9 ms·

Up to 30% of online reviews are fake and consumers can't tell the difference

199 points by elorant 4y ago

dam_broke_it 4y ago
Always go by the 1 or 2 star reviews.....
- unity1001 4y ago
  You'd end up not being able to buy anything...
- mikestew 4y ago
  2 and 3 star reviews. 1 star reviews, in my observation, are consistently along the lines of "UPS left the package in the rain! 1 star!", which has fuck all to do with the product.
  - VancouverMan 4y ago
    Such things are still part of the overall purchasing experience, though. If I'm about to order a product online and for whatever reason there may be delivery-related challenges involved that others have experienced, I'd certainly like to know beforehand.
    - regular 4y ago
  - Toutouxc 4y ago
    Also people who don’t seem to understand how the product, their life and the universe in general work. The “can’t make coffee from cat litter, blames Obama in all seriousness, two typos per word” kind. I always wonder how these people look in real life and if I meet some of them on the street.
    - nebula8804 4y ago
      Its the outcome of gutting the educational system, poor methods of teaching (instead of teaching critical thinking they teach how to take the test), and just the fact that in a country of ~332 Million the bottom 20% could be like 67 million people(the bottom 20% is not a direct correlation but still you get the point).
- spamizbad 4y ago
  In my experience its always best to leave negative reviews in 3 star reviews. 1 star reviews get buried/removed, but if you let that criticism sneak into a 3-star review it's likely not bad enough for the platform to notice.
- acchow 4y ago
  Isn't that attack spam from competitors?
- xxs 4y ago
  1 is not useful; 5 is next to the useless list.
jraby3 4y ago
Do fakespot and similar services work?
- Someone1234 4y ago
  Fakespot does its best, but Amazon and similar don't expose very much information to determine if a review is fake (be it manual review OR via a service like Fakespot). Plus there are two kinds of "fake reviews": Automated reviews ("spam"), and then reviewers who got free samples/paid. The second is almost impossible to detect as real people are really writing the reviews (and even calling them "fake" is hard because the person may still give an honest review sometimes). You can sometimes spot fake reviews, but that is just due to laziness, if they're trying even a little bit it could be very hard to spot in particularly at volume. I will say one good trick is to read "new" reviews rather than most helpful/liked, since they game those too.
OJFord 4y ago
I've had two fairly detailed, not low-effort, reviews not approved for publication on Amazon.co.uk recently. After the first I swore I'd never bother again (it was pretty high-effort to be honest, relatively) but something got the better of me. Neither time has there been any indication of what the problem is (I guessed the first one was my reference to a 'knob', as in for turning, which the product had - but couldn't find any such similar Scunthorpe in the second) and even if they did give you some idea, they invite you to start again from scratch - not edit it, it's not saved, not even your photos. I'd love to see click-through metrics on that, does anyone bother?
- jersak 4y ago
  I had the same experience. Id say they just don't approve most of the reviews. I would think most (real) people only leave a good review when things go EXTREMELY WELL. Not the same for bad reviews though, which means real people will more often than not leave reviews pointing problems and shortcomings than praising a product. That, at least in my head, would result in less sales and so making the review workflow painful for the user is by design.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I just checked on my account and I have 126 published reviews on Amazon. I can recall around 10 that were denied, about half of which seemed "OK, that's fair in retrospect" and a modest edit and resubmit got them published. The other half of the denies I couldn't really figure out and just ignored (some of which were solid product, 4 or 5 star reviews). I have several 1-star reviews among the published.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Amazon banned me from leaving reviews entirely after I left a couple of negative reviews for products I bought.
- xxs 4y ago
  I don't leave 1/2 star reviews in general, pretty much every single review has been approved. 5 stars almost never given, either. It was sort of surprising amazon rejects reviews - the more you know. Only 30% being fake seems like a very low estimate
prottog 4y ago
Online reviews and rating systems do need an overhaul. I once tried to leave a review of a poor experience I had while staying at a short-term rental property, sticking to the facts with no melodrama; and the platform rejected my review as being "against policy". There's clearly no incentive at all for the platform to accept anyone's poor review, since that would mean less business for the platform. Not to mention all the e-commerce reviews that are along the lines of, "1-star: item was perfect and was everything I wanted it to be but it arrived three days late" or "5-stars: item sucks so bad that I returned it but the platform's return policy is great".
- cutenewt 4y ago
  Netflix removed 5-star ratings a while back; they don't have reviews either. Seems like it hasn't impacted the user experience. Arguably improved the experience. Perhaps other sites like Amazon and AirBnb should remove ratings and reviews too?
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    Don't you have access to everything on Netflix? It's a different model On other platforms you're spending time and money, on Netflix only time.
  - another_devy 4y ago
    In case of e-commerce reviews are crucial not sure of ratings. If I’m buying an item and couple of reviews point out something wrong in design or usage I avoid it. Without reviews it’s not possible
  - superbaconman 4y ago
    Three star reviews feel more intuitive anyway: 1 bad 2 average 3 good. But when it comes to product reviews, accounts of hardware failures is super important imo.
  - yakak 4y ago
    I was pretty disappointed with Netflix after they canceled the star system. Before they cancelled it they could fit my likes to other people with similar likes, after they cancelled it they could insist their own content was good enough for everyone.
egberts1 4y ago
I grilled a red lobster complete with scallop, pearl onions, and capers and then simmered it in a butter dish for an hour. It was so delicious. (Hey, I am not a bot, these are my current experience of what I am actually reading on Amazon reviews). More funny Amazon reviews that I found: https://eliteseller.com/blog/funny-amazon-reviews/ https://eliteseller.com/blog/funny-amazon-reviews/
- odysseus 4y ago
  The product photo for the shaving bib apron (#7 on the list) is quite a gem.
Scoundreller 4y ago
Only 30%????
- xxs 4y ago
  Up to.. 30% is too low in my experience.
regular 4y ago
I start with negative reviews, looking for well-written ones with specifics. The fake ones are often absurdly easy to spot, with mindless cheerleading, lists of features regurgitated verbatim, and fully spelled-out product names. That's my favorite: ridiculously complete product names with taglines, practically only missing the (tm).
- maxbond 4y ago
  I read the 3-star reviews myself. I find the negative ones on Amazon often received the wrong product (a concern to be sure but that's just the chance you take with literally every Amazon product), or misunderstood what the product did. And then I try to find details that are repeated across several reasonable-sounding reviews. I've not had very much success with this approach, to be honest. I still just feel like I'm rolling the dice.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
I'd like to think I'm pretty good at spotting which reviews are fake, but I'd love to do a test to find out if the ones I thought were real were actually fake. It won't be long before someone writes a GPT-3 model that can write hundreds of different reviews indistinguishable from real ones, and that sound and look different from each other, based on a product description and images.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Fake reviews are not the only problem. It's the fact that most reviews are going to either be from someone who loved the product enough to take the time to write about, or had such a bad experience (which could be anything and maybe not related to the problem) that they feel compelled to write about. So you wind up with 5-stars and 1-stars and not much inbetween.
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  It seems like this is a thesis that could be tested empirically. It makes intuitive sense to me, but if I’m honest, that kind of inverted bell is not what I actually see very often on Amazon.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    Amazon has a lot of paid-for reviews, so you would likely see it if you remove the paid entries. In some cases on very bad products, you see tons of 5 star reviews and a lot of 1 star reviews - and if it's high on the fakespot list, I can only conclude it's a bad product. I've mostly given up on Amazon except where I can't find the product elsewhere (or on time).
    - tracker1 4y ago
      I still use amazon a lot.. but not always reviews... often I know the product I'm looking for. I'll also tend to look at the negative reviews.. are the reviewers just not knowledgeable about what they bought, broke in shipping, or actually a bad product/seller. It will vary a bit. What sucks, is competitors will pay for bad reviews too.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    I have not done any systematic check, but I often see this type of inverted curve in product reviews. -- Though either the 5-star side or the 1-star side will be significantly higher than the other.
- taeric 4y ago
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Lots of reviews are paid. I get half my electronics refunded by leaving 5 star reviews on Amazon that sellers have asked for in the packages.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  How does this kind of transaction take place? I've bought plenty of things on Amazon that I've left 5 star reviews for, including electronics, but haven't once been approached with refunds or incentives.
  - laweijfmvo 4y ago
    I've often received little cards in my orders asking for a screenshot of a 5-star review in exchange for a 90% off coupon for my next purchase, or something like that.
    - ravenstine 4y ago
      Come to think of it, I believe I've had such material come with some of my purchases but I've ignored them because I'm so advertising-averse. I'll have to pay attention for these next time. haha Though I still won't leave a 5 star review if I don't genuinely think the product is worth that.
SoftTalker 4y ago
I assume all online reviews are faked or at least biased. I don't believe any of them, especially those that appear on the same site or include affiliate links to the product being sold.
- nomel 4y ago
  I tend to believe the review distribution. For a reasonable product, they're usually normal distributions. For a bad product, they're almost always bimodal.
another_devy 4y ago
Lower ratings most of the times are honest reviews and if seller replies to them you can see how much they care about the customer and if they are being honest business
- club_tropical 4y ago
  If the seller/owner responds to a negative review, this is a red flag for me. Indicates a sort of hypersensitive, pressuring attitude. I empathize that they might wanna "tell their side" but in the end it betrays a clingy monitoring of Your Image that makes me as a potential customer feel like I may be walking into a spiderweb.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Than you for your review. Please contact Company Support so that we can resolve this for you. How many times have I seen that on various reviews. I kind of like it somewhat, at least it means they didn’t delete it.
    - club_tropical 4y ago
      Oh actually that's a good point. Anodyne generic response might be positive.
rdtwo 4y ago
Only 30%. No way like 90%
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  30% are fake and fool shoppers. 60% are fake but don't fool shoppers. 9% are fake but so good they fooled the researchers, too.
  - smittywerben 4y ago
    The 5% that fool themselves: '1/5 stars - This stupid modem doesn't have wifi. The $20 a month modem from Comcast has wifi.'
seydor 4y ago
You can find a review to confirm your biases every time. In the end , everything is a hunch
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lapcat 4y ago
As an App Store developer, it's painfully obvious that at least 30% of App Store reviews are fake.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
eatsyourtacos 4y ago
How do fake reviews on something like Amazon work? Wouldn't they only allow you to leave a review if you have purchased the item? I get that for a cheap product a seller could have a bunch of dummies buy it and then leave reviews, but that... doesn't seem very viable for most things. Or are normal people getting paid to leave high reviews for something they bought and would not normally review?
- baxtr 4y ago
  Easy. Check out some telegram channels. There, people get offers for specific products. You order them, write a review, send in a proof and then get reimbursed for the item. So you can keep items for free. In some cases you even get some extra money on top.
- acdha 4y ago
  They do allow you to leave reviews for things you didn’t buy from them (there’s a “verified buyer” tag for people who did buy it directly) but here are two other very common scams: 1. I receive emails offering to give me free stuff in exchange for reviews, with the promise of more if they’re good. You can also find job site posting which are similar: get paid to review products, strongly implying that you get more for 5 star reviews. I haven’t actually done this but I’d be shocked if they gave people time or latitude for fairly reviewing anything. 2. I’ve had cards included in Amazon purchases offering freebies for positive reviews - just include a link in your email and get an Amazon gift certificate. Amazon makes reporting these difficult and the frontline support tend to be confused if you try, and nothing visibly happened when I did. Clearly they do not care about this problem.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  Since you're intending to fake the review, you don't have to actually send the product. You only lose the shipping costs and the platform fees. And even if the platform handles fulfilment, since you control both sides of the exchange, you can take your unopened product and re-stock it at only marginally increased cost.
ravenstine 4y ago
What I'm curious of is how reliably people can identify fake reviews. Is it that ~30% of customers suck at distinguishing them, or is it fuzzier than that and there's an overall 30% chance the review you think is trustworthy actually isn't? I've bought a lot of stuff on Amazon, and while I do think there's tons of fake reviews and craptacular products for sale, I've yet to come away with the same opinion of Amazon that many people have here. That is, the idea that Amazon is basically an unnavigable swamp of a marketplace. Somehow, I've avoided bad products to such an extent that I can't name a bad purchase off the top of my head. Ok, there was _one_ time I got an air filter that was used and repackaged (eww!) but it wasn't obvious and Amazon didn't know about it, and that's different than flimsy Chinese goods with fake 5 star reviews. I feel like I can spot fake reviews and other nonsense from a mile away, but I don't know if that feeling is real or not.
- pcurve 4y ago
  You are more savvy than most consumers. If you’ve been using Amazon for years you probably have sixth sense for navigating around site and content. How to interpret the reviews. All the meta data. I suspect many on HN can too. They are likely annoyed by it and use hyperbole to express their frustration Amazon gets away with a lot of shit because they have top notch fulfillment capability along with good customer service
  - 6510 4y ago
    There is no need to write credible reviews at the moment. When this need arises they will all be exactly the same as real reviews. Bots are already writing entire articles. Creating templates from "real" reviews is barely a challenge.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Many items from Amazon come with a “gift card for reviewing” note and they follow through (I tried it once because the item worked and was something I’d have left a review for anyway). Sometimes the gift card is worth more than the item. Was my review a real one?
baxtr 4y ago
Is there a browser plug-in which Scans reviews and then does some AI magic to say if a review is fake or not?
- xxs 4y ago
  AI magic - yeah, that should do it.
- mckirk 4y ago
  Check out reviewmeta.com, sadly its quality has decreased recently because the servers are overloaded I think.
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
Similarly, I wonder how many HN posts are made by shills or fake accounts to push certain technologies or tools. I know reddit gets astroturfed pretty heavily, so I'd imagine something similar happens elsewhere. Certain technologies can appear a lot more popular than reality due to how much exposure they get on sites like HN, leading to a skewed perspective of the industry.
- netr0ute 4y ago
  Does this mean not as many things are Written In Rust as I might believe?
  - supertrope 4y ago
    Evangelicals are a very loud minority.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The shillbots are written in Rust I presume.
slaw 4y ago
Maybe up to 30% reviews on Amazon are fake, but in my experience on AirBnb 90% reviews are fake.
- propogandist 4y ago
  I see many “new properties” with no reviews, which automatically disqualifies them. I want to see some stay history to gauge the experience, but have seen review padding recently (tons of positive reviews to hide Bad reviews). it seems to be a new trend
- jraby3 4y ago
  Seems much harder to fake an Airbnb review. You actually have to stay at the place. And since Airbnb charges a lot of fees and taxes, it’s fairly expensive to have a friend do that in order to leave a 5 star review. Source: Airbnb host since 2007
pr0zac 4y ago
In case anyone wants an example of how challenging this actually is: try to find a sleep mask on Amazon that doesn't let a bunch of light in somewhere, isn't so thick it makes your face sweat, is comfortable while sleeping on your side, and has elastic that won't fail in 2 months. After around a dozen failed attempts I finally found a great solution 9 months ago. Of course two days back I accidentally left it in a hotel room. Trying to buy a new one by clicking the link from my purchase history brings me to a listing with completely different pictures that look nothing like my beloved mask, now includes bluetooth music playback functionality, and of course costs about 3 times more. Pretty sure I won't get the same product if I bought it again. So really I'm wondering if my previous 5 star review counts as a "fake review" based on this study's metrics and if not what percentage on top of that 30% is earnest reviews that are for completely different products.
- aardshark 4y ago
  Have you tried using a black (or any colour) tshirt? It solves your first two issues at least.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Had the same experience one time. I had bought something many years ago on amazon like a cable or tool and I remember needing to replace it. I clicked on the link in my orders and it took me to a spark plug or something. Vendors definitely reuse links to get traffic. It's insane.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It’s hilarious trying to find older yumcha product. You have to do vague searches and look at images heh.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Yeah, if I go a few years back in my Amazon orders history it's almost impossible to find any page that's still legit. It's completely rampant.
- snakey 4y ago
Waterluvian 4y ago
The thing that offends me is when it’s BLOODY OBVIOUS that an account owner has taken a listing and switched the product while keeping all the reviews. I went looking for a pulse oximeter and the highest rated one had reviews that were all about a bicycle storage rack. Amazon could trivially delete these but they simply don’t give a shit. Shameful company to work for.
yojo 4y ago
Even in the realm of "real" reviews, there's a filtering problem. As others have mentioned in this thread, many services will just not post a poor review. They have an incentive to make a sale, and a low star rating is going to turn a buyer away. Why push you away from the buy button when you're already on the page? There's also the problem of incentivized reviews. I'm currently working on self-publishing a book. Standard practice is sending out "advanced reader copies" before you launch. The readers get a free book, you hopefully get some reviews to prime the pump on launch day. So far, somewhat reasonable. But many of the platforms let you block reviewers. If you're a major publisher using something like NetGalley, you would be foolish not to filter out anyone who's ever handed out a bad review. At best, the result is honest reviews from a non-representative sample. But it's even worse than that. The reviewers know the game; a bad review will take them off the free book gravy train. So they bias their reviews to not get cut off. I don't know how you solve the review problem; the financial incentive for getting good reviews is huge. If you're willing to spend money, it is 100% possible to get non-representative or outright fake reviews that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
- dorgo 4y ago
  >many services will just not post a poor review but the reviewer will notice that the negative review wasn't published. I would seriously consider to leave a platform which doesn't publish negative reviews. Even more so if the review appears to be published, but other users can't see it.
throwaway290 4y ago
That a review is fake is my default position when researching. Review needs to be critical of the product or service in substantial ways, otherwise there is a high bar.
crazygringo 4y ago
I mean, does it matter? Even a lot of reviews that are clearly real are from people who have completely lost their minds, from people who give 1 star for no other reason than it was "made in China", to people who give 1 star because shipping was slow to people who give 1 star because the item is way too big/small even though they never looked at its dimensions. And there's always the top "most helpful" review that's scaremongering about how the product causes CANCER!! (Because they don't understand how California Prop 65 labels work.) Even if we got rid of fake reviews, at least 75% of real reviews add no value. Like so many Amazon book reviews that are simply "arrived quickly, cover in good condition". BUT... as long as you sort by "most helpful" and read the top ~30 reviews, it's generally pretty clear whether the product is reliable or breaks (and how/when), and whether it is as advertised or not. It's pretty easy to suss out the signal from the noise. Call it critical thinking, call it a having a bullshit detector, call it common sense. But I just don't see a problem here, as long as there's a "helpful" vote button and "sort by helpful".
- zulfazli 4y ago
  So how does the prop 65 label supposed to work? Asking as a person who has never been to US and only heard about the label being ridiculed since it is applied on all/ most products sold there.
- JamesianP 4y ago
  From what I've read, Amazon deletes reviews that indicate the product is made in China. Your implication that it's some kind of racist basis for the review itself may explain why, but I doubt this is the primary reason. It's probably more that people are unhappy with the item first, then the identification as Chinese-made as about the only way to screen out these companies swamping Amazon with thousands of short-lived low-quality brands. Since the law requires them to at least indicate this much. I do see lots of 1-star reviews complaining that the package came damaged or something. I tended to consider them worthless. But recently I have gotten a couple items that looked like the box spent months in a dumpster or something, so maybe they had a point too.
maxbond 4y ago
I enjoyed this interview with Rajvardhan Oak about their work investigating fake reviews by infiltrating paid review rings on Facebook: https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2022/fraudulent-amazon-reviewers https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2022/fraudulent-amazon...
modzu 4y ago
"up to" lol
nerdyadventurer 4y ago
Can we address this by only allowing people to review if the purchase is verified?
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
30%? I'm pretty sure for App Store and Amazon the number is closer to 95%.
fijiaarone 4y ago
Most 2 star reviews aren’t fake
maram 4y ago
I thought of an app for this after I noticed high paying users "Very Important Beauty Insider" fake reviews on Sephora. I tweeted to them and they replied, https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1123360104596811777?s=20 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1123360104596811777?s=20 A year later, NYtimes published a story on how one of the highest selling products was telling her employees to write reviews. https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1218339532891983873?s=20 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1218339532891983873?s=20 I wrote on here https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1130299513011343366 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1130299513011343366 service/product reviews are the new ads. -- Amazon reviews Groupon reviews Sephora reviews Booking com reviews This is the beginning..we are entering a new whole world of decentralized power and brand authority. It's interesting to watch how big brands will continue to fight it.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
The law of the internet: everything will be abused to the fullest. Ebay lists total number of items sold (by product and by the seller), that's somewhat more useful metric.
camkego 4y ago
You can generally beat the fake reviews by calculating the ratio of 4-star to 1-star reviews. See my post here: https://rtc9.com/blog/beat-fake-amazon-reviews/ https://rtc9.com/blog/beat-fake-amazon-reviews/
QuantumGood 4y ago
I follow a process to find product problems that should be avoided, find lower-cost products that avoid those problems, choose the one most believably "good": 1. Find lower-cost options that have a lot of reviews. 2. Sort reviews by recent; average MUCH lower than overall? Avoid. Ignore short to medium reviews explaining nothing and using glowing superlatives. 3. Use Lustre.ai to suggest alternatives (site or browser plugin), and use the steps below to know what issues MOST of these kind of products have. 4. Check much more expensive versions of the product for desirable features / problems solved, e.g. Bluetooth earbuds with a physical or app-based "re-pairing" function. 5. Read 1- and 2-star reviews; many re: misleading features/broken functions? Avoid, but note what kinds of problems are common. 6. Check most helpful negative review when available 7. Search reviews and questions for the issues you uncovered in steps 3 and 4. Sometimes MOST products have similar issues regardless of price—there may not be ANY product worth buying, e.g. home blood pressure monitors.
readerbaza 4y ago
First the obvious: amazon is evil and the website is crap. Search is bad, filtering is bad, sorting is bad. All on purpose. Here's some of my process when I don't know what I need exactly already. - try a few keywords first to find the right category - use the keywords to make the first search, depending on the item filter by 4 star and above, never by price - browse listings: - all caps BRANDNAME, skip - same picture or clearly same item from different brands, skip - listing has any badly photoshopped photo, skip Arrive at a few options: - there's customer photos/videos? check those (even if the review is fake, the photos are useful) - shipped by == amazon, if false skip - check 1 star reviews for delivery damage, if many skip or beware for delivery. amazon uses no padding most of the time. - check 3 star reviews (then 4) for sensible users making good points - always ignore reviews with "arrived fast/late" - always ignore reviews with "seller" is sold by == amazon Depending on item price, research product more and see suggested alternatives both on amazon and offsite - check reviews on those products too - check camelcamelcamel for price history - current price ok, buy - current price high, clear history of discounts, clean url from tracking and bookmark with price in the title (seldom open the bookmark, current price < bookmarked price? buy same or next day at most, price will likely increase after traffic)

199 points by elorant 4y ago

dam_broke_it 4y ago

Always go by the 1 or 2 star reviews.....

unity1001 4y ago
You'd end up not being able to buy anything...
mikestew 4y ago
2 and 3 star reviews. 1 star reviews, in my observation, are consistently along the lines of "UPS left the package in the rain! 1 star!", which has fuck all to do with the product.
- VancouverMan 4y ago
  Such things are still part of the overall purchasing experience, though. If I'm about to order a product online and for whatever reason there may be delivery-related challenges involved that others have experienced, I'd certainly like to know beforehand.
  - regular 4y ago
- Toutouxc 4y ago
  Also people who don’t seem to understand how the product, their life and the universe in general work. The “can’t make coffee from cat litter, blames Obama in all seriousness, two typos per word” kind. I always wonder how these people look in real life and if I meet some of them on the street.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    Its the outcome of gutting the educational system, poor methods of teaching (instead of teaching critical thinking they teach how to take the test), and just the fact that in a country of ~332 Million the bottom 20% could be like 67 million people(the bottom 20% is not a direct correlation but still you get the point).
spamizbad 4y ago
In my experience its always best to leave negative reviews in 3 star reviews. 1 star reviews get buried/removed, but if you let that criticism sneak into a 3-star review it's likely not bad enough for the platform to notice.
acchow 4y ago
Isn't that attack spam from competitors?
xxs 4y ago
1 is not useful; 5 is next to the useless list.

jraby3 4y ago

Do fakespot and similar services work?

Someone1234 4y ago
Fakespot does its best, but Amazon and similar don't expose very much information to determine if a review is fake (be it manual review OR via a service like Fakespot). Plus there are two kinds of "fake reviews": Automated reviews ("spam"), and then reviewers who got free samples/paid. The second is almost impossible to detect as real people are really writing the reviews (and even calling them "fake" is hard because the person may still give an honest review sometimes). You can sometimes spot fake reviews, but that is just due to laziness, if they're trying even a little bit it could be very hard to spot in particularly at volume. I will say one good trick is to read "new" reviews rather than most helpful/liked, since they game those too.

OJFord 4y ago

I've had two fairly detailed, not low-effort, reviews not approved for publication on Amazon.co.uk recently. After the first I swore I'd never bother again (it was pretty high-effort to be honest, relatively) but something got the better of me. Neither time has there been any indication of what the problem is (I guessed the first one was my reference to a 'knob', as in for turning, which the product had - but couldn't find any such similar Scunthorpe in the second) and even if they did give you some idea, they invite you to start again from scratch - not edit it, it's not saved, not even your photos. I'd love to see click-through metrics on that, does anyone bother?

jersak 4y ago
I had the same experience. Id say they just don't approve most of the reviews. I would think most (real) people only leave a good review when things go EXTREMELY WELL. Not the same for bad reviews though, which means real people will more often than not leave reviews pointing problems and shortcomings than praising a product. That, at least in my head, would result in less sales and so making the review workflow painful for the user is by design.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I just checked on my account and I have 126 published reviews on Amazon. I can recall around 10 that were denied, about half of which seemed "OK, that's fair in retrospect" and a modest edit and resubmit got them published. The other half of the denies I couldn't really figure out and just ignored (some of which were solid product, 4 or 5 star reviews). I have several 1-star reviews among the published.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Amazon banned me from leaving reviews entirely after I left a couple of negative reviews for products I bought.
xxs 4y ago
I don't leave 1/2 star reviews in general, pretty much every single review has been approved. 5 stars almost never given, either. It was sort of surprising amazon rejects reviews - the more you know. Only 30% being fake seems like a very low estimate

prottog 4y ago

Online reviews and rating systems do need an overhaul. I once tried to leave a review of a poor experience I had while staying at a short-term rental property, sticking to the facts with no melodrama; and the platform rejected my review as being "against policy". There's clearly no incentive at all for the platform to accept anyone's poor review, since that would mean less business for the platform. Not to mention all the e-commerce reviews that are along the lines of, "1-star: item was perfect and was everything I wanted it to be but it arrived three days late" or "5-stars: item sucks so bad that I returned it but the platform's return policy is great".

cutenewt 4y ago
Netflix removed 5-star ratings a while back; they don't have reviews either. Seems like it hasn't impacted the user experience. Arguably improved the experience. Perhaps other sites like Amazon and AirBnb should remove ratings and reviews too?
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Don't you have access to everything on Netflix? It's a different model On other platforms you're spending time and money, on Netflix only time.
- another_devy 4y ago
  In case of e-commerce reviews are crucial not sure of ratings. If I’m buying an item and couple of reviews point out something wrong in design or usage I avoid it. Without reviews it’s not possible
- superbaconman 4y ago
  Three star reviews feel more intuitive anyway: 1 bad 2 average 3 good. But when it comes to product reviews, accounts of hardware failures is super important imo.
- yakak 4y ago
  I was pretty disappointed with Netflix after they canceled the star system. Before they cancelled it they could fit my likes to other people with similar likes, after they cancelled it they could insist their own content was good enough for everyone.

egberts1 4y ago

I grilled a red lobster complete with scallop, pearl onions, and capers and then simmered it in a butter dish for an hour. It was so delicious. (Hey, I am not a bot, these are my current experience of what I am actually reading on Amazon reviews). More funny Amazon reviews that I found: https://eliteseller.com/blog/funny-amazon-reviews/ https://eliteseller.com/blog/funny-amazon-reviews/

odysseus 4y ago
The product photo for the shaving bib apron (#7 on the list) is quite a gem.

Scoundreller 4y ago

Only 30%????

xxs 4y ago
Up to.. 30% is too low in my experience.

regular 4y ago

I start with negative reviews, looking for well-written ones with specifics. The fake ones are often absurdly easy to spot, with mindless cheerleading, lists of features regurgitated verbatim, and fully spelled-out product names. That's my favorite: ridiculously complete product names with taglines, practically only missing the (tm).

maxbond 4y ago
I read the 3-star reviews myself. I find the negative ones on Amazon often received the wrong product (a concern to be sure but that's just the chance you take with literally every Amazon product), or misunderstood what the product did. And then I try to find details that are repeated across several reasonable-sounding reviews. I've not had very much success with this approach, to be honest. I still just feel like I'm rolling the dice.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

I'd like to think I'm pretty good at spotting which reviews are fake, but I'd love to do a test to find out if the ones I thought were real were actually fake. It won't be long before someone writes a GPT-3 model that can write hundreds of different reviews indistinguishable from real ones, and that sound and look different from each other, based on a product description and images.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Fake reviews are not the only problem. It's the fact that most reviews are going to either be from someone who loved the product enough to take the time to write about, or had such a bad experience (which could be anything and maybe not related to the problem) that they feel compelled to write about. So you wind up with 5-stars and 1-stars and not much inbetween.

hcurtiss 4y ago
It seems like this is a thesis that could be tested empirically. It makes intuitive sense to me, but if I’m honest, that kind of inverted bell is not what I actually see very often on Amazon.
- r00fus 4y ago
  Amazon has a lot of paid-for reviews, so you would likely see it if you remove the paid entries. In some cases on very bad products, you see tons of 5 star reviews and a lot of 1 star reviews - and if it's high on the fakespot list, I can only conclude it's a bad product. I've mostly given up on Amazon except where I can't find the product elsewhere (or on time).
  - tracker1 4y ago
    I still use amazon a lot.. but not always reviews... often I know the product I'm looking for. I'll also tend to look at the negative reviews.. are the reviewers just not knowledgeable about what they bought, broke in shipping, or actually a bad product/seller. It will vary a bit. What sucks, is competitors will pay for bad reviews too.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  I have not done any systematic check, but I often see this type of inverted curve in product reviews. -- Though either the 5-star side or the 1-star side will be significantly higher than the other.
taeric 4y ago

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Lots of reviews are paid. I get half my electronics refunded by leaving 5 star reviews on Amazon that sellers have asked for in the packages.

ravenstine 4y ago
How does this kind of transaction take place? I've bought plenty of things on Amazon that I've left 5 star reviews for, including electronics, but haven't once been approached with refunds or incentives.
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  I've often received little cards in my orders asking for a screenshot of a 5-star review in exchange for a 90% off coupon for my next purchase, or something like that.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Come to think of it, I believe I've had such material come with some of my purchases but I've ignored them because I'm so advertising-averse. I'll have to pay attention for these next time. haha Though I still won't leave a 5 star review if I don't genuinely think the product is worth that.

SoftTalker 4y ago

I assume all online reviews are faked or at least biased. I don't believe any of them, especially those that appear on the same site or include affiliate links to the product being sold.

nomel 4y ago
I tend to believe the review distribution. For a reasonable product, they're usually normal distributions. For a bad product, they're almost always bimodal.

another_devy 4y ago

Lower ratings most of the times are honest reviews and if seller replies to them you can see how much they care about the customer and if they are being honest business

club_tropical 4y ago
If the seller/owner responds to a negative review, this is a red flag for me. Indicates a sort of hypersensitive, pressuring attitude. I empathize that they might wanna "tell their side" but in the end it betrays a clingy monitoring of Your Image that makes me as a potential customer feel like I may be walking into a spiderweb.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Than you for your review. Please contact Company Support so that we can resolve this for you. How many times have I seen that on various reviews. I kind of like it somewhat, at least it means they didn’t delete it.
  - club_tropical 4y ago
    Oh actually that's a good point. Anodyne generic response might be positive.

rdtwo 4y ago

Only 30%. No way like 90%

yamtaddle 4y ago
30% are fake and fool shoppers. 60% are fake but don't fool shoppers. 9% are fake but so good they fooled the researchers, too.
- smittywerben 4y ago
  The 5% that fool themselves: '1/5 stars - This stupid modem doesn't have wifi. The $20 a month modem from Comcast has wifi.'

seydor 4y ago

You can find a review to confirm your biases every time. In the end , everything is a hunch

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lapcat 4y ago

As an App Store developer, it's painfully obvious that at least 30% of App Store reviews are fake.

deleted 4y ago
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eatsyourtacos 4y ago

How do fake reviews on something like Amazon work? Wouldn't they only allow you to leave a review if you have purchased the item? I get that for a cheap product a seller could have a bunch of dummies buy it and then leave reviews, but that... doesn't seem very viable for most things. Or are normal people getting paid to leave high reviews for something they bought and would not normally review?

baxtr 4y ago
Easy. Check out some telegram channels. There, people get offers for specific products. You order them, write a review, send in a proof and then get reimbursed for the item. So you can keep items for free. In some cases you even get some extra money on top.
acdha 4y ago
They do allow you to leave reviews for things you didn’t buy from them (there’s a “verified buyer” tag for people who did buy it directly) but here are two other very common scams: 1. I receive emails offering to give me free stuff in exchange for reviews, with the promise of more if they’re good. You can also find job site posting which are similar: get paid to review products, strongly implying that you get more for 5 star reviews. I haven’t actually done this but I’d be shocked if they gave people time or latitude for fairly reviewing anything. 2. I’ve had cards included in Amazon purchases offering freebies for positive reviews - just include a link in your email and get an Amazon gift certificate. Amazon makes reporting these difficult and the frontline support tend to be confused if you try, and nothing visibly happened when I did. Clearly they do not care about this problem.
YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
Since you're intending to fake the review, you don't have to actually send the product. You only lose the shipping costs and the platform fees. And even if the platform handles fulfilment, since you control both sides of the exchange, you can take your unopened product and re-stock it at only marginally increased cost.

ravenstine 4y ago

What I'm curious of is how reliably people can identify fake reviews. Is it that ~30% of customers suck at distinguishing them, or is it fuzzier than that and there's an overall 30% chance the review you think is trustworthy actually isn't? I've bought a lot of stuff on Amazon, and while I do think there's tons of fake reviews and craptacular products for sale, I've yet to come away with the same opinion of Amazon that many people have here. That is, the idea that Amazon is basically an unnavigable swamp of a marketplace. Somehow, I've avoided bad products to such an extent that I can't name a bad purchase off the top of my head. Ok, there was _one_ time I got an air filter that was used and repackaged (eww!) but it wasn't obvious and Amazon didn't know about it, and that's different than flimsy Chinese goods with fake 5 star reviews. I feel like I can spot fake reviews and other nonsense from a mile away, but I don't know if that feeling is real or not.

pcurve 4y ago
You are more savvy than most consumers. If you’ve been using Amazon for years you probably have sixth sense for navigating around site and content. How to interpret the reviews. All the meta data. I suspect many on HN can too. They are likely annoyed by it and use hyperbole to express their frustration Amazon gets away with a lot of shit because they have top notch fulfillment capability along with good customer service
- 6510 4y ago
  There is no need to write credible reviews at the moment. When this need arises they will all be exactly the same as real reviews. Bots are already writing entire articles. Creating templates from "real" reviews is barely a challenge.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Many items from Amazon come with a “gift card for reviewing” note and they follow through (I tried it once because the item worked and was something I’d have left a review for anyway). Sometimes the gift card is worth more than the item. Was my review a real one?

baxtr 4y ago

Is there a browser plug-in which Scans reviews and then does some AI magic to say if a review is fake or not?

xxs 4y ago
AI magic - yeah, that should do it.
mckirk 4y ago
Check out reviewmeta.com, sadly its quality has decreased recently because the servers are overloaded I think.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

Similarly, I wonder how many HN posts are made by shills or fake accounts to push certain technologies or tools. I know reddit gets astroturfed pretty heavily, so I'd imagine something similar happens elsewhere. Certain technologies can appear a lot more popular than reality due to how much exposure they get on sites like HN, leading to a skewed perspective of the industry.

netr0ute 4y ago
Does this mean not as many things are Written In Rust as I might believe?
- supertrope 4y ago
  Evangelicals are a very loud minority.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The shillbots are written in Rust I presume.

slaw 4y ago

Maybe up to 30% reviews on Amazon are fake, but in my experience on AirBnb 90% reviews are fake.

propogandist 4y ago
I see many “new properties” with no reviews, which automatically disqualifies them. I want to see some stay history to gauge the experience, but have seen review padding recently (tons of positive reviews to hide Bad reviews). it seems to be a new trend
jraby3 4y ago
Seems much harder to fake an Airbnb review. You actually have to stay at the place. And since Airbnb charges a lot of fees and taxes, it’s fairly expensive to have a friend do that in order to leave a 5 star review. Source: Airbnb host since 2007

pr0zac 4y ago

In case anyone wants an example of how challenging this actually is: try to find a sleep mask on Amazon that doesn't let a bunch of light in somewhere, isn't so thick it makes your face sweat, is comfortable while sleeping on your side, and has elastic that won't fail in 2 months. After around a dozen failed attempts I finally found a great solution 9 months ago. Of course two days back I accidentally left it in a hotel room. Trying to buy a new one by clicking the link from my purchase history brings me to a listing with completely different pictures that look nothing like my beloved mask, now includes bluetooth music playback functionality, and of course costs about 3 times more. Pretty sure I won't get the same product if I bought it again. So really I'm wondering if my previous 5 star review counts as a "fake review" based on this study's metrics and if not what percentage on top of that 30% is earnest reviews that are for completely different products.

aardshark 4y ago
Have you tried using a black (or any colour) tshirt? It solves your first two issues at least.
xeromal 4y ago
Had the same experience one time. I had bought something many years ago on amazon like a cable or tool and I remember needing to replace it. I clicked on the link in my orders and it took me to a spark plug or something. Vendors definitely reuse links to get traffic. It's insane.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It’s hilarious trying to find older yumcha product. You have to do vague searches and look at images heh.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Yeah, if I go a few years back in my Amazon orders history it's almost impossible to find any page that's still legit. It's completely rampant.
snakey 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago

The thing that offends me is when it’s BLOODY OBVIOUS that an account owner has taken a listing and switched the product while keeping all the reviews. I went looking for a pulse oximeter and the highest rated one had reviews that were all about a bicycle storage rack. Amazon could trivially delete these but they simply don’t give a shit. Shameful company to work for.

yojo 4y ago

Even in the realm of "real" reviews, there's a filtering problem. As others have mentioned in this thread, many services will just not post a poor review. They have an incentive to make a sale, and a low star rating is going to turn a buyer away. Why push you away from the buy button when you're already on the page? There's also the problem of incentivized reviews. I'm currently working on self-publishing a book. Standard practice is sending out "advanced reader copies" before you launch. The readers get a free book, you hopefully get some reviews to prime the pump on launch day. So far, somewhat reasonable. But many of the platforms let you block reviewers. If you're a major publisher using something like NetGalley, you would be foolish not to filter out anyone who's ever handed out a bad review. At best, the result is honest reviews from a non-representative sample. But it's even worse than that. The reviewers know the game; a bad review will take them off the free book gravy train. So they bias their reviews to not get cut off. I don't know how you solve the review problem; the financial incentive for getting good reviews is huge. If you're willing to spend money, it is 100% possible to get non-representative or outright fake reviews that are indistinguishable from the real thing.

dorgo 4y ago
>many services will just not post a poor review but the reviewer will notice that the negative review wasn't published. I would seriously consider to leave a platform which doesn't publish negative reviews. Even more so if the review appears to be published, but other users can't see it.

throwaway290 4y ago

That a review is fake is my default position when researching. Review needs to be critical of the product or service in substantial ways, otherwise there is a high bar.

crazygringo 4y ago

I mean, does it matter? Even a lot of reviews that are clearly real are from people who have completely lost their minds, from people who give 1 star for no other reason than it was "made in China", to people who give 1 star because shipping was slow to people who give 1 star because the item is way too big/small even though they never looked at its dimensions. And there's always the top "most helpful" review that's scaremongering about how the product causes CANCER!! (Because they don't understand how California Prop 65 labels work.) Even if we got rid of fake reviews, at least 75% of real reviews add no value. Like so many Amazon book reviews that are simply "arrived quickly, cover in good condition". BUT... as long as you sort by "most helpful" and read the top ~30 reviews, it's generally pretty clear whether the product is reliable or breaks (and how/when), and whether it is as advertised or not. It's pretty easy to suss out the signal from the noise. Call it critical thinking, call it a having a bullshit detector, call it common sense. But I just don't see a problem here, as long as there's a "helpful" vote button and "sort by helpful".

zulfazli 4y ago
So how does the prop 65 label supposed to work? Asking as a person who has never been to US and only heard about the label being ridiculed since it is applied on all/ most products sold there.
JamesianP 4y ago
From what I've read, Amazon deletes reviews that indicate the product is made in China. Your implication that it's some kind of racist basis for the review itself may explain why, but I doubt this is the primary reason. It's probably more that people are unhappy with the item first, then the identification as Chinese-made as about the only way to screen out these companies swamping Amazon with thousands of short-lived low-quality brands. Since the law requires them to at least indicate this much. I do see lots of 1-star reviews complaining that the package came damaged or something. I tended to consider them worthless. But recently I have gotten a couple items that looked like the box spent months in a dumpster or something, so maybe they had a point too.

maxbond 4y ago

I enjoyed this interview with Rajvardhan Oak about their work investigating fake reviews by infiltrating paid review rings on Facebook: https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2022/fraudulent-amazon-reviewers https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2022/fraudulent-amazon...

modzu 4y ago

"up to" lol

nerdyadventurer 4y ago

Can we address this by only allowing people to review if the purchase is verified?

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

30%? I'm pretty sure for App Store and Amazon the number is closer to 95%.

fijiaarone 4y ago

Most 2 star reviews aren’t fake

maram 4y ago

I thought of an app for this after I noticed high paying users "Very Important Beauty Insider" fake reviews on Sephora. I tweeted to them and they replied, https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1123360104596811777?s=20 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1123360104596811777?s=20 A year later, NYtimes published a story on how one of the highest selling products was telling her employees to write reviews. https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1218339532891983873?s=20 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1218339532891983873?s=20 I wrote on here https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1130299513011343366 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/1130299513011343366 service/product reviews are the new ads. -- Amazon reviews Groupon reviews Sephora reviews Booking com reviews This is the beginning..we are entering a new whole world of decentralized power and brand authority. It's interesting to watch how big brands will continue to fight it.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

The law of the internet: everything will be abused to the fullest. Ebay lists total number of items sold (by product and by the seller), that's somewhat more useful metric.

camkego 4y ago

You can generally beat the fake reviews by calculating the ratio of 4-star to 1-star reviews. See my post here: https://rtc9.com/blog/beat-fake-amazon-reviews/ https://rtc9.com/blog/beat-fake-amazon-reviews/

QuantumGood 4y ago

I follow a process to find product problems that should be avoided, find lower-cost products that avoid those problems, choose the one most believably "good": 1. Find lower-cost options that have a lot of reviews. 2. Sort reviews by recent; average MUCH lower than overall? Avoid. Ignore short to medium reviews explaining nothing and using glowing superlatives. 3. Use Lustre.ai to suggest alternatives (site or browser plugin), and use the steps below to know what issues MOST of these kind of products have. 4. Check much more expensive versions of the product for desirable features / problems solved, e.g. Bluetooth earbuds with a physical or app-based "re-pairing" function. 5. Read 1- and 2-star reviews; many re: misleading features/broken functions? Avoid, but note what kinds of problems are common. 6. Check most helpful negative review when available 7. Search reviews and questions for the issues you uncovered in steps 3 and 4. Sometimes MOST products have similar issues regardless of price—there may not be ANY product worth buying, e.g. home blood pressure monitors.

readerbaza 4y ago

First the obvious: amazon is evil and the website is crap. Search is bad, filtering is bad, sorting is bad. All on purpose. Here's some of my process when I don't know what I need exactly already. - try a few keywords first to find the right category - use the keywords to make the first search, depending on the item filter by 4 star and above, never by price - browse listings: - all caps BRANDNAME, skip - same picture or clearly same item from different brands, skip - listing has any badly photoshopped photo, skip Arrive at a few options: - there's customer photos/videos? check those (even if the review is fake, the photos are useful) - shipped by == amazon, if false skip - check 1 star reviews for delivery damage, if many skip or beware for delivery. amazon uses no padding most of the time. - check 3 star reviews (then 4) for sensible users making good points - always ignore reviews with "arrived fast/late" - always ignore reviews with "seller" is sold by == amazon Depending on item price, research product more and see suggested alternatives both on amazon and offsite - check reviews on those products too - check camelcamelcamel for price history - current price ok, buy - current price high, clear history of discounts, clean url from tracking and bookmark with price in the title (seldom open the bookmark, current price < bookmarked price? buy same or next day at most, price will likely increase after traffic)