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Amazon Dark Patterns

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Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that hard to believe. Any chance of a link to the review? Otherwise this comment could easily be written by an Amazon competitor looking to sway opinion.

Who are these Amazon competitors that have shills working for them to damage Amazon's reputation?

Yes, apparently its too shocking to believe that Amazon will lie in its reviews, but its perfectly reasonable that Walmart PR staff would troll HN and lie in comments.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#132
I wonder if amazon is struggling with fake reviews and would rather have false positives on the negative side of the spectrum. To a seller there's no diff btwn their product getting a positive review and all their competitors getting negative reviews. A bot can just as easily do one or the other. But forcing the bots to be positive review bots benefits amazon in two ways. It makes all the products on their site look purchase-worthy and it contains all a product's review-warfare onto the product page itself, so they can clean it up later if they want.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that hard to believe. Any chance of a link to the review? Otherwise this comment could easily be written by an Amazon competitor looking to sway opinion.

Who are these Amazon competitors that have shills working for them to damage Amazon's reputation?

Jet.com and/or Walmart.com?

I have no idea of that's true but certainly there are competitors. And Walmart is certainly know for shady tactics.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a rev…

Sure they can, but what about some of the products on Amazon which are mostly immutable like for example: Books. A bad book is a bad book. Batch B of the said book is mostly a new "product" listing on Amazon with its own set of reviews and ratings. Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in…

>Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something

That is a good idea, but that still does not fix the aggregate data. When someone searches for "Coffee", the aggregate number of reviews is still considering that low-star review. So the "Seattle Coffee Beans" overall rating for Batch C could be a 4.5 / 5, but for all batches is a 2.5 / 5.

The easiest way to fix this is to remove old, out-of-date reviews. This should apply to positive reviews too, but I have no idea if Amazon is doing this.

Another approach is what Steam did - have a long-term rating and a "recent" rating. See "No Man's Sky" as an example [1] - a product that started poor, but improved over time. This helps prevent product brigading and gives vendors an opportunity to bounce back from negative reviews.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#135

This rant is not well written. The first issue looks like a bug on Amazon's side. I'm not going to assume malice without something pointing in that direction. The author writes "What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed?" Well, would it? I see no indication it would. Those reviews are indeed suspicious, and Amazon should do a better job of detecting fake review accounts. The…

It's a weird omission because it would have been so easy to increase the star rating and try to post the review again.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#136
post #60

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com a…

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a rev…

Its a serious issue if Amazon does not have this feature and still deletes reviews.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#137
post #60

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com a…

As someone who worked for a third party used bookseller, this was 8 months ago, we would always and I mean always dispute anything below a 3 star review. Many get thrown out. It was generally in the 40-50% range that we could get removed. Not much rhyme or reason...just dispute all of them.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#138
post #60

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com a…

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a rev…

I think they could do like ebay does: reviews in the last 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, ...etc. Or a similar mechanism. Sometimes I am not interested to old reviews, esp. technical books, as they become very quickly outdated. Deleting them implies deleted forever, though. Such information will be always lost, while it might still apply. I would simply give it a different weight.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#139
post #60

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com a…

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a rev…

If a batch is different enough to warrant new reviews, it's a different product and should be sold as such. Consider beer and wine. Industrially manufactured beer doesn't vary much from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand. Wine varies a lot from batch to batch, so it's sold by brand and year.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#140
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is he supposed to know if this is a problem with “shipping” or with the warehouse, the manufacturing, or the design of the product? What if it left the warehouse in that condition? Or the factory? I previously have avoided products with a large number of “arrived damaged” reviews, because it’s a sign of something other than a “shipping problem”.

Personal experience: When shopping for budget 3D printers, some models that had been available for several months or years had earlier reviews mention poor packing/shipping. The newer reviews mentioned that the situation has improved.

This is a problem generally, and not limited to "shipping" issues. I was looking at a telescope recently that had a lot of early bad reviews because of an issue with the eyepiece that had, apparently, been resolved.

Reviews should either "age out" or there should be a way for the seller to indicate that a revision has been made. Granted, they would probably game both.

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