111–120 of 429 posts
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Lots of them are offering a gift card for a review to purchasers - which seems slightly less scammy as you’re unlikely to leave a good review of a crappy product for a $5 gift card.
All the gift card offers I have gotten have required a 5* review.
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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…
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…
The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.
>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.
I'm surprised you can still write reviews for products and services on Amazon you haven't bought from Amazon. How much of this racket on places like Amazon and Yelp would be killed if you had a unique generated ID assigned to you once you purchased a good or service and it was verified as delivered?
Scamming verified reviews is already a thing, it's called "Brushing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce)
I trust Walmart's return policy more than Amazon's reviews. I think Walmart gives you 90 days for a return.
Reviews are broken. There needs to be a web of trust for reviews. I would weight a review from somebody I know or trust 1000x more than every Amazon or online review ever left. It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.
My solution: only read negative reviews. They're much more telling. As a bonus, they'll often kill impulse purchases, saving me money.
I'm just spitballing, but what do you guys think about this as a fake-resistant review system? To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per…
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"…
We definitely spend less at Amazon because of lack of trust and counterfeit concerns, and it seems directionally true for the HN crowd. That's got to be a worry for anyone at Amazon - if the people who were early adopters are starting to leave your platform, that's got to be concerning...
I'm just spitballing, but what do you guys think about this as a fake-resistant review system? To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per…
Sellers already pay people to write reviews– and compensate for the product. How is this system any different? > If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. They already have 100 people buy their product and fully pay for it for a review.
Sellers are currently paying people (in money and product) for 5 star reviews, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
Reviews are broken. There needs to be a web of trust for reviews. I would weight a review from somebody I know or trust 1000x more than every Amazon or online review ever left. It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.
My solution: only read negative reviews. They're much more telling. As a bonus, they'll often kill impulse purchases, saving me money.
The real action is 3 star reviews. Those people have really given a lot of thought to the review.
Also the reviews with pictures tend to be useful.
Based on how many people are talking about this stuff, I can't imagine how I have survived since 1997 without buying anything counterfeit off Amazon. What are people buying? How are you searching? Do you have any criteria when you buy something?
Did you authenticate everything you ever bought from Amazon?
I noticed my SanDisk SD Card was fake when I studied the printed logo closely with a real one I had bought before.