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Amazon's Fake Review Problem

brianbien.com

121–130 of 336 posts

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my wife is an author on Amazon and personally knows most of the people who review her books. So your wife has people she knows leave positive reviews in order to bump her book's review score and you're upset that Fakespot gave it an F due to them being non-organic reviews? As a consumer it sounds like Fakespot is doing a great job, and exactly what it states on the tin. What your wife is doing is at best dishonest…

I would also call this dishonesty, but I wouldn't be too hard on someone for this. Asking someone to not do this is like asking someone to do honest advertisements. It's asking someone to uphold an ethical standard that the majority neglects. A little bit of moderated moral pushback has its place, but I think the main solution at societal-scale must be structural.

Friends & family reviews do break the Amazon TOS, but Amazon has limited means available to detect it. Authors get more leeway for giving out free review copies than other categories do now.

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#122

This is not just Amazon’s problem. App store ratings, Reddit comments, Twitter/FB feeds, and Net Neutrality comments are all gamed. We are living in the age of human controlled bots looking to manipulate other humans through what we read.

Yeah, these are all "message passing" algorithms, like belief propagation. The whole financial system itself is another good example of this.

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#123
post #72

If Amazon starts penalizing products for fake reviews then it's probably just a matter of time until that's weaponized by competitors to tank competing products. Then I imagine Amazon will have to come out with a "disavow review" tool similar to Google's disavow backlinks (to counteract targeted negative SEO).

What's to say that isn't happening now? Seen quite a lot of pseudo positive reviews that are simply advising reader that "another product is better"

It is happening now in fairly large quantities.

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that Amazon could split the market place off. I disliked it from the first day they introduced it. I want to buy from Amazon not some company I've never heard of. It's if course never gonna happen. It's too convenient for Amazon and most users probably don't even understand that they aren't buying from Amazon.

> It's if course never gonna happen. It's too convenient for Amazon and most users probably don't even understand that they aren't buying from Amazon. Out of curiosity, why do you assume people don't realize they aren't buying from Amazon?

Mostly because it happened to me multiple times to buy something off Amazon, and later realize it was a different vendor when I tried to return stuff and the conditions are different.

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just shop directly with Alibaba/aliexpress then, skip the big markup :D

Because you need to buy wholesale quantities and it's still not the brand name product you want.

AliExpress is consumer focused; you can buy single units there.

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#127
post #105
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I've never really had an issue because I chalked it up more to people buying cheap crap and expecting it to be good. But $65 for a pair of headphones isn't exactly cheap. Was it a familiar brand but maybe a counterfeit? Or was it a brand you've never heard of, but the price is justified by very positive reviews? I'm curious.

Headphones seem to be a very strange category in general. You can get exceptional good value for money if you know what to buy and on the other hand pay a lot for utter crap.

Listening is extremely subjective though. Headphone types can be better / worse for certain listening habits (there are people out there who don't think great bass makes great music, folks), and for different ears. Music taste itself is extremely subjective. Best thing is still to get to a trusted hifi store nearby with your own, known music in best quality and your current best headphone model and test through candidate models yourself. (Admittedly, I'd still read some reviews before investing a few hundred dollars into headphones.)

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#128
The fake-review problem was amusingly exposed for TripAdvisor by a journalist who with, the aid of five people, had his garden shed rated as five stars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich

At the end of the TRASHFUTURE podcast (14 Dec 2017 "The Shed Chronicles ft. Oobah Butler, ca. 36 minutes in http://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/feed/ ) people are still calling for what he describes as "frozen dinners with the sort of things that wankers like on them, like microherbs".

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#129
Amazon does do a lot to detect bribed reviews automatically. However, in the long run, this may be an arms race that Amazon will lose.

One issue with detecting fakes with identical phrases is that many real reviewers will take phrases from the product description or from other peoples' reviews either consciously or unconsciously.

This also matches up with a common bribed review technique of giving people canned phrases to repeat in their reviews or hundreds of prewritten reviews to be distributed out to people who are part of the review program.

Top reviewers are also not a good brake on this process because the best way for them to profit from their reviews is to take bribes. Just going after people who only leave positive reviews also doesn't really work because smart reviewers salt their reviews with the occasional negative one (generally for people who aren't bribing them).

User generated reviews emerged because many surveys across many different product categories have shown that shoppers tend to trust peer reviews more than they trust expert reviews. Part of this is because so many expert reviews have been corrupted to an even greater degree, with PR departments basically being bribery and party-throwing departments whose jobs are to manipulate journalists and place articles in supposedly unbiased publications.

The issue from the seller side is that shoppers are absurd perfectionists. A product can go from a 4.24 star to a 4.26 star average and have its conversion rate double. The difference between 4 and 4.5 stars is the difference between losses on the product and profits in many competitive categories. Also many people just give 1 star reviews to products when they have minor nitpicks. That'd be fine if that 1 star review didn't tank a product average and suddenly mean the budget that was there for an employee suddenly isn't there anymore.

In real terms the main difference in most categories between the reliably 4.5-5 star product and the 4 star product is that one seller spams harder than the other one. Considering that nice guys finish last in that particular competition, it rapidly becomes a triumph or the worst.

Long-run what will happen is that the reaction against user reviews will be as severe as the reaction against critics has been. Part of this is also just a scale issue: with so many products and brands constantly popping up globally, there isn't enough time and editorial attention available to review everything.

Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

#130

Well the situation does seem quite bad when you see people who leave fake reviews become brazen enough to actually advertise their services on Amazon itself [1]. I reported this review about 10 days ago and it's still up. The email address provided appears on hundreds of product listings [2]. When they can't even filter out nonsense like this I can only assume they put zero effort into tackling fake reviews. [1] http…

Nice investigative work there.
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