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

Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–429 of 429 posts

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

#421

Post by Chris2048 »

xxs wrote: post #379
Chris2048 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"find out if it's broken" isn't the same thing as cable properties/quality. If the cable fails to carry a signal, or fails to do so without interference, it should be pretty easy to determine this. Failure to do this would make it "faulty".

Lets say the cable catches fire due to high resistance/poor isolation (used at 40-50C or close to oven exhaust, causing thermal runaway) - is it broken? In that regard you can use a lamp cable to connect an oven - it will totally work for 5seconds, it might burn down later, though.

SO a QA process that tests for more than 5 seconds will find that.

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

#423

Post by dazbradbury »

dazbradbury wrote: post #343

For UK users: I'm surprised the BBC are hijacking the back button here when redirecting from .com -> .co.uk. I thought that behaviour was reserved for more, well, scummy websites. This appears to be the offending client-side code: let {isUkCombined: t} = e; const n = new URL(Object(c.a)()) , {protocol: a, host: r, pathname: o} = n; if (Object(m.b)(), t && r.includes(".com")) { const e = r.replace(".com", ".co.uk"); w…

Looks like this comment worked. Thanks for fixing!

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

#424

Post by grogenaut »

behringer wrote: post #393
grogenaut wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forward this to amazon customer service.

Do you honestly believe everybody but Amazon knows this is going on?

I did not say that.

The people who work on this at Amazon read HN, but this article won't be their first exposure.

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

#425

Post by throwaway_1301 »

anonymousDan wrote: post #76
throwaway_1301 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this is a total strawman argument. Who cares if you have a few false positives? What is the downside of marking a review as fake when it's not? Next to nothing. You don't even have to tell the person who submitted the review it was treated as fake.

How would you feel if half the positive reviews on your small business were wiped out overnight - incorrectly?

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

#426

Post by throwaway_1301 »

rhizome wrote: post #25
throwaway_1301 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The mistake was in creating something planet-scale before having anti-abuse systems in place. In this regard, Amazon is very much not alone.

We will never have anything if we decide only perfect things are allowed to exist.

Its not the best example but even our country/state/local level justice system has cases where it fails. In addition to judges actually making incorrect verdicts, there are many ills that cause this - eg. Police not following procedures, poor people not having the money to right wrongs by appealing decisions, being bullied or scared into pleas etc.

That does not mean we should not have a justice system at all. Just like us, the systems we build are not perfect. That does not mean they should not exist. There is immense value in the valley between non existent and perfect.

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

#428

Post by thw0rted »

jodrellblank wrote: post #353
nkrisc wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make good points, but on Amazon I just have to assume that all the reviews are fake. I've seen how easy it is to buy fake reviews, the lengths sellers go to get people to leave only 5-star reviews, and Amazon's inability or unwillingness to do anything about it. Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real? I think any random review you pull up is more likely than not to be fake. Of course, we can't kno…

> “ Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real? ” Because they contain facts which anchor them to reality and act as “proof of work” in some way. I don’t care for a review which says “this camera takes amazing pictures” that could apply to any camera and is subjective, but one which says “the cover on the sd card slot is sharp and cut my finger twice” is likely someone who has used that specific camera, a…

I think you've got the right idea. It's about incentives.

With fake positive reviews, the seller has an incentive to leave them up, and Amazon has no particular incentive to remove them -- you, a random user, has to somehow convince Amazon to take them down.

With fake negative reviews, the seller has an incentive to get them taken down, and has the data to prove that the reviewer didn't actually buy the item. (Actually buying all your competitor's items to leave fake negative reviews about them would dramatically increase the cost of the tactic.)

End result: ignore positive reviews because they're easily faked, check negative reviews because they're probably accurate.

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

#429

Post by young_unixer »

kioleanu wrote: post #182

Amazon has a problem with fake reviews and it seems they are ok with it. I bought a replacement screen from Amazon and it wasn’t working properly. I thought I did something wrong so I contacted the seller/manufacturer and they told: oh yeah, it‘s defective, we‘ll just give you your money back. I agreed and then the person said „cool, now in order to process your request, please click these buttons on Amazon” and they…

- If something benefits Amazon, it's legitimate.

- If somethings doesn't benefit Amazon, it's abuse.

Their double standards are disgusting.

Post reply on HN