71–80 of 124 posts
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That's awful. Has no one automated the process of checking for bogus reviews and reporting them?
How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.
I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week. Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test: Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word? I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but seve…
Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move. Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy. If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn…
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Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move. Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy. If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn…
The effectiveness of reviews is predicated on the population of 'helpful' reviewers being greater than the population of spam reviewers after some level of filtering. It's unclear if a crowdsourced flag would tip the balance of helpful vs spam in any useful way for categories where there's already a unhelpful level of spam.
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How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.
The good news is that you don't need to read all the books, because many bogus reviews tend to be written by the same "customers". Simply seeing a correlation of bad books getting good reviews, would result in those "customers" losing their ranking power from their reviews. What's bad (really bad) here, is that not only are the books that are being ranked highly absolute crap, but they are crap in different categorie…
When it comes to reviews, the correct answer is that every user should have their tastes profiled and compared against the tastes of other users, with only users whose tastes in other areas counting strongly. I could easily imagine that this sort of thing might be difficult for Amazon to implement, though, depending on their infrastructure.
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Do you leave your own review on those books to counteract the unearned rating?
Usually yes, but always. I wish Amazon let you just give a star rating, instead of requiring you to add a real comment.
It's fairly easy to ignore a bogus review when you look at it, but the star system makes it too easy to take them at face value.
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You can easily detect that. If a person buys a lot of books and make a lot of 5 star or 1 star reviews, then returns them, that's clearly abuse and you ban them.
Or just wait until they have a lot of books and then reject every return. Their purchase history would tell a compelling story for the credit card bank.
Anything with less than a real critical mass of reviews (less than hundreds) is way too easy to entirely game on Amazon. I wrote a book quite a few years ago on a niche tech topic. To be entirely honest, very few people read it. The positive reviews of the book were almost all from people I knew personally. Then the 1-star reviews started coming in. Each 1-star review had no actual content in the review. It was clear…
That's awful. Has no one automated the process of checking for bogus reviews and reporting them?
One thing I do like about their system is that you can click a link to read the reviews they consider "not recommended."
Here's what they say about it publicly: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/11/yelp-recommended-review...
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How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.
Probably apply ML techniques. Similar to how spam is classified - build a classifier that determines the likelihood of a review being bogus, then flag it for human review if it exceeds a certain threshold.
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That's awful. Has no one automated the process of checking for bogus reviews and reporting them?
Yelp has a system. It doesn't seem to be perfect; I've seen what looks like both false-negative and false-positive classification of fake reviews. But it seems to work decently well. One thing I do like about their system is that you can click a link to read the reviews they consider "not recommended." Here's what they say about it publicly: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/11/yelp-recommended-review...
This may not be the best place to bash Yelp, but if you're reading this, please don't pay Yelp for their exorbitantly-priced business service. It is absolute garbage.
I found a recently published technical book on Amazon, which had a couple dozen five star reviews. I read a few of them, and it seemed great. The author's biography said he worked at X, a very well-known software company. I bought a paperback copy, read it, and was disappointed. The book wasn't terrible, but it wasn't written very well, and did not contain the technical depth that it appeared it would on the reviews. The book turned out to be self-published, and the technical editor was the author's boss at X. The other editors were the author's family members.
I went back and looked at the reviews, and found that many of the five-star reviewers worked at X, or if I couldn't figure out their employer, they happened to be located in the same metro area as X's headquarters. One of the Amazon reviewers is even mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.
I think all the reviewers had good intentions to help their friend and colleague, but I think it's still misleading, as you cannot expect a someone to give an impartial public review on their colleague's work.
All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5 star book instead of 5/5.