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Amazon Dark Patterns

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Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#191

Post by always_good »

lurn wrote: post #180
paulie_a wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people write crappy reviews. I remember seeing a 1 start review for a video card that was basically "I ordered the wrong one and it didnt fit my system" reviews should be taken with a grain of salt.

Sometimes the reviews also don't match the rating. I see this happen all the time, not only on Amazon: "Great service, great product. No complaints." 1 star

I confronted someone who left this sort of my review on my mobile app to ask why they gave me one star if they were so pleased. It was the only review under five stars.

They said that they wanted their review to appear in the "top negative review" column since it didn't have a shot at the "top positive review" column.

I was dumbfounded.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#192

Post by briandear »

dalore wrote: post #178
SamuelAdams wrote: post #111

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…

You can pick a cut off date. Like only reviews in the last 18 months used to calculate score and are shown.

Only verified purchases should count as well. A lot of people review stuff just out of spite or PR reasons.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#193

Post by OkGoDoIt »

exgamedev wrote: post #130
k__ wrote: post #2

I also had to implement this pattern for app reviews. Show a custom review dialog, if the user gives 4-5 stars send them to the app store for the real review, if not just say "thank you" and close the dialog. Repeat until one day they'll give you a good review.

I used to work for f2p game companies and they also used this as a standard trick. On top of suppressing negative reviews they would only ask you to rate the game immediately after something good happened in the game. You leveled up, or got a good prize, or whatever. They would craft these entire on-rails onboarding experiences where you seem to win a jackpot early on, then ask you for a review. They'd build out thes…

I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but Tinder used to ask for a review right after a successful match

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#194

Post by iron0013 »

Sorry to be pedantic (although this IS Hacker News, after all), but shouldn't the web page's title be "Censoring Unhappy Customers" rather than "Censuring Unhappy Customers"?

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#195

Post by closetohome »

simias wrote: post #43
jackewiehose wrote: post #33

I once wrote a 1-star review on amazon for a top-selling product that had almost only positive reviews. The review was published but they quietly changed its contents. They replaced some words (I guess it was too strong language like "crap" or something) but even worse they removed at least one whole sentence and after that the review didn't make much sense anymore and it looked like I wrote it like that. Then I watc…

Wait amazon edits your reviews? That's shaddy as hell, I can understand removing a review for "strong language" but changing its content without asking the author is borderline scammy. I couldn't find similar stories online (although admittedly that's pretty hard to search for). I'd think it would be a big deal if Amazon was caught doing that, wouldn't it be?

Obviously a retailer like Amazon wouldn't outright edit user reviews because it would be incredibly easy to catch, and would be a massive scandal if true.

The guy you're replying to probably just forgot what he wrote.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#196

Post by taeric »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #152
taeric wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you think that would work. They could sign the serial number, I suppose, but I don't see why the fakes wouldn't just recycle serial numbers at that point. For fast moving parts, they could include a date, but you could still just copy some other one from recent checks.

I think how it would work (if I amazon wanted it to) is that the supplier would send the list of signatures for the next 200 products to amazon (which would then check for duplicates). Presumably these signatures could be scanned from a barcode format programatically. Also, consumers believing they had a fake product could then go to the website of these manufacturers, who would have an incentive to make a web-ui to…

Apologies if my tone made it sound dismissive. I'm genuinely interested in how this could be made to work.

I agree in thinking a full on handshake would be required. Not sure how instrumented all of the suppliers would be. And I'd imagine that is where a lot of the pain to build a solution like this would be.

Any other approaches that you could think of that don't require cooperation from every party?

There is also the question of cost and basic reach. You assert this gets 90% of the way there. Do we really think the fake problem is over 10% of traffic today? I'd be surprised if that is the case. I don't have numbers, but I would expect this to be in the .1% range. At the scale of a large store, that is still a giant number.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#197

Post by closetohome »

mrtksn wrote: post #80
fouc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? They make returns very easy to do. There's a form that pops up and many choices for reasons.

There was no return option on the SD Card, it was marked as "not eligible for return" so I had to deal with the customer support. I actually went ahead and dug out the conversation for you. This is my refund request: https://imgur.com/bthMMoN This is the response from Amazon: https://imgur.com/xWK8FVH Yeah, they refunded me without a fuss but I prefer an experience where the items arrive in expected quality and I kee…

So all it took was an email, they didn't even require you to return the product before refunding you, and you're unhappy with that for some reason?

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#198

Post by alpha_squared »

closetohome wrote: post #195
simias wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait amazon edits your reviews? That's shaddy as hell, I can understand removing a review for "strong language" but changing its content without asking the author is borderline scammy. I couldn't find similar stories online (although admittedly that's pretty hard to search for). I'd think it would be a big deal if Amazon was caught doing that, wouldn't it be?

Obviously a retailer like Amazon wouldn't outright edit user reviews because it would be incredibly easy to catch, and would be a massive scandal if true. The guy you're replying to probably just forgot what he wrote.

> Obviously a retailer like Amazon wouldn't outright edit user reviews because it would be incredibly easy to catch...

To be fair, you're also giving them the benefit of doubt on this, for which the dark patterns don't seem to justify. It could just be a scandal that hasn't broken, yet.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#199

Post by sbjs »

At first I thought the only way to genuinely avoid these kind of bots is to have reviewers posting videos, maybe hosted on YouTube to save costs. Videos are the only thing that can't be faked as easily (but they can with 'deep fakes'). But this won't actually solve the problem. These reviews may be fake but they're probably real people being paid to write them, and those real people can just as easily make real review videos.

I don't think there is an automated solution to "liars will lie for money". I think the only real solution is brand trust. We have to go back! Back to a time when you knew something was good because it proved that it was good, and word of mouth spread to let you know it was good. Don't trust anonymous word of mouth either.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#200

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #111
seren wrote: 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…

Steam handles this by displaying the average from strictly recent reviews and the average over all.

For example, No Man's Sky was one of the biggest letdowns in recent gaming releases. It was later patched to be much better.

Check out the reviews here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/

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