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Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

bbc.com

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Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#5

Post by ncallaway »

coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

It does affect the bottom line, though.

Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page...

Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related.

With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites.

Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#6

Post by Judgmentality »

ncallaway wrote: post #5
coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

It does affect the bottom line, though. Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page... Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related. With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads t…

I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#7

Post by wwww4all »

It’s similar to rampant doping in competitive sports, where everyone knows what’s going on. When there are millions of dollars at stake in contracts, prize money, and sponsorships, people will cheat and take risks. Even if they’re caught, the payoffs are usually greater than consequences.

The incentives and payoffs are far, far greater than any type of consequences to the seller. Worst case, they can shut down and start another shill store.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#10

Post by throwaway_1301 »

coldcode wrote: post #4

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake.

Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem.

You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity.

It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products.

I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false.

I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society.

/rant

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