4 ms·

Once someone is identified as a serial review bomber, then you’d just ban them and all their reviews. Or at least flag their reviews so they aren’t shown by def

Once someone is identified as a serial review bomber, then you’d just ban them and all their reviews. Or at least flag their reviews so they aren’t shown by default (similar to a shadow ban). That person could no longer write verified reviews. Maybe it’s a permanent ban, maybe it’s a 1-5 year ban. They wouldn’t be able to verify another account with their identity until the ban is listed. Yeah Steam is good, but mostly because it is a very closed loop system as they own the entire transaction-review-lifecycle. Not soo easy with other things like books.

chongli 3y ago
You can’t identify the review bombers. These are 3rd parties hiring the reviewers to leave reviews. That hiring process takes place offline (from the perspective of your site), so you have no way to monitor and detect these directly. As for the individual reviewers, there are tens of thousands or millions of these, and review bombers can trivially cycle these in and out, so no individual reviewer is a “serial fake reviewer.”
- yardstick 3y ago
  It’s trivial under current systems. But once you start placing higher value on verified identities, those millions of bombers are going to turn out to be a lot smaller.
  - chongli 3y ago
    It doesn't take millions to boost a specific product's sales. As few as a thousand fake reviews can get the job done. And bombers will find ways to corrupt the verified reviewers, since their reviews will go up in value. And the cost for Amazon to verify the reviewers is really important to take into consideration. If verified reviewers end up being untrustworthy, they've put in that effort (time and money) for nothing! This is really just a special case of the wider issue of fraud. And I'm fairly convinced of the argument that the optimal amount is nonzero [1]. A further wrinkle to this problem is that fraud tends to only get more sophisticated over time, so the costs of fighting it always go up. At some point we may reach a scenario where fraud is so rampant that entire business models become non-viable. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913

chongli 3y ago

You can’t identify the review bombers. These are 3rd parties hiring the reviewers to leave reviews. That hiring process takes place offline (from the perspective of your site), so you have no way to monitor and detect these directly. As for the individual reviewers, there are tens of thousands or millions of these, and review bombers can trivially cycle these in and out, so no individual reviewer is a “serial fake reviewer.”

yardstick 3y ago
It’s trivial under current systems. But once you start placing higher value on verified identities, those millions of bombers are going to turn out to be a lot smaller.
- chongli 3y ago
  It doesn't take millions to boost a specific product's sales. As few as a thousand fake reviews can get the job done. And bombers will find ways to corrupt the verified reviewers, since their reviews will go up in value. And the cost for Amazon to verify the reviewers is really important to take into consideration. If verified reviewers end up being untrustworthy, they've put in that effort (time and money) for nothing! This is really just a special case of the wider issue of fraud. And I'm fairly convinced of the argument that the optimal amount is nonzero [1]. A further wrinkle to this problem is that fraud tends to only get more sophisticated over time, so the costs of fighting it always go up. At some point we may reach a scenario where fraud is so rampant that entire business models become non-viable. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913