Live data from Hacker News

I write fake online reviews

bbc.co.uk

1–10 of 91 posts

Re: I write fake online reviews

#2
Positive reviews are not very informative.

What I find more informative is bad reviews that get an answer from the seller/company. I guess these interactions will be faked in the next iteration of reviewogenesis.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#3
I tend to ignore good reviews and rely on bad ones mostly to make my decisions. Will also never leave a good review when I'm satisfied, they are indistinguishable from fake ones anyway, I tend to rather just leave bad reviews when I'm not satisfied.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#4
post #2

Positive reviews are not very informative. What I find more informative is bad reviews that get an answer from the seller/company. I guess these interactions will be faked in the next iteration of reviewogenesis.

Fake reviews are a game of cat and mouse. If writing good ones for their own products no longer works, they'll start writing bad ones for competing products.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#5
post #3

I tend to ignore good reviews and rely on bad ones mostly to make my decisions. Will also never leave a good review when I'm satisfied, they are indistinguishable from fake ones anyway, I tend to rather just leave bad reviews when I'm not satisfied.

Yes, bad reviews are often more useful - particularly when they explain clearly enough what the reviewer found unsatisfactory, so that I can make my own judgement as to whether that issue is important to me.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#7
For me, the whole "rate product/experience by X amount of stars" system has always been broken. Especially when it seems to be taken much more seriously than it was originally meant. Ok, I'm not a UX expert or a data analyst, but as far as I know, the statistics that are drawn from these star reviews were originally only meant to be some sort of rough pointer to approximately evaluate how good a product is. And the result should in its turn, determine if a product needs to be further reviewed. But on the other hand I get why almost everyone who offers a product or a service utilises this system, it's easy. Is this product good or bad? 1 or 5 stars? Yes or no? The web isn't really compatible for maybes, yes buts, and no howevers.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#8
post #3

I tend to ignore good reviews and rely on bad ones mostly to make my decisions. Will also never leave a good review when I'm satisfied, they are indistinguishable from fake ones anyway, I tend to rather just leave bad reviews when I'm not satisfied.

The problem is that bad reviews can be just as fake as good ones, as they could be written by the product's competitors.

Also, if a product is popular enough, odds are that even with a great product there'll be a small fraction of people who'll just happen to get a dud, while most of the rest will be satisfied.

Because of this, I tend to read both good and bad reviews, and give more weight to the longer reviews that go in to great detail about the product and why they rated it the way they did, with comparisons to other products being especially helpful. Also helpful are reviews by professionals who really know the field thoroughly. Unfortunately, such reviews are rare.

I also look at the ratio of good reviews to bad reviews, and look for products with many reviews, though on Amazon this strategy is not quite as effective these days as it once was. One of the big problems with Amazon's model is that it seems that most people buy the products shown on the first page or two of search results. Products on later pages might be just as good or even better, but they may never get bought or reviewed because they weren't on the first couple of pages.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#9
There are hundreds of groups on Facebook in which the seller will ask you to buy the product give them 5 star review and they will return your money (some time with the tip) on Paypal. And you can keep the product.
Post reply on HN