Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 334 posts

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

#181

Post by beckler »

jliptzin wrote: post #176

Amazon is worth an enormous amount of money. They can afford to solve this problem. Here's one idea: invite regular amazon users with accounts active for at least > 1 year, who have some kind of verified identity/address, and ask them to become certified reviewers. Give them amazon credits/coupons in exchange for reviews of all the items they've purchased in the last 6-12 months (if they haven't yet left a review for…

It's probably more profitable to leave it the way it is... Which opens up the door for a competitor.

Imagine if there was a different site that became known for its highly reliable ratings. It would eat Amazon's lunch and dinner.

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

#182

Post by ttty »

markdown wrote: post #95
koolba wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you even implement a verified purchase? For a hotel maybe you could forward an itinerary (which can be faked) but there’s probably no receipt for a random taco stand that only accepts cash. Granted the latter does not care as much as the hotel but whatever they do would need to cover everybody.

After thinking about this problem for... umm... 30 seconds... Allow users to write reviews, and then send a message to the hotel owner saying "X has posted a review of your business. Do you accept that X was a guest on X date?" The hotel owner is forced to verify the stay before he gets to see the review. Of course he'll know all about the outliers who had a bad experience and complained at the hotel and might want t…

Then the hotel owner can put a ton of fake positive reviews and verify all.

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

#183

Post by w1nst0nsm1th »

markdown wrote: post #95
koolba wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you even implement a verified purchase? For a hotel maybe you could forward an itinerary (which can be faked) but there’s probably no receipt for a random taco stand that only accepts cash. Granted the latter does not care as much as the hotel but whatever they do would need to cover everybody.

After thinking about this problem for... umm... 30 seconds... Allow users to write reviews, and then send a message to the hotel owner saying "X has posted a review of your business. Do you accept that X was a guest on X date?" The hotel owner is forced to verify the stay before he gets to see the review. Of course he'll know all about the outliers who had a bad experience and complained at the hotel and might want t…

With a receipt system to authenticate real customer and an opt-in inscription to the service by restaurants/hotels, it could make it.

It could be linked to an order/invoice number the owner could check or enter in the system when the client check in or check out. The client would then be required to enter that number to authenticate he's a real consumer.

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

#184

Post by adaptiveValleys »

incongruity wrote: post #127
bootlooped wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear those low-price low-quality products aren't legitimately listed first because most people prefer them. Edit: ignore the above, I failed to read the part where they said the price was the same.

Except when sellers game the system and flood it with fake reviews, it’s pretty strongly suggestive that this isn’t a grassroots shift in consumer preferences. Relatedly, if someone else can make a business out of helping your customers sort out fake reviews on your site, like Fakespot has, it pretty clearly means either there’s something wrong with your site or you don’t care about the sham reviews because they stil…

Agreed. I recently heard in a talk an example of NLP being used to help rank sellers by analyzing messages between buyers and sellers, before and after transactions.

Another example was how Taobao increased the number of useful reviews by allowing sellers to pay for reviews, and used NLP to determine if the review was useful. If it was, only then would the reviewer get paid. This would then dis-incentivize sellers expecting bad feedback from paying for reviews, and incentivize good sellers who were seeking honest, relevant feedback.

Seems like both examples can still be gamed, but it seems like a step in the right direction.

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

#185

Post by vadym909 »

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #17
zarriak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon doesn't deliver the things you bought. I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods. There is a reason designer stores exist. There are many reasons that Amazon as a company and service are bad but almost none of what you describe is a valid complaint.

> I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods. His wife bought him a gift. I assume she thought that a company as big as Amazon wouldn't allow sales of counterfeit items on their platform, like I once did. > My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall.

This is a serious problem. My wife goes to Amazon and just buys the top seller of whatever she's looking for(even if its from a no name marketplace seller). I don't think she realizes people can game this system.

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

#186

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bewuethr wrote: post #132
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, the pervasive Amazon counterfeit problem is unrelated to the fake review problem. Both are serious problems that Amazon does little to combat, but they're not the same. The counterfeiting is more insidious because Amazon is entirely at fault for mixing legit merchandise with counterfeits. Fake reviews on the other hand aren't Amazon's fault. That's just the world being filled with heinous assholes out to…

Amazon kind of audits and reviews products, or at least has an official program for sellers to solicit user reviews: it's called Amazon Vine [0]. For the reviewers (the "Vine Voices"), it looks like this: on a regular basis, you can choose a product to review (based on your past reviews, purchasing history etc., maybe - they don't disclose how that works), and Amazon sends the product to you. Within one month, you ha…

> As a side note, I know a Vine Voice, and they get emails from companies offering to reimburse them for a product in exchange for a five star reviews every few days.

Amzn should pay extra for those. Then ban them:)

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

#187

Post by alsetmusic »

PostOnce wrote: post #170
x0054 wrote: post #111

Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I would search for "target arrows" on Amazon the first page results would be for legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of 6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for "target arrows" I get pages and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I…

Why not order online from a sporting goods store, or, if possible, direct from the manufacturer? "Get everything in one place" was more valuable when we had to travel from place to place and it took 30 minutes, but traveling from one website to another takes no time, so the proposition isn't as strong. Return policies, security, etc, are concerns still, but those cons come along with the pros of no commingling, proba…

Not OP.

> Why not order online from a sporting goods store, or, if possible, direct from the manufacturer?

I don’t want to share my info with more websites / services than necessary. Amazon already has my CC. I don’t want to spread my info any more than I have to.

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

#188

Post by jtreminio »

esalman wrote: post #180
x0054 wrote: post #111

Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I would search for "target arrows" on Amazon the first page results would be for legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of 6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for "target arrows" I get pages and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I…

I was recently researching car dashcams. On Amazon the top brand has thousands of reviews but the most critical one accuses the seller of offering free mounts in exchange for 5* reviews. The second most prominent one is featured heavily in a deal aggregator website which I knew about from before. I decided to do my research outside of Amazon. The most reliable brand which I chose based on independent review sites and…

I'm in the market, can you tell us the name?

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

#189

Post by dudus »

jtreminio wrote: post #188
esalman wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently researching car dashcams. On Amazon the top brand has thousands of reviews but the most critical one accuses the seller of offering free mounts in exchange for 5* reviews. The second most prominent one is featured heavily in a deal aggregator website which I knew about from before. I decided to do my research outside of Amazon. The most reliable brand which I chose based on independent review sites and…

I'm in the market, can you tell us the name?

I'm not OP but something similar happened to me. I ended up buying the Papago goSafe 535. Pretty decent bang for buck.

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

#190

Post by cma »

user111233 wrote: post #166
antidesitter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good. Incidentally, this was the motivation behind a PoW system called Hashcash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash .

Bitmessage had this and it would burn up my laptop cpu trying to send a text message but spammers with gpu farms could still take out the whole network with no troubles.

Seems like in a mature implementation your phone/laptop would route the message to a GPU farm and the work requirement could be scaled appropriately. And for whitelisted everyday contacts the computation cost could be zero.
Post reply on HN