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

I write fake online reviews

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 91 posts

Re: I write fake online reviews

#41

Post by cosarara »

pmoriarty wrote: post #8
janpot wrote: 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…

I love reading bad reviews on Steam, because they usually explain pretty well what the reviewer thinks is wrong with the game. I can then decide if that matters or not to me. They stopped adding new content to the game? Maybe not too bad. It has a buggy always-online DRM? Deal-braker. Etc.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#42

Post by carnagii »

janpot wrote: 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.

> Will also never leave a good review when I'm satisfied ... tend to rather just leave bad reviews when I'm not satisfied

This is basic consumer behavior. Receiving a good experience (either service or product) is not notable because you paid for it and expect it, whereas a bad experience is offensive and makes you feel cheated so you retaliate by taking your time to leave a bad review.

What this means at scale is that most positive reviews are fake except for the truly extraordinary products/services that are far above all their peers in terms of quality or novelty.

In order to get decent reviews you have to be able to verify that the consumer actually paid for the product/experience and then you have to apply some sort of sampling methodology and statistical analysis to arrive at a meaningful relative score to other products/services in the same industry.

No review site has any interest in doing this because they are just using reviews to generate free content for SEO, to put ads on, and to extort businesses into paying them to "manage" negative reviews in various ways.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#43

Post by V-2 »

janpot wrote: 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.

When I see a good review, I check other reviews of this person. If there are none or very few, it's a major red flag. If there are also positive, they're not necessarily fake, but maybe this person has very low expectations overall. I imagine someone like the Alec Baldwin character in an episode of "Friends". Of course relying on this isn't fool-proof, the reviewer could be mixing their genuine, "private" reviews with the ones they get paid for, but it's something.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#44

Post by bradleyjg »

danieltillett wrote: post #39
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers will pay for reviews they believe are truthful, like Consumer Reports. But it's far more lucrative for sellers to pay for fake reviews, e.g. celebrity endporsements, magazine articles, youtube videos etc. So much content out there is just lying about products for sale that I think a for-profit model for honest reviews will inevitably decide to open itself up to fake reviews or paid content. The pressure to…

Are you sure consumers will actually pay? Assuming Consumer Reports is truthful, what percentage of consumers actually pay for it? My solution actually can't be opened to fake reviews, but it is expensive and I haven't been able to find a work around for that. Unfortunately quality costs.

Looks like about 1%[1]. If that's not a big enough business opportunity for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports (see circulation in sidebar)

Re: I write fake online reviews

#45

Post by c0vfefe »

externalreality wrote: post #27
janpot wrote: 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.

Let's face it, reviews are useless. Even when they come from professional product critics. Those critics can be compromised (bribed) by big business just the same. A good example of this were reviews for 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'; most reviews either against and in favor of that movie, by critic or causal viewer, were either fake or compromised.

Reviews for a physical product that is described as fulfilling certain functions are much more objective & useful than media reviews.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#46

Post by NKCSS »

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

One of the best dutch webshops, coolblue.nl, actually has people responsible for each market section, they test the products themselves and have recommendations for the items in each category they think are the best. It's supplemented with user reviews, but still, it's nice to get a semi-objective indication for which products to look at. The pride themselves in customer service, only sell a select range of products for each category and you can tell real time and effort went into it, this, in turn makes this shop pretty trusted by people. That's both good and bad, because now companies could approach them to get into their favours, but still, from what I've been able to tell, they actually offer some good recommendations.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#47

Post by pizza234 »

janpot wrote: 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.

> Will also never leave a good review when I'm satisfied, they are indistinguishable from fake ones anyway

A review can have a certain quality and/or amount of details, that makes it obvious that the reviewer actually owned and used the item. If I think it's worth sharing the quality (or lack of) of an item, I put effort into producing a review that it's clearly real. Reviewers also have a history.

So I think it's not correct to state that the good reviews are always undistinguishable from the fake ones. Of course, with enough effort, a fake review can be made real.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#48

Post by bubblethink »

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

>Why provide free services to billionaires?

Also why I never saw the point of sites like quora. Why are all these "subject matter experts" spending countless hours writing free content for a platform that is ultimately locked in and going to either a) Be infested with ads or b) Going to charge money (like the publishers' racket in scientific publishing).

Re: I write fake online reviews

#49

Post by basetop »

externalreality wrote: post #19

The title should be "Why bbc reads Hacker News comments to get ideas for its next article." I could swear I just read a discussion on HN (just hours ago) in response to an article about Amazon getting flooded with fake reviews. Some suggested how they write fake reviews for money and how one could monetize fake reviews. Then here comes this BBC article. Coincidence. I think not.

I noticed that too. Particularly articles based on reddit and HN posts/comments. Maybe it's because those two are the primary social media platforms I use or maybe those are popular with media workers. The one that comes to mind recently was the last blockbluster article from The NYTimes ( I think ). It featured prominently on reddit and then a few months later, there was an article about it. Also, I noticed a lot of content from reddit in movie and tv show dialogues. I'd be watching something and a dialogue would remind me of a reddit post or comment and then I'd think, I bet the writers of the show uses reddit.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#50

Post by nathan_long »

Planet Money did an episode (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/27/623990036/epis...) about fake reviews and talked with the creator of ReviewMeta (https://reviewmeta.com/), which attempts to distinguish real reviews from fake ones based on things like similarity and clustered posting.

Of course, if it has or gets traction, fake reviewers will adapt, just like spammers do.

Post reply on HN