Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews

Post by acheron » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 12:54 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #20

dragontamer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met a family member (like 2nd cousin or further away) at some wedding a few years ago. I only talked to him once, but he was very clear about this situation. He owned a hotel, and was trying to track down the writers of bad reviews on Yelp. Primarily, as the owner of the hotel, it was his job to find out what's wrong about the hotel and improve it. But he started to investigate some of the 1-star reviews, and came…

Wouldn't fake reviews reduce the credibility of Yelp eventually, thus letting the problem take care of itself?

Post by joegahona » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 12:57 AM UTC

howenterprisey wrote: post #85

abruzzi wrote: post #83

A bit off topic, but companies/organizations that use punctuation in their name make sentences look screwy. The organization in this article is “Which?” which the Guardian faithfully reproduces (without the quote I used). As a result, every time the name of the organization comes at the end of a sentence, the Guardian doesn’t end it with a period, they end it with a question mark. This made me go back and reread at l…

Completely agreed. I think Wikipedia has the right idea for dealing with company names like this - use title case and omit anything that isn't pronounced. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

Post by perpetualcrayon » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:04 AM UTC

bootlooped wrote: post #102

perpetualcrayon wrote: post #97

*-star reviews on all of the major review sites are 2-dimensional. They should be 3 dimensional (0-x stars) + time. This way if clusters of 5-star reviews show up in an extremely short period of time it's a red flag. Instead of seeing a static "this product/service got x stars", we should be able to see "this product/service, within the last 1 month, received on average x stars". And then you can extrapolate, oh they…

Fake review services have already figured out how to slow-drip reviews. If you put a mediocre product on Amazon and buy reviews, there will be no legit review history to compare against either. It's a tough nut to crack if the fake reviews are linked to real purchases already.

Post by anonymous5133 » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:13 AM UTC

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #70

I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics). I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every pro…

Post by i_made_a_booboo » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

pmcollins wrote: post #42

plink wrote: post #2

I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value to are the negative ones. Also, I've extremely curtailed any purchasing on Amazon as I've come to perceive the majority of their marketplace to be a degenerative crap house.

I bought a problematic item on Amazon and left a negative review. The seller contacted me three times via email and offered me $30 (the cost of the item) to remove the review. I didn't take it but maybe others had. And I wonder if I was duped into buying the thing because previous negative reviewers had been bought off. Considering the fake reviews and the number of counterfeit items I've received from Amazon, I defa…