6 ms·

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

ncallaway 6y ago
It does affect the bottom line, though. Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page... Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related. With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites. Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    > Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains? I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around. It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.
- bitsnbytes 6y ago
  I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints. If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product. I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date. I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.
  - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
    Positive reviews aren't the only ones being spoofed though, with competitors often posting fake negative ones for other products [1]. --- [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039
    - bitsnbytes 6y ago
      Yeah I have seen that as well and should have clarified that is a possibility. However to avoid that I also look at the middle reviews and avoid the reviews with no or little explanation. However, I avoid the top reviews at all cost which typically is just the manufactures product description anyways. It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.
- 8ytecoder 6y ago
  I absolutely shop more at Best Buy, Costco and other places because of this reason. Whatever I buy at these places, I know they stand behind the quality. Do I go to Best Buy for a $10 cable? No. But a $3000 DSLR, I would rather buy from B&H.
throwaway_1301 6y ago
I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake. Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem. You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity. It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products. I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false. I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society. /rant
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  This is a bit like arguing that Medicare for all is impossible in the United States because it is such a big country. This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews. You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect. Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template. The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.
random5634 6y ago
No kidding. What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part. * Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more. * Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory). * Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better * Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way. * Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked. I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy. Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.
- lozaning 6y ago
  You're not going to touch amazon with a site with more trust if you cant compete logistically.
- fatfox 6y ago
  Which Chinese platform runs all these checks? Really curious as I don't have much experience with selling on Chinese platforms.

ncallaway 6y ago

It does affect the bottom line, though. Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page... Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related. With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites. Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).

Judgmentality 6y ago
I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?
- ncallaway 6y ago
  > Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains? I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around. It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.
bitsnbytes 6y ago
I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints. If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product. I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date. I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.
- HDMI_Cable 6y ago
  Positive reviews aren't the only ones being spoofed though, with competitors often posting fake negative ones for other products [1]. --- [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039
  - bitsnbytes 6y ago
    Yeah I have seen that as well and should have clarified that is a possibility. However to avoid that I also look at the middle reviews and avoid the reviews with no or little explanation. However, I avoid the top reviews at all cost which typically is just the manufactures product description anyways. It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.
8ytecoder 6y ago
I absolutely shop more at Best Buy, Costco and other places because of this reason. Whatever I buy at these places, I know they stand behind the quality. Do I go to Best Buy for a $10 cable? No. But a $3000 DSLR, I would rather buy from B&H.

throwaway_1301 6y ago

I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake. Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem. You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity. It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products. I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false. I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society. /rant

jiggawatts 6y ago
This is a bit like arguing that Medicare for all is impossible in the United States because it is such a big country. This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews. You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect. Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template. The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.

random5634 6y ago

No kidding. What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part. * Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more. * Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory). * Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better * Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way. * Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked. I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy. Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.

lozaning 6y ago
You're not going to touch amazon with a site with more trust if you cant compete logistically.
fatfox 6y ago
Which Chinese platform runs all these checks? Really curious as I don't have much experience with selling on Chinese platforms.