41–50 of 429 posts
Bought a gaming chair that had 5 star reviews. It smelled toxic. Smell didn't dissipate after a month. Returned it and found out buried under all the 5 star reviews of people citing the same issue.
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I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints. If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectati…
Positive reviews aren't the only ones being spoofed though, with competitors often posting fake negative ones for other products [1]. --- [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039
It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.
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.
No kidding. What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part. * Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more. * Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory). * Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better * Product spot checks let you also pick up the…
Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star. The more it looks like people buying stuff using amazon are happy, the better that marketing is for Amazon. Look at all these people who are so happy to be buying stuff on Amazon, so much better than the alternatives. Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable"…
Disruptive solution proposal: Get rid of the review system entirely. Stars, comments, user pictures; eliminate all of it. For everyone. There. Problem solved.
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 m…
You might only show 80% of all user reviews - but if 10% of your reviews are fake - then you're only hiding 10% of real reviews.
Who cares? Amazon definitely doesn't have a problem of not having enough reviews. It does have a problem of having too many products with almost entirely fake reviews.
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This is a bit like arguing that Medicare for all is impossible in the United States because it is such a big country. This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss . The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews. You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should…
You've fallen into a common statistical trap. If we assume the volume of auto-generated spam is significantly (several orders of magnitude) higher than the volume of legitimate reviews (which seems to be the case, and would make sense), having a 99.999% success rate doesn't mean that users will observe 99.999% legitimate reviews.
Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star. The more it looks like people buying stuff using amazon are happy, the better that marketing is for Amazon. Look at all these people who are so happy to be buying stuff on Amazon, so much better than the alternatives. Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable"…
I wonder if anyone is deliberately paying for bad reviews of their competitors' products?
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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 m…
I think it would be very difficult to detect these: a) with 100% accuracy, and b) without involving humans at all but I noticed the trend of fake Amazon reviews some time ago, and some patterns were very evident. I'd click on the profile of a five-star reviewer, more often than not every review they left was five stars. And every product I'd click through on also had a deluge of suspicious five star reviews. I even s…
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Unless it’s a really big ticket item I’ve given up on product research as the investment is just not worth my time. I just buy whatever Wirecutter tells me to; usually they’re not too wrong.
OMG wire cutter. Affiliate advertising once removed. EDIT: NextDesk scandal aside, when was the last time you saw WireCutter recommend a product that did NOT offer affiliate commissions (let’s just call a spade a spade: these are kickbacks). I don’t use WC anymore so I can’t answer that myself. I stopped using them when I saw some companies completely ignored in 2 different industries with which I’m familiar. Those c…
I guess the paid alternative is consumer reports, but I feel like they’re not noticeably better.