I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit of time and computing power to work through...
Amazon has hundreds of thousands of products with tens of millions of reviews... correlating that with log history for each review will take a lot of time... not just to run, but to write any automated process, and work through resolving it.
It seems to me that Amazon seems to be pretty responsive when bot reviews are pointed out, and that may be, or at least have been a more effective strategy... But looking at an article a few days ago regarding twitter bot nets, and even seeing them try to draw me in... it's a very large problem all around.
Bad people will do bad things... as will misguided people. The bigger issue is the false positives... we've all read the horror stories of when a legitimate domain gets screwed by (insert popular domain registrar here) because of incorrect reportiong/reaction... or when a business' google apps is offline, and nobody can be reached at google... it happens.
In the case mentioned in TFA... it's probably prudent to ban the publisher in question. In others, the case may well be different.
> I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit of time and computing power to work through...
It is a complex problem - but amazon has a serious advantage over other sites that have to deal with such issues (i.e. Twitter) - in that they have significantly more information on each user. I don't think Amazon is short on computing power either.
Taking into account order and browsing history, product review trends, linguistic similarities in review posts etc. They should be able to get very low error rates in identification.
Further unlike something like twitter feeds, it's quite possibly to silently de-prioritize abusive reviewers and associated products. Really, I'm quite surprised at how bad of a job they are doing - most of these cases are so blatant and obvious they should not require an author and a live representative to resolve.
Amazon has hundreds of thousands of products with tens of millions of reviews... correlating that with log history for each review will take a lot of time... not just to run, but to write any automated process, and work through resolving it.
It seems to me that Amazon seems to be pretty responsive when bot reviews are pointed out, and that may be, or at least have been a more effective strategy... But looking at an article a few days ago regarding twitter bot nets, and even seeing them try to draw me in... it's a very large problem all around.
Bad people will do bad things... as will misguided people. The bigger issue is the false positives... we've all read the horror stories of when a legitimate domain gets screwed by (insert popular domain registrar here) because of incorrect reportiong/reaction... or when a business' google apps is offline, and nobody can be reached at google... it happens.
In the case mentioned in TFA... it's probably prudent to ban the publisher in question. In others, the case may well be different.