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For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and inte
by doppio19 1y ago
For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.
- rasz 1y agoDid Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil
- i80and 1y agoDeepSpeech shuttered in 2021. The repo was just made read-only the other day
- rasz 1y agoApril 12 2021 https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-partners-with-nvidia-to-democratize-and-diversify-voice-technology/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-partners-with-nv... https://venturebeat.com/business/mozilla-winds-down-deepspeech-development-announces-grant-program/ https://venturebeat.com/business/mozilla-winds-down-deepspee...
- doppio19 1y agoNot that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.
- rasz 1y agoIndeed. You would need a plugin running on user computers, or maybe even control over User Agent. Insurmountable blocker for Mozilla.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoSo they wrote a ping pong shader for monetization going with the user or selling out the user.