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So an army of bots can create fake reviews for my business and it will look legit so long as they also give consensus reviews for a bunch of well known places?
by sideshowb 4y ago
So an army of bots can create fake reviews for my business and it will look legit so long as they also give consensus reviews for a bunch of well known places?
- londons_explore 4y agoYep. But as soon as a few real users find your place and rank it highly, then the bot army will only impact scores for users who haven't yet come across such bot scores. Obviously any such scheme is helped by there being not-too-many bot accounts. It's hard to limit bot account creation in a decentralized opensource design. One potentially workable approach is to have users leave a trail of data in some immutable form (eg. a series of reviews left, with scores, timestamps, and text comments), which you later apply some heuristic over (eg. 'all comments containing a web link to a url shortener are probably spam'). All data that is older than the publication of the heuristic is then fairly trustworthy, since bot account owners can't retrospectively edit their spam to make it not match the heuristic.