Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#1

Post by Ovid » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book
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Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#2

Post by chdir » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

Upvoted for visibility. A bit related : another recent article on fake Amazon reviews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614 .

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#3

Post by impostervt » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:29 PM UTC

Web cache version, since the site is down for me: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.p...

While not really related, I seem to run across a lot of books on Amazon that have a high number of 5 star reviews that, upon reading, are just bad. Seems to happen a lot with books by independent sci-fi authors with Kindle-only books...

Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#4

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

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Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#5

Post by matheweis » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

The problem isn't unique to Amazon. The same thing happens on the App stores. It really does seem like it's high time something were done about it.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#6

Post by FreakyT » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books.

What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#7

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

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Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#8

Post by joelrunyon » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

I don't think this is unique to Amazon.

I've gotten this on the iTunes app store quite a bit. Low ratings from people who don't review any other products (or if they do, it looks super spammy).

On top of that, the bad reviews tend to come in bunches (multiple in a day), are void of any actual useful feedback or complaints and are just vague & angry (sucks, ripoff, etc).

I've had decent luck with having Apple remove any that are WAY off topic, but it still sucks.

Google Play allows you to reply to reviews (which helps quite a bit as far as either helping the customer or correcting a misconception). I'm not sure what Amazon can change on that front.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#9

Post by mrbig4545 » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#10

Post by dangerlibrary » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:37 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

They could buy Reddit and crib their spam detection algorithms. :)