and consolidate items that were the same but where sellers intentionally (or accidentally) had split the listing. Amazon has lots of internal metrics showing how correctly matching listings reduces prices for customers and increases sales. Something like 5-7 listings was enough to find a market minimum. The achilles heal for sellers is that their listings ultimately need to show up When searching for unique information specific to a particular product. They’ll often try to hide that in an unrelated field or in the description. Usually a seller uses the same “trick” for all their listings.
captn3m0 6y ago
In the case of Twitter, they also want to keep the fakes active for a while to help uncover a larger number of accounts at once. Large purges are more effective, because they don’t let the spammers play cat/mouse. Same reason why Google pushes out the large SEO updates in bulk - to stop spammers from gaming them as they come one by one.
daveleebbc 6y ago
Lack of effort? I wrote the FT piece referenced in CNBC's reporting, regarding the 20,000 fake reviews. While the reviews have been taken down, there doesn't seem to have been any repercussions for the companies. All the products are still live... complete with other suspect reviews (just from users not specifically highlighted by our report). Amazon could do a lot more. I've just opened up Telegram to see what's happening in the scam review groups today, and within seconds I can see that this wifi range extender is being boosted by paid-for positive reviews: https://www.amazon.com/Extender-Wodgreat-Wireless-Repeater-Internet/dp/B07XKZRW9P https://www.amazon.com/Extender-Wodgreat-Wireless-Repeater-I... (The 5-star reviews on that page confirm the theory). If I can do that, on a Sunday morning, from my home... why isn't Amazon?
- random_visitor 6y ago
  Seeing how aggressively all the Big Co. optimize for more profits, wouldn't the reason be something like "Doing this at scale isn't worth the effort"
- jjeaff 6y ago
  But you can't just remove products for fake reviews. Or else competitors will buy fake reviews for their competitors products in order to get them delisted.
  - Angostura 6y ago
    "repercussions" covers a lot if things.
  - awinder 6y ago
    There’s a big jump from committing fraud for your own benefit and committing fraud because it might mess your competitor up. I think you’d deal with a much smaller problem, and, presumably one that companies would be on the lookout for and aligned with Amazon on.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      committing fraud is committing fraud. if i'm on a jury, you get no less of a sentence than if you bought the negative reviews.
alexbanks 6y ago
What benefit does Amazon get from spotting and weeding out fake reviews?
- Guest42 6y ago
  They gain credibility against rivals such as Best Buy, Walmart or others...
  - alexbanks 6y ago
    I think that might've been true a decade ago. Now I think it's Best Buy and Walmart that are attempting to gain credibility against Amazon, no?
    - Guest42 6y ago
      I usually get electronics from Best Buy as they haven't sent any fakes (to my knowledge...) and it seems that Walmart has a pretty faithful customer base Tough to generalize based off personal experience but I think overall Amazon would benefit from more credibility and have it be a net positive.
    - Thorrez 6y ago
      Aren't they all trying to prove that they are more credible than competitors?
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  I used to buy things by going to amazon, searching for the type of product I want, and then picking one based on user review. For ten years or so this worked very well and I didn't even consider buying things from anyone else. Now the reviews and rating are meaningless noise and I have to pick out a product to buy by looking elsewhere, which also typically results in me buying things elsewhere.
  - alexbanks 6y ago
    I agree with you, but my point is that you're the dramatic majority. Their revenue proves it. So, in 2020, even though their reviews are all garbage and spam, does it matter to them? I again ask, now, based on their data, what benefit it poses to them?
lithos 6y ago
Bots are the best thing to have happened to Twitter's bottom line. Essentially Twitter at a fundamental level operates by farming the users into nice sorted silos. Then waiting for something to enrage a silo enough for them to obsessively engage with something in a dopamine addiction reaction. Bots are amazingly effective at finding enrage points, and fertilizing what would otherwise be fallow fields. Bots are just a cost effective way of finding the right fertilizer, field, and silo (and all government subsidized on top of it).
dfraser992 6y ago
> "more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably." ... Doing so is Fakespot's raison d'etre, but an unimportant side gig for Amazon. I did my MSc thesis on classifying fake reviews (https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html). It focused on purely text based features, but I am familiar with all of the literature and research at this point. Non-text based features are more useful (classification based just on text is hard because believable fake reviews are easy to write) but the amount of non-text / behavioral data Amazon gets or would need to process would be a Facebook level of engineering effort - and is it really that cost-effective? (versus letting buyers do the work - humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see) The removal of these 20,000 reviews (the FT article) is based on a straightforward obvious heuristic and so is cost-effective. But trying to track all the IPs from China leaving reviews? hmmm. But they should have got the distance and banned all the companies associated with the fake reviews; that would definitely send a signal. Amazon has tried things like Vine etc to deal with the problem; Yelp and TripAdvisor have their own methodologies. But bad actors always seem to find a way around it. Automating the monitoring of communities where spammer groups congregate is possible but that is another major engineering effort - you just can't have humans doing it due to the scale (and Bezos doesn't like paying essential warehouse workers a decent wage either... so why bother with something like this?)
- ilamont 6y ago
  > humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see Shouldn't an excessive number of 5* reviews also be easy for a machine to see, especially when other indicators are considered? For most Amazon detail pages I visit, I immediately sort by most recent. I have learned that the most relevant (which tend to correlate with earlier posting dates) are most likely to be fake, sometimes obviously so.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Vine generates real-ish reviews. It doesn't stop fake reviews.
solatic 6y ago
Classic innovator's dilemma. The benefit of spotting fake reviews is too small for a company of Amazon's scale, so the company doesn't spend (meaningful) resources in pursuit of that goal. Amazon has no way of knowing which, among the infinite number of small projects that may end up becoming a commercial necessity, are fated to grow to that size. This allows smaller competition (here, Fakespot) to do move quickly, execute, and seize that benefit which, for a company of Fakespot's size, is highly meaningful. The momentum that a company like Fakespot builds while building out Fakespot's service allows the quality of Fakespot's service to outstrip and embarrass Amazon's parallel attempts. > I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors. Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems Citation (unfortunately, still) needed. "Very big" means something quite different to Amazon at Amazon's scale.
- hevelvarik 6y ago
  They could outsource it. It’s wondrous that they haven’t solved this yet. I have to suspect they prefer it this way.
ysavir 6y ago
> Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews. What incentive? They're still a giant, and while I've seen people here on HN complain about it, I've yet to see people or companies stop ordering via Amazon due to fake reviews. Aside from their own sales incentives, why should they invest in something that other businesses (such as Fakespot) are already solving? It's R&D costs they can just not spend at all, and if the public pressure against fake reviews starts to boil up, they can probably buy Fakespot for less than it would cost them to develop the functionality on their own.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Are the HN commenters liars? Many people here swear off Amazon electronics and sometimes books.
  - rdtwo 6y ago
    The folks here don’t represent the majority. Most people on hn don’t shop at Walmart Or dollar general either but somehow they do alright
schalab 6y ago
I am guessing its because the hackers are not gaming fakespot's detection systems. If amazon adopted fakespot's algorithm, the hackers would circumvent it within a week. This would also happen if fakespot reaches a critical mass of audience.
jsmith99 6y ago
> I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably. Maybe they can't? Fakespot authoritatively scores reviews but is there evidence that they are accurate? Anecdotally, there are many claims that the results aren't perfect, such as poor scores on a product where the seller knows there are no fake reviews. As a buyer the results on similar, shortlisted, products often seem a bit random compared to my judgement from reading the reviews carefully. Also, without knowing what reviews are identified and removed by amazon themselves we don't have much to compare it to.
- thatthatis 6y ago
  I can confirm. My company is a top 2,000 amazon seller (top 0.1%) and we’ve never bought or incentivized a single review. Our fake spot grade is “B” with some products getting “A” and others “D.” Most recently amazon changed their review gathering algorithm in a way that increases the percent of customers who leave reviews. The acceleration in our review velocity is flagged by fakespot as suspicious.
aaron695 6y ago
> Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts > while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes. This is not symmetrical. This is their job for researchers without doing this they would be unemployed. A month of effort working on a small tight part of Twitter finding a problem and they get a large payday. Twitter does this everyday and gets no reward other than maybe a slightly better network. They just get people thinking they do nothing.
kongolongo 6y ago
What sort of metrics are being used to evaluate fakespot's evaluations? I also think what fakespot does of providing a rating of ratings is a bit easier than actually addressing the larger problem. At some point wouldn't fakespots ratings also be prone to faking as well, surely there will be attacks and attempts at manipulation of that rating system too? What threshold would be used to remove reviews, how would it be fair to different listings? Removing fakes can have significant negatives too if you have too many false positives. So to say that amazon or twitter is failing in comparison to fakespot or independent researchers is a kind of an incomplete comparison without knowing fakespot's false positive rate.

surfmike 6y ago

It Is Difficult to Get Someone to Understand Something When Their Salary Depends Upon Their Not Understanding It

ajmurmann 6y ago
That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though. If I can I am now ordering anything expensive from the vendor directly and avoid Amazon. Just two years ago, I'd have even paid a little extra to have the purchase go through Amazon due to their fast shipping, easy returns and my Amazon store card given me 5% back on purchases. Just the last three months, I probably spent $2k-3k buying directly instead of via Amazon. That was 100% driven by not wanting to get fakes
- BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
  Amazon knows that products with no or bad reviews don't sell well. By not policing they allow more reviews and more sales.
- dorkinspace 6y ago
  Absolutely the same for me. Amazon is the new Best Buy for me. Back when online commerce was starting to really take off, it was very common to go to Best Buy to browse then go home and buy it cheaper online. Anymore, I use Amazon for the same thing, I go there to search then go elsewhere to buy. These days, I only buy from Amazon if I need it quick and it isn't in stock locally.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Why? To save money?
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though. I Amazon makes 1 billion extra each year, it can use it to buy a few of the "vendors" later on. Profit now has more value than profit in 10-15 years. Also, many people will be scammed by Amazon/vendor and they will never know it. To detect a fake some times a minimum knowledge is needed. So, in the very short term, the Amazon customer is happy because he thinks that got a bargain, the seller is happy because the item is not returned, Amazon is happy because keeps their percentage. The authentic brand loses a sale and a year later it even looks bad when the fake fails and the customer blames the original brand. And, if a customer detects the fake and complains. Amazon/vendor happily apologizes and returns the money. It is just part of being in the fake business.
Thorrez 6y ago
How does their salary depend on them not understanding it? I would assume Amazon's bottom line would be helped by having employees who fully understand the market impact of fake reviews and can easily identify and take down fake reviews.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

When fakespot identifies a fake review there are no repercussions is they are wrong. If Amazon does it, flags or removes those it incorrectly identifies as fake, there will be repercussions with the sellers.

dv_dt 6y ago
Between all the great AI technologies in development, and hard feedback from decision info that Amazon could get from a fake review removal process, I believe Amazon could easily solve this problem if they wanted.

tuna-piano 6y ago

I've wondered the same thing... I've got a few theories: -Amazon could identify those fake reviews, but doesn't want to play a cat+mouse game and would rather leave the fake reviews as-is, and easier to spot. If they start targeting harder, the fake reviews will get harder and harder to spot. -Fake reviews (even 5* reviews) may be placed on products by other sellers in a product category to try and get a product banned. The top ranked seller will earn substantially more than the #2 seller. If you're the #2 seller, pay for a bunch of fake reviews on the #1 seller's product, then gather evidence and submit to Amazon to get the #1 seller's product banned. -Short-term incentive is for Amazon to leave the reviews (higher scored products get more sales). Seems not too probable, but not sure.

pizza234 6y ago
> -Short-term incentive is for Amazon to leave the reviews (higher scored products get more sales). Seems not too probable, but not sure. Amazon has been very fraudster friendly, and without any exaggeration, anti-customer, for a long while. There's several misbehaviors that they tolerate, while at the same time, make it difficult for customers to fight (report, etc.): - they allow flooding searches with almost-identical products (ebay doesn't) - they allow replacing a product page with a different one (ebay doesn't) - they hide shipping prices and actively confuse the customer (ebay doesn't) - they don't do anything against fakes, even when there are multiple reports (ebay is not great on this, either, though) There's no reason why Amazon should not (by their strategy, certainly not mine) take advantage of fake reviews.
- jonhohle 6y ago
  I worked on this at Amazon a long time ago. One of the goals was to identify and consolidate items that were the same but where sellers intentionally (or accidentally) had split the listing. Amazon has lots of internal metrics showing how correctly matching listings reduces prices for customers and increases sales. Something like 5-7 listings was enough to find a market minimum. The achilles heal for sellers is that their listings ultimately need to show up When searching for unique information specific to a particular product. They’ll often try to hide that in an unrelated field or in the description. Usually a seller uses the same “trick” for all their listings.

captn3m0 6y ago

In the case of Twitter, they also want to keep the fakes active for a while to help uncover a larger number of accounts at once. Large purges are more effective, because they don’t let the spammers play cat/mouse. Same reason why Google pushes out the large SEO updates in bulk - to stop spammers from gaming them as they come one by one.

daveleebbc 6y ago

Lack of effort? I wrote the FT piece referenced in CNBC's reporting, regarding the 20,000 fake reviews. While the reviews have been taken down, there doesn't seem to have been any repercussions for the companies. All the products are still live... complete with other suspect reviews (just from users not specifically highlighted by our report). Amazon could do a lot more. I've just opened up Telegram to see what's happening in the scam review groups today, and within seconds I can see that this wifi range extender is being boosted by paid-for positive reviews: https://www.amazon.com/Extender-Wodgreat-Wireless-Repeater-Internet/dp/B07XKZRW9P https://www.amazon.com/Extender-Wodgreat-Wireless-Repeater-I... (The 5-star reviews on that page confirm the theory). If I can do that, on a Sunday morning, from my home... why isn't Amazon?

random_visitor 6y ago
Seeing how aggressively all the Big Co. optimize for more profits, wouldn't the reason be something like "Doing this at scale isn't worth the effort"
jjeaff 6y ago
But you can't just remove products for fake reviews. Or else competitors will buy fake reviews for their competitors products in order to get them delisted.
- Angostura 6y ago
  "repercussions" covers a lot if things.
- awinder 6y ago
  There’s a big jump from committing fraud for your own benefit and committing fraud because it might mess your competitor up. I think you’d deal with a much smaller problem, and, presumably one that companies would be on the lookout for and aligned with Amazon on.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    committing fraud is committing fraud. if i'm on a jury, you get no less of a sentence than if you bought the negative reviews.

alexbanks 6y ago

What benefit does Amazon get from spotting and weeding out fake reviews?

Guest42 6y ago
They gain credibility against rivals such as Best Buy, Walmart or others...
- alexbanks 6y ago
  I think that might've been true a decade ago. Now I think it's Best Buy and Walmart that are attempting to gain credibility against Amazon, no?
  - Guest42 6y ago
    I usually get electronics from Best Buy as they haven't sent any fakes (to my knowledge...) and it seems that Walmart has a pretty faithful customer base Tough to generalize based off personal experience but I think overall Amazon would benefit from more credibility and have it be a net positive.
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    Aren't they all trying to prove that they are more credible than competitors?
plorkyeran 6y ago
I used to buy things by going to amazon, searching for the type of product I want, and then picking one based on user review. For ten years or so this worked very well and I didn't even consider buying things from anyone else. Now the reviews and rating are meaningless noise and I have to pick out a product to buy by looking elsewhere, which also typically results in me buying things elsewhere.
- alexbanks 6y ago
  I agree with you, but my point is that you're the dramatic majority. Their revenue proves it. So, in 2020, even though their reviews are all garbage and spam, does it matter to them? I again ask, now, based on their data, what benefit it poses to them?

lithos 6y ago

Bots are the best thing to have happened to Twitter's bottom line. Essentially Twitter at a fundamental level operates by farming the users into nice sorted silos. Then waiting for something to enrage a silo enough for them to obsessively engage with something in a dopamine addiction reaction. Bots are amazingly effective at finding enrage points, and fertilizing what would otherwise be fallow fields. Bots are just a cost effective way of finding the right fertilizer, field, and silo (and all government subsidized on top of it).

dfraser992 6y ago

> "more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably." ... Doing so is Fakespot's raison d'etre, but an unimportant side gig for Amazon. I did my MSc thesis on classifying fake reviews (https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html). It focused on purely text based features, but I am familiar with all of the literature and research at this point. Non-text based features are more useful (classification based just on text is hard because believable fake reviews are easy to write) but the amount of non-text / behavioral data Amazon gets or would need to process would be a Facebook level of engineering effort - and is it really that cost-effective? (versus letting buyers do the work - humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see) The removal of these 20,000 reviews (the FT article) is based on a straightforward obvious heuristic and so is cost-effective. But trying to track all the IPs from China leaving reviews? hmmm. But they should have got the distance and banned all the companies associated with the fake reviews; that would definitely send a signal. Amazon has tried things like Vine etc to deal with the problem; Yelp and TripAdvisor have their own methodologies. But bad actors always seem to find a way around it. Automating the monitoring of communities where spammer groups congregate is possible but that is another major engineering effort - you just can't have humans doing it due to the scale (and Bezos doesn't like paying essential warehouse workers a decent wage either... so why bother with something like this?)

ilamont 6y ago
> humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see Shouldn't an excessive number of 5* reviews also be easy for a machine to see, especially when other indicators are considered? For most Amazon detail pages I visit, I immediately sort by most recent. I have learned that the most relevant (which tend to correlate with earlier posting dates) are most likely to be fake, sometimes obviously so.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Vine generates real-ish reviews. It doesn't stop fake reviews.

solatic 6y ago

Classic innovator's dilemma. The benefit of spotting fake reviews is too small for a company of Amazon's scale, so the company doesn't spend (meaningful) resources in pursuit of that goal. Amazon has no way of knowing which, among the infinite number of small projects that may end up becoming a commercial necessity, are fated to grow to that size. This allows smaller competition (here, Fakespot) to do move quickly, execute, and seize that benefit which, for a company of Fakespot's size, is highly meaningful. The momentum that a company like Fakespot builds while building out Fakespot's service allows the quality of Fakespot's service to outstrip and embarrass Amazon's parallel attempts. > I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors. Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems Citation (unfortunately, still) needed. "Very big" means something quite different to Amazon at Amazon's scale.

hevelvarik 6y ago
They could outsource it. It’s wondrous that they haven’t solved this yet. I have to suspect they prefer it this way.

ysavir 6y ago

> Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews. What incentive? They're still a giant, and while I've seen people here on HN complain about it, I've yet to see people or companies stop ordering via Amazon due to fake reviews. Aside from their own sales incentives, why should they invest in something that other businesses (such as Fakespot) are already solving? It's R&D costs they can just not spend at all, and if the public pressure against fake reviews starts to boil up, they can probably buy Fakespot for less than it would cost them to develop the functionality on their own.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Are the HN commenters liars? Many people here swear off Amazon electronics and sometimes books.
- rdtwo 6y ago
  The folks here don’t represent the majority. Most people on hn don’t shop at Walmart Or dollar general either but somehow they do alright

schalab 6y ago

I am guessing its because the hackers are not gaming fakespot's detection systems. If amazon adopted fakespot's algorithm, the hackers would circumvent it within a week. This would also happen if fakespot reaches a critical mass of audience.

jsmith99 6y ago

> I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably. Maybe they can't? Fakespot authoritatively scores reviews but is there evidence that they are accurate? Anecdotally, there are many claims that the results aren't perfect, such as poor scores on a product where the seller knows there are no fake reviews. As a buyer the results on similar, shortlisted, products often seem a bit random compared to my judgement from reading the reviews carefully. Also, without knowing what reviews are identified and removed by amazon themselves we don't have much to compare it to.

thatthatis 6y ago
I can confirm. My company is a top 2,000 amazon seller (top 0.1%) and we’ve never bought or incentivized a single review. Our fake spot grade is “B” with some products getting “A” and others “D.” Most recently amazon changed their review gathering algorithm in a way that increases the percent of customers who leave reviews. The acceleration in our review velocity is flagged by fakespot as suspicious.

aaron695 6y ago

> Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts > while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes. This is not symmetrical. This is their job for researchers without doing this they would be unemployed. A month of effort working on a small tight part of Twitter finding a problem and they get a large payday. Twitter does this everyday and gets no reward other than maybe a slightly better network. They just get people thinking they do nothing.

kongolongo 6y ago

What sort of metrics are being used to evaluate fakespot's evaluations? I also think what fakespot does of providing a rating of ratings is a bit easier than actually addressing the larger problem. At some point wouldn't fakespots ratings also be prone to faking as well, surely there will be attacks and attempts at manipulation of that rating system too? What threshold would be used to remove reviews, how would it be fair to different listings? Removing fakes can have significant negatives too if you have too many false positives. So to say that amazon or twitter is failing in comparison to fakespot or independent researchers is a kind of an incomplete comparison without knowing fakespot's false positive rate.