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Often it's quite easy to spot these fake reviews. I mean a 10 $ USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g. the PS5? Sure. The popular "name brands" must rea

Often it's quite easy to spot these fake reviews. I mean a 10 $ USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g. the PS5? Sure. The popular "name brands" must really like this as these scammers ruin the collaborative review system for everyone, so people will put more trust in brand names again. Another funny thing are all the new brands that pop up on Amazon (at least in Germany). They're often picked to sound vaguely familiar (e.g. Orfeld) and trust-inspiring, and their product pages portrait them as century-old companies. Often the products they sell are sourced from whitelabel manufacturers, so you have 20-40 brands offering the same product (for wildly different prices), maybe with some small variation in packaging and color. Interestingly, some new companies like Anker have managed to build up a good "brand reputation" in 5-10 years, probably also due to the fact that they're no longer at the bottom of the trust chain.

jader201 5y ago
> I mean a 10 $ USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g. the PS5? That seems like a bad example. People are having a really hard time getting PS5s, and probably 50%+ are scalpers that don’t care about writing reviews. And cables are produced and bought at a much higher rate than video game consoles, anyway.
1_person 5y ago
The funny thing to me, if you think about it, is that nothing really changed, it's just become more transparent. It's for decades, if not arguably always been a bunch of bullshit marketing for meaningless labels slapped on imported knock offs of questionable quality that you just hope they sample enough of for QA to keep the factory from slipping turds and razor blades into some of the boxes.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
Cables are an interesting example because they are so inexpensive and easy to produce, I can't imagine any one being much better than the others. Especially when they're all within 10-20% in price. I used to agonize over finding "the best" but then I started to realize how much time I was wasting. Just find the cheapest option with the length you want and call it a day. Same goes for most things on Amazon.

jader201 5y ago

> I mean a 10 $ USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g. the PS5? That seems like a bad example. People are having a really hard time getting PS5s, and probably 50%+ are scalpers that don’t care about writing reviews. And cables are produced and bought at a much higher rate than video game consoles, anyway.

1_person 5y ago

The funny thing to me, if you think about it, is that nothing really changed, it's just become more transparent. It's for decades, if not arguably always been a bunch of bullshit marketing for meaningless labels slapped on imported knock offs of questionable quality that you just hope they sample enough of for QA to keep the factory from slipping turds and razor blades into some of the boxes.

mitchdoogle 5y ago

Cables are an interesting example because they are so inexpensive and easy to produce, I can't imagine any one being much better than the others. Especially when they're all within 10-20% in price. I used to agonize over finding "the best" but then I started to realize how much time I was wasting. Just find the cheapest option with the length you want and call it a day. Same goes for most things on Amazon.