I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably.
Same question applies to Twitter. Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts and bot networks pushing spam, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...) while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes.
ETA: Regarding comments along the lines of, "it's in their best interest to let fake reviews continue as it boosts Amazon's sales."
I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors.
Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.
Lack of effort? I wrote the FT piece referenced in CNBC's reporting, regarding the 20,000 fake reviews. While the reviews have been taken down, there doesn't seem to have been any repercussions for the companies. All the products are still live... complete with other suspect reviews (just from users not specifically highlighted by our report).
Amazon could do a lot more. I've just opened up Telegram to see what's happening in the scam review groups today, and within seconds I can see that this wifi range extender is being boosted by paid-for positive reviews: https://www.amazon.com/Extender-Wodgreat-Wireless-Repeater-I...
(The 5-star reviews on that page confirm the theory).
If I can do that, on a Sunday morning, from my home... why isn't Amazon?
But you can't just remove products for fake reviews. Or else competitors will buy fake reviews for their competitors products in order to get them delisted.
There’s a big jump from committing fraud for your own benefit and committing fraud because it might mess your competitor up. I think you’d deal with a much smaller problem, and, presumably one that companies would be on the lookout for and aligned with Amazon on.
I don't think it is a huge jump. In the past, I was a high volume seller on Amazon and competitors frequently purchased our products and left unwarranted negative reviews or just left a negative review without ever having purchased it. We knew this because in several cases, we matched the shipment address of our shipment with the return address of a competitors product (this was before FBA was huge).
Plus, sellers wash their hands of this by paying a company to boost their listings. It's don't ask, don't tell on how they accomplish that.
I’m talking number of cases (how many people relatively would commit the 2 categories of crimes), not necessarily the severity of the crime. But I am now kinda interested in flushing this out lol, Bernie Madoff and Martha Stewart both committed securities fraud, yet served different sentences, but was this ok in your world view?
I don't know the particulars, so hard to say. You're probably wanting me to say intent has bearing. Madoff intended to scam anybody as long as it helped his situation along. Don't know what Stewart's intent was.
You buying positive reviews is intended to make more money for yourself by getting as many sales as possible including if it means another seller doesn't get that sale. The person buying negative reviews is intending to take sales from others so they get the sales instead. Either way, the intent in both situations is to increase one's own position at the expense of others in a fraudulent manner. You're both just as guilty.
For the record, I don’t want you to say anything, I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from. No agenda with that particular choice, just the first scenario that came to mind of same crime, different sentence.
I don’t understand why you need particulars if fraud is fraud though. They both got difference sentences and did the same underlying crime. Why do we sentence people differently, or is the view that we shouldnt be doing that?
I don't have information on what Stewart did. It's as simple as that. I honestly don't even know what Stewart did. I read up on Madoff. I care so little about what Stewart does, I didn't follow it. Madoff was more interesting to me, so I read more details on it.
23% 1-star reviews? They need to buy a lot more 5-star reviews for me to even start reading the negative reviews and then to consider to buy the product.
> If I can do that, on a Sunday morning, from my home... why isn't Amazon?
Because there's no real way of measuring the cost of a fake review to Amazon. Yes, Amazon could do a lot more. What's the right amount to do? How much should be spent on that initiative, and why shouldn't that money be spent on other initiatives?
Honestly? A lot of effort and money is appropriate. People can and have gotten hurt because of fake, deceptive, or counterfeit goods sold on Amazon.
Safety and genuine goods are important things. If they can't or don't care about that, what makes it any more reputable than random vendors on aliexpress, for instance?
I've wondered the same thing... I've got a few theories:
-Amazon could identify those fake reviews, but doesn't want to play a cat+mouse game and would rather leave the fake reviews as-is, and easier to spot. If they start targeting harder, the fake reviews will get harder and harder to spot.
-Fake reviews (even 5* reviews) may be placed on products by other sellers in a product category to try and get a product banned. The top ranked seller will earn substantially more than the #2 seller. If you're the #2 seller, pay for a bunch of fake reviews on the #1 seller's product, then gather evidence and submit to Amazon to get the #1 seller's product banned.
-Short-term incentive is for Amazon to leave the reviews (higher scored products get more sales). Seems not too probable, but not sure.
> -Short-term incentive is for Amazon to leave the reviews (higher scored products get more sales). Seems not too probable, but not sure.
Amazon has been very fraudster friendly, and without any exaggeration, anti-customer, for a long while. There's several misbehaviors that they tolerate, while at the same time, make it difficult for customers to fight (report, etc.):
- they allow flooding searches with almost-identical products (ebay doesn't)
- they allow replacing a product page with a different one (ebay doesn't)
- they hide shipping prices and actively confuse the customer (ebay doesn't)
- they don't do anything against fakes, even when there are multiple reports (ebay is not great on this, either, though)
There's no reason why Amazon should not (by their strategy, certainly not mine) take advantage of fake reviews.
I worked on this at Amazon a long time ago. One of the goals was to identify and consolidate items that were the same but where sellers intentionally (or accidentally) had split the listing. Amazon has lots of internal metrics showing how correctly matching listings reduces prices for customers and increases sales. Something like 5-7 listings was enough to find a market minimum.
The achilles heal for sellers is that their listings ultimately need to show up When searching for unique information specific to a particular product. They’ll often try to hide that in an unrelated field or in the description. Usually a seller uses the same “trick” for all their listings.
> The achilles heal for sellers is that their listings ultimately need to show up When searching for unique information specific to a particular product. They’ll often try to hide that in an unrelated field or in the description. Usually a seller uses the same “trick” for all their listings.
By unique information, do you mean descriptive adjectives or product features? If so, these terms more often than not show up right in the title:
ProBien Case for iPhone 11, Liquid Silicone Phone Cover w Tempered Glass Screen Protector, Shockproof Durable Protective Rubber Cases Full Body Drop Protection 6.1 for Women Girls-Wine Red
60 Pack Guitar Picks,Cowalkers Abstract Art Random Color Celluloid Guitar Picks Plectrums Unique Guitar Gift For Electric, Bass & Acoustic Guitars Includes 0.46mm/0.71mm/0.96mm
COMFEE' Rice Cooker, Slow Cooker, Steamer, Stewpot, Sauté All in One (12 Digital Cooking Programs) Multi Cooker (5.2Qt ) Large Capacity. 24 Hours Preset & Instant Keep Warm
All of these items were on the first page of results for a single term (iphone 11 case, guitar pick, pressure cooker) so not only is Amazon failing to enforce TOS rules and guidelines against keyword-stuffing, the trick clearly works for sellers.
Amazon and Ebay facilitate fraud on both sides. Amazon, as with Ebay, automates customer complaints to the point of almost no due diligence. There are some very high profile schemes of fraud on the side of buyer where they either claim damages, lost packages, or return empty boxes that force sellers to send replacements or refunds.
Personally I've been able to ask for refunds on Amazon through a 5 minute chat dialogue for products that were months out of the return period (I felt it was in my case because the seller wouldn't honor warranty etc, but this ease of refund/return is abused rampantly on both Amazon and Ebay by buyers).
Someone at Amazon had to have looked at the sales boost fake reviews give and decided to leave them. There is just no way that this hasn't been tested. So if the fake reviews sales increase > decrease in user retention, they decided just let the crap fly. This has probably been concluded more than once.
It is too bad. Ironically eBay used to be the place all the random crap ended up, now when I order something off eBay I expect it to show up in better shape than from Amazon. Amazon turned in to the flea market of the web.
The first reason is interesting to think about. It's similar to how one needs to be careful in prescribing certain antibiotics, otherwise the bacterial will adopt.
> I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably.
Maybe they can't? Fakespot authoritatively scores reviews but is there evidence that they are accurate? Anecdotally, there are many claims that the results aren't perfect, such as poor scores on a product where the seller knows there are no fake reviews. As a buyer the results on similar, shortlisted, products often seem a bit random compared to my judgement from reading the reviews carefully. Also, without knowing what reviews are identified and removed by amazon themselves we don't have much to compare it to.
I can confirm. My company is a top 2,000 amazon seller (top 0.1%) and we’ve never bought or incentivized a single review. Our fake spot grade is “B” with some products getting “A” and others “D.”
Most recently amazon changed their review gathering algorithm in a way that increases the percent of customers who leave reviews. The acceleration in our review velocity is flagged by fakespot as suspicious.
> "more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably." ...
Doing so is Fakespot's raison d'etre, but an unimportant side gig for Amazon. I did my MSc thesis on classifying fake reviews (https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html). It focused on purely text based features, but I am familiar with all of the literature and research at this point.
Non-text based features are more useful (classification based just on text is hard because believable fake reviews are easy to write) but the amount of non-text / behavioral data Amazon gets or would need to process would be a Facebook level of engineering effort - and is it really that cost-effective? (versus letting buyers do the work - humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see)
The removal of these 20,000 reviews (the FT article) is based on a straightforward obvious heuristic and so is cost-effective. But trying to track all the IPs from China leaving reviews? hmmm. But they should have got the distance and banned all the companies associated with the fake reviews; that would definitely send a signal.
Amazon has tried things like Vine etc to deal with the problem; Yelp and TripAdvisor have their own methodologies. But bad actors always seem to find a way around it. Automating the monitoring of communities where spammer groups congregate is possible but that is another major engineering effort - you just can't have humans doing it due to the scale (and Bezos doesn't like paying essential warehouse workers a decent wage either... so why bother with something like this?)
> humans can't tell if a review is fake from the text very well, but other things like an excessive number of 5* reviews is easy for a human to see
Shouldn't an excessive number of 5* reviews also be easy for a machine to see, especially when other indicators are considered?
For most Amazon detail pages I visit, I immediately sort by most recent. I have learned that the most relevant (which tend to correlate with earlier posting dates) are most likely to be fake, sometimes obviously so.
Classic innovator's dilemma. The benefit of spotting fake reviews is too small for a company of Amazon's scale, so the company doesn't spend (meaningful) resources in pursuit of that goal. Amazon has no way of knowing which, among the infinite number of small projects that may end up becoming a commercial necessity, are fated to grow to that size. This allows smaller competition (here, Fakespot) to do move quickly, execute, and seize that benefit which, for a company of Fakespot's size, is highly meaningful. The momentum that a company like Fakespot builds while building out Fakespot's service allows the quality of Fakespot's service to outstrip and embarrass Amazon's parallel attempts.
> I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors. Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems
Citation (unfortunately, still) needed. "Very big" means something quite different to Amazon at Amazon's scale.
I am guessing its because the hackers are not gaming fakespot's detection systems.
If amazon adopted fakespot's algorithm, the hackers would circumvent it within a week. This would also happen if fakespot reaches a critical mass of audience.
That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though. If I can I am now ordering anything expensive from the vendor directly and avoid Amazon. Just two years ago, I'd have even paid a little extra to have the purchase go through Amazon due to their fast shipping, easy returns and my Amazon store card given me 5% back on purchases. Just the last three months, I probably spent $2k-3k buying directly instead of via Amazon. That was 100% driven by not wanting to get fakes
> That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though.
I Amazon makes 1 billion extra each year, it can use it to buy a few of the "vendors" later on.
Profit now has more value than profit in 10-15 years.
Also, many people will be scammed by Amazon/vendor and they will never know it. To detect a fake some times a minimum knowledge is needed.
So, in the very short term, the Amazon customer is happy because he thinks that got a bargain, the seller is happy because the item is not returned, Amazon is happy because keeps their percentage. The authentic brand loses a sale and a year later it even looks bad when the fake fails and the customer blames the original brand.
And, if a customer detects the fake and complains. Amazon/vendor happily apologizes and returns the money. It is just part of being in the fake business.
Absolutely the same for me. Amazon is the new Best Buy for me. Back when online commerce was starting to really take off, it was very common to go to Best Buy to browse then go home and buy it cheaper online. Anymore, I use Amazon for the same thing, I go there to search then go elsewhere to buy.
These days, I only buy from Amazon if I need it quick and it isn't in stock locally.
How does their salary depend on them not understanding it? I would assume Amazon's bottom line would be helped by having employees who fully understand the market impact of fake reviews and can easily identify and take down fake reviews.
When fakespot identifies a fake review there are no repercussions is they are wrong. If Amazon does it, flags or removes those it incorrectly identifies as fake, there will be repercussions with the sellers.
Between all the great AI technologies in development, and hard feedback from decision info that Amazon could get from a fake review removal process, I believe Amazon could easily solve this problem if they wanted.
Bots are the best thing to have happened to Twitter's bottom line. Essentially Twitter at a fundamental level operates by farming the users into nice sorted silos. Then waiting for something to enrage a silo enough for them to obsessively engage with something in a dopamine addiction reaction. Bots are amazingly effective at finding enrage points, and fertilizing what would otherwise be fallow fields. Bots are just a cost effective way of finding the right fertilizer, field, and silo (and all government subsidized on top of it).
> Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts
> while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes.
This is not symmetrical.
This is their job for researchers without doing this they would be unemployed. A month of effort working on a small tight part of Twitter finding a problem and they get a large payday.
Twitter does this everyday and gets no reward other than maybe a slightly better network. They just get people thinking they do nothing.
> Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.
What incentive? They're still a giant, and while I've seen people here on HN complain about it, I've yet to see people or companies stop ordering via Amazon due to fake reviews.
Aside from their own sales incentives, why should they invest in something that other businesses (such as Fakespot) are already solving? It's R&D costs they can just not spend at all, and if the public pressure against fake reviews starts to boil up, they can probably buy Fakespot for less than it would cost them to develop the functionality on their own.
What sort of metrics are being used to evaluate fakespot's evaluations? I also think what fakespot does of providing a rating of ratings is a bit easier than actually addressing the larger problem. At some point wouldn't fakespots ratings also be prone to faking as well, surely there will be attacks and attempts at manipulation of that rating system too?
What threshold would be used to remove reviews, how would it be fair to different listings?
Removing fakes can have significant negatives too if you have too many false positives. So to say that amazon or twitter is failing in comparison to fakespot or independent researchers is a kind of an incomplete comparison without knowing fakespot's false positive rate.
In the case of Twitter, they also want to keep the fakes active for a while to help uncover a larger number of accounts at once. Large purges are more effective, because they don’t let the spammers play cat/mouse. Same reason why Google pushes out the large SEO updates in bulk - to stop spammers from gaming them as they come one by one.
I used to buy things by going to amazon, searching for the type of product I want, and then picking one based on user review. For ten years or so this worked very well and I didn't even consider buying things from anyone else.
Now the reviews and rating are meaningless noise and I have to pick out a product to buy by looking elsewhere, which also typically results in me buying things elsewhere.
I agree with you, but my point is that you're the dramatic majority. Their revenue proves it. So, in 2020, even though their reviews are all garbage and spam, does it matter to them? I again ask, now, based on their data, what benefit it poses to them?
It behooves them to solve the problem before Walmart or whoever takes over their customers.
Legit manufacturers hate Amazon due to counterfeits. Ali is cheaper. Shopping websites get easier to make every year.
Sellers can hook up to multiple websites easily. What's Amazon's moat? It's been "the reviews".
This. They are if nothing else very good at data analysis, and when you have achieved market dominance it is more profitable to hide the problem, attack people pointing out the problem, and buy out any one trying to solve the problem than to fix it yourself. They could fill every order today with a box of straw and see no impact at all to their bottom line.
What alternative do people have here in the US? Go to an actual store? I just went to a local Home Depot to buy a power tool. The store was basically stock out on the thing I wanted from every available manufacturer, of which there are 5-6 Home Depot carries. But I could go on the Home Depot website and get any of them. Amazon destroyed physical retail, and now sits on the rubble and collects rent. The supreme irony is that Amazon is now ... opening physical locations. They built their empire on the notion that a storefront is a quaint anachronism of the undigital dark ages, why would they do that?
I usually get electronics from Best Buy as they haven't sent any fakes (to my knowledge...) and it seems that Walmart has a pretty faithful customer base
Tough to generalize based off personal experience but I think overall Amazon would benefit from more credibility and have it be a net positive.
This topic comes up quite frequently on HN. It boils down to the risk-reward ratio. If you've never tried to sell anything on Amazon it's probably not obvious how ridiculously important positive reviews are to your product sales. I cannot overstate how important they are in the beginning, given the way your average online shopper decides what to buy.
What this means is that sellers are faced with an absolute imperative to get positive reviews at any cost, otherwise they die, while the flip side is that if they get caught manipulating reviews they maybe get de-listed and start over again. This imbalance leads to exactly what you see now, and it at least seems like as long as positive reviews are so important (in the absence of curation) this will be an arms race.
Amazon feels to me just a place that continues to exist because of its name recognition. Most of the stuff doesn't even come from Amazon's own warehouses anymore.
I suspect many people buy from Amazon because they can't find what they want anywhere else, or don't want to be stuck with shipping and restocking fees if something is wrong with it, or both.
Sadly, there aren't many vendors with a wide selection and a hassle-free return policy. On Amazon, even third-party sellers often have a return policy that matches Amazon's.
I found out recently that there are actually a few levels of "Amazon Prime" sales! The "Shipped and sold by Amazon" is what we normally expect, but there's also "Fulfilled by Amazon" and a third tier that's effectively "Prime Shipping" but is treated as a third-party seller. That third tier is particularly deceptive because the sidebar display doesn't distinguish between the second and third case but the return policies are very different.
From which side? The obvious alternative for consumers is to go back to curation, which is what brick and mortar retailers have done since forever. Costco, for example, has a giant team of people that test, verify, and give approval on the few products that go on shelves so that shoppers know they are getting something legitimate and of reasonable quality.
On the marketplace seller side I haven't come across anything that really strikes me as a better alternative. Review culture is pretty ingrained at this point.
If all that's happening is fake good reviews and bots upvoting bad ones, it's not a problem if you take the approach I do and think is the only correct one:
1. Only read the bad reviews
2. Ignore the fake or irrelevant bad reviews
3. Ignore the good/bad ratio
Of course, if people are good enough at faking bad reviews, then there is a problem, but I like to think I can tell, and it isn't something that is practical to scale.
The whole idea of treating reviews as some sort of voting mechanism that determines what you should buy makes no sense. The way I look at it is, is there something non-obvious that is a dealbreaker? That's what reviews are for.
If I was running an e-commerce site, I'd simply not allow good reviews at all. Maybe have a sales counter that would serve to show how many people didn't complain.
I've taken the approach of only reading the 3-star reviews.
In most cases, a 3-star review will provide a pretty thorough assessment of the pros and cons, and it's generally easier to determine the authenticity of the review.
An ultra reliable query for scammy products is "1TB USB flash drive." This product does exist in legit versions for about $200, but almost all of the (relevant to the query; many are for smaller capacities) hits are scams in the $30-40 price range. I believe these are mostly lower capacity thumb drives that have been hacked to report 1TB; this tactic has high danger for data corruption.
The fact that these listings are so easily gamed is to me a sign of something seriously wrong at Amazon. I know from experience how hard the abuse problem is (it was my job for a couple years at Google), but this should be Amazon's bread and butter.
"Sort-by-price" is "sort-by-price minus whatever arbitrary "shipping" fee the seller put in to cheat the sort, with paid placements mixed in at the top, bottom, and middle of every page".
Something I want from a store is curation. I want them to do the hard work of evaluating whether the product is worthy of the customer's money. Amazon (also copycats like Walmart) is failing at this basic task. That's why more of my online dollars are going to Costco, Target, and others who do the work.
Same, and it really helps to not pay for prime. The prime service not only costs extra, it also encourages impulse buying. When you have to pay for shipping (or purchase at least $25 prime with stuff) and you have to wait a week for delivery it really makes you look for alternatives, and those aren't actually that bad, you also discover that the many of the items have better prices outside of Amazon.
The issue is basically whether the store has opened up itself as the marketplace for third-party-sellers, and how much they push these third-party sellers compared to their own products.
It seems like Target may be more conservative with their Target Plus compared to Walmart and Amazon. However, even Newegg and many other stores have gotten on the third-party bandwagon.
Wait, I don't recall seeing third-party products on Target. When did that change? I see some mention of it online, but cursory search for products doesn't bring it up.
Edit: Looks like Target even hides that the product is third-party!
Even Target has completely fraudulent bait-and-switch 3rd-partty listings, of the sort Covid-19 made popular (paper towels and cleaners, buy a 24-pack but only 1 shows up), mixed in with legit 1st-party listings.
Not just fake reviews (where fake means no product was ever bought), but also reimbursed 5-star reviews.
Instagram + Facebook are blasting sites like Rebatest[0] in my face for some reason. I'm shocked Amazon lets such sites exist. I'm not opposed to people asking for reviews, but insisting they are 5-star reviews seems terribly unethical. Not surprisingly, they have a referral program as well...
Intrigued by this several hours earlier today, I signed-up because who wouldn't want a reimbursement for a _good_ product they would have bought otherwise? Let's see how this goes, low expectations.
Searching Google for "rebatest vs" naturally yields competitors Rebaid[1]
Yep. I've bought two things in the last week that each offer $15 for a five star review. The weird thing is, both were truly great products, so there wasn't an ethical dilemma for me, but it's kinda gross it exists.
I have a weird selection mechanism for purchases. It’s not my only mechanism, but it informs the decision. As much as I enjoy a well made item, what really upsets me is something that should be much better than it is. Buyer’s remorse is a huge issue for me.
So I look at the people who are panning it in their reviews. If they are coherent and reasonable, I’m going to think twice about it. If they are incoherent, shrill Karens, then everyone has those and it’s no big deal.
I do the same for development tools and libraries. It doesn’t catch everything, and I may see their point but am willing to deal with a consequence they couldn’t stomach. It does seem to help, especially with biased reporting.
I should rephrase. It’s not the ratio of Karens it’s the quantity of people with legitimate gripes. Flood with all caps as much as you want, Bob in Ohio who couldn’t get them on the phone when his product caught on fire and burned down his garage is going to have me asking a lot of questions.
Yup - people love leaving a bad review when they're mad about something, but rarely leave a positive review. This skews almost most reviews towards the negative.
It's funny -- a lot of products are 90% 5-star reviews, but nearly all the top reviews on a page are 1-star (the ones that get voted up as "most helpful").
This actually seems to solve the problem. You read through a bunch of them, and use your critical thinking to figure out if the problems are real are not.
Because the first couple are often just "this product broke after using it once!" which you can just ignore, because that's always going to happen to somebody and for some reason people love to upvote it.
But then you'll either start to notice a theme, or not. If there's a theme (8 of the 10 top reviews complain that the handle breaks, or that it's not compatible with Macs), then you can be pretty sure it's legitimate and probably want to look for a different product. But if there isn't any theme except "it broke immediately/arrived damaged" and then you start seeing reviews where people are like "it works fine", then you're good.
I dunno, but that seems to work for me. So thank goodness Amazon has the upvote button -- if it didn't it would make finding meaningful reviews a lot harder.
Yeah along these lines one I’ve noticed a lot lately is “this thing doesn’t fit like it used to” or “something has changed since March” where it is 90% 5 star like you said but the recent or most helpful reviews show something has changed, that can be useful.
The "old analog" world has solved this problem long ago: Consumer review magazines and NGOs (e.g. "Stiftung Warentest" in Germany) that review and rank products on objectively measurable criteria, with dedicated niche magazines (especially in computing) going on deep dives for reviews.
Why can't Amazon do it like Facebook and have a set of publicly trusted reviewers organizations whose reviews are shown with a "trusted review" mark and ranked higher?
Also: why can't regulators step in and demand that:
a) Amazon does not commingle inventory from different sellers to prevent fraudulent product from entering the system and being "washed" in the process, as well as provide end-to-end (from ingestion in the warehouse to the parcel at delivery) for each and every product they ship
b) Amazon employees have to manually review changes to product descriptions, varieties etc. so that "switch-a-roo" schemes where a vendor sells, let's say, plant seeds and then shifts the product description to laptop chargers while retaining the reviews.
This is the advantage that physical retail stores have: they at least know what they are selling and that it is reasonably free from fraudulent product.
Amazon is the unregulated Wild West, and frankly this has to stop.
That is up for Amazon to decide, but generally many countries already have established organizations. It should not be that hard for Amazon to hire one of the global market research networks to gather a suitable list.
> How do you get reviews for the long tail?
You mean for new products? Why not mandate that all products that are sold on Amazon have to pass review by two or three of the trusted organizations as a condition of listing?
friend working at Bose tells me: yeah, i know our IP is getting ripped off and we are getting either outright faked or clone-faked; but we are confident that people will continue to buy Bose because they trust the brand. brand loyalty might cut through whatever consumer preferences are shaped by the likes of reviews.
OT, but The Bose brand does exactly the opposite for me. I bought a pair of 700 headphones, started having problems THEN read the forums. Ooh boy do they need to work harder on the firmware. They can’t mute anything on Windows. This is after the version that temporarily bricked thousands of headphones for several months. Also support was abysmal.
I guess the brand advantage is that at least you know what you’re getting.
Definitely. We don't buy any off-brand cookware any more, for example, and are now extending that out to other categories. I'd sooner trust walmart's discount brands (eg mainstays) than most chinese brands.
A family member of mine recently ordered some wireless headphones, in the box was a card asking for a 5-star review in exchange for another pair of the headphones. They also ordered some school supplies with a similar offer in the box.
I've seen people post photos of these kind of messages along with their 5-star reviews. Once I actually bothered to report it to Amazon (I was about to buy the damn thing until I noticed the image.)
The customer support person seemed genuinely confused - the conversation went back and forth a few times; "We can see that you haven't bought this product", "No, but I'm reporting a problem", "We cannot give you a refund if you didn't purchase it", "I don't want a refund, but this is apparently against your seller ToS", etc. I gave up.
These days I won't buy anything from 3rd-party sellers, and I ignore all 5-star reviews.
I've stopped judging a product on 5-star reviews. Between two products, I will chose the product with the _least_ 1-star reviews. But obviously, this method breaks down when a product only has 50 reviews. Also, I would expect a somewhat normal distribution of reviews for a quality product. More 5s, than 4s, more 4s than 3s, etc.
4, 3 and 2 are where the most honest reviews are. High 1 count is indicative of quality control issue. 5 star reviews is either a customer who was immediately excited about product or a fake review.
I've just given up on buying anything from Amazon that isn't sold directly by them or isn't a brand name I recognize. That eliminates a solid 80% of things that I deem "eligible" to buy.
Nearly every time I order things like small kitchen gadgets, barware, office accessories/supplies, I get a card saying that if I write a 5-star review, and send them a link to it, they'll send me a "free gift."
I suspect there are a lot of reviews like this that aren't 100% fake (they're from different people who actually paid full price for the product) but are solicited and therefore not accurate.
(I'll never review a product where the vendor makes an offer like this. I used to report it to Amazon, but I don't think they care.)
I swear I see an article like this on HN at least once a month (actually, according to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it's probably closer to about once a week) and the comments are always the same, let me save you (the person reading this) some time and summarize what these comments are going to look like:
> I've lost all faith in Amazon, now I use Walmart, where I get cheap junk but at least I know it's real cheap junk
> Amazon has so much data! How have they failed so hard to stop this?
> I swear I see this type of article posted every other week on HN
> I was recently hit by this! They even shipped it in totally real looking packing and outer shell, but the serial number wasn't valid/the company selling it had no record of my purchase/when I dropped it and the casing popped open I could see it was not authentic/etc
> This is largely because of comingling
> Check out fakespot/reviewmeta, they can analyze the comments and tell you which ones are fake
> This is Amazon's fault for making reviews so important for the seller
The scarey corollary is that all fake user-generated content is becoming harder to spot, from Yelp reviews, Youtube comments, Tinder profiles, News stories, Facebook posts, etc. And this is before the wide adoption of deep fakes by these outfits.
I've lost all trust in Amazon and competitors. I try to buy direct from the company producing the product when I can. The shipping times aren't much different. Maybe no same or next day.
Simple solution: combine it with ubiquitious social scoring, and make real names/government issued IDs mandatory for any review. See the graph lighten up with the fakers. Shun. Done.
The FT article that kicked off this flurry suggests a guy was making £5000 a month from selling his free stuff. It must be an extreme example but with that much temptation...
Amazon should allow only bad reviews or reviews that speak negative points about a product.
In addition to that amazon should show only the number of purchases made.
Fake (paid) reviewers usually write good about the product to support sales
As a user after reading the description of the product i would be interested to know where the product fails.
With this model, fake reviewers will have to write fake bad reviews on other rival products which is expensive to do and easier to spot them based on patterns.
funny, I thought AI/DL has been ready to save the world for a while since everyone is bragging its power but until now Amazon still faces fake reviews problem.
Ive always thought (noted here a bit ago) that the Internet needs a verified government ID. Each time you use it to comment on Facebook or any website you are helping verify the veracity of what your saying is true. If you don't use it then what your saying is socially/culturally in question, which I think either a minority or majority are already doing in terms believing what they read on the Internet.
Of course I dont think anyone here likes the sound of the above, which i thought of after seeing deepfakes videos (was downvoted heavily).
If downvoting love to understand the negatives of such a system?
Government validated identification online sounds like pure hell to me and the antithesis of an open and free internet, which is already under assault in many different ways.
I don’t think that Amazon needs government backed identification to be able to weed out fake reviews.
They could start by allowing only reviews from actual purchasers of the product. (I assumed this was already a restriction they had in place, but I just checked now and, of course, they appear to allow reviews from any registered user).
They could also only allow reviews from accounts over a certain age or with a minimum number of purchases or who have completed additional identity validation, either themselves or through some other third party.
Point is, it’s not an insurmountable problem for them. It’s just either not a priority or something they actively and intentionally do not wish to stop.
Sure, but this idea was prompted after seeing deepfakes. What's another way to fight the insanity and further erosion of veracity on the Internet/fight deepfakes. You note and seem to agree there's an issue with it the Internet too.
Also and as I note above it isn't anything you are mandated to use... only use when you want to ensure veracity to what your saying, posting, publishing, etc.
Maybe I'll get down voted, but I think it's a legitimate question to ask: if someone offers me a refund in exchange for my review, and the product would benefit me, why shouldn't I accept it? Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers? Perhaps it's a small merchant trying to get started in the face of big corporations doing other things to cheat the system (ex. pricing out competition to capture the market). Could it be that I'm helping a small business get started by getting a free product in exchange for a review? There's no way to know for sure. But I can imagine that some people would indeed take this offer and I don't necessarily blame them. Should I?
> Is it my duty to protect [...] other consumers?"
Calling them 'consumers' rather than 'people' seems like a use of dehumanizing language to assuage your guilt. At least, that's how it comes across to me. When you accept a bribe for a review you're screwing over the living breathing human beings who might make the mistake of assuming you aren't a liar.
> Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers?
If you follow Kant, the argument is pretty much this: if everyone would do that, nobody could trust any reviews. The right choice, according to Kant, is that which you can want to be made into law for everyone. You don't want reviews to lose all meaning as they're important information for people to learn about the products, ergo you mustn't fake it.
Should you blame them? Yeah, but it's a pretty small infraction and they're a small cog in a large machine, so don't be too harsh.
Yes, thank you for entertaining this idea at least. There is a certain amount of logic that people who post a review, which is optional, have some sort of motivation for doing it in the first place. And then there's also the idea that the seller, in this case Amazon, is relieving themselves or their own responsibility to review the products that they sell before putting them on the market.
The issue is not whether you should accept a situation which appears to be mutually beneficial to you and the entity soliciting the review. Corporations are typically going to make decisions about the things they do based on income to to corporate entity. While this usually aligns to consumer need and demand (for happiness even), it usually doesn't as a whole. Facebook seems to give people what they want, but actually they figured out how to progressively remove choices from users to get EXACTLY what they want without the users realizing what had been lost (time, attention, focus, desire for a unique product vs. the product resulting from the software driven dogma of the crowd, etc.)
The question should be whether or not the embodied process is fair, in whole, to the users? As much as we worry about "right" API design here (or what is the perfect framework for CSS?), you'd think we'd worry about how bad we are screwing users with all this software optimized to make startups, founders, VCs and private equity firms more an dmore money with less and less effort.
Same question applies to Twitter. Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts and bot networks pushing spam, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...) while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes.
ETA: Regarding comments along the lines of, "it's in their best interest to let fake reviews continue as it boosts Amazon's sales."
I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors.
Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.