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Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

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Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#151

Post by rightbyte »

dankwizard wrote: post #46

It was falling behind. The dodgy stores were getting more creative and Fakespot needed to play catch up. You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review. You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE. Then an expensive option I was suprised happened…

Why did they choose you for vacuum pimp? You got high "consumer rating" or something?

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#153

Post by throwaway_20357 »

varispeed wrote: post #150
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.

If something is not remotely up to standard, do a return. I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful for them and probably only stick there is.

It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#154

Post by carterschonwald »

jorvi wrote: post #108
Scoundreller wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews. Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though. (And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)

The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical. One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but…

Amusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western knives, all these problems go away because those duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and there’s even premium cloning brands which have duplicate store fronts

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#155

Post by latexr »

dankwizard wrote: post #46

It was falling behind. The dodgy stores were getting more creative and Fakespot needed to play catch up. You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review. You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE. Then an expensive option I was suprised happened…

> Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.

Thank you for the laugh.

But why keep them all? Why not give some away to friends or neighbours, or even sell them?

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#156

Post by bjord »

bentcorner wrote: post #11

> Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever. I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their…

I don't actually think there was (or needed to be) one...keep in mind they're a non-profit. I think they just wanted to make the internet a safer place, but semi-extraneous (particularly unprofitable) projects sadly need to be cut aggressively with the rising threat of the google antitrust suit, as they may lose most of their income.

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#157

Post by varjag »

consp wrote: post #132
nothercastle wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer eBay at least it’s cheaper and the sellers care about reputation

With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.

Ebay is not the best for dropshipped Chinese crap. It's markedly better for about anything else.

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#158

Post by yard2010 »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #91
dankwizard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like my wife. I don't know. I grew up kind of poor and my mindset still has a "If I can get an item typically worth $100-200 for free, TAKE IT". The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.

this example suggests that you'd be happy to get paid in an alternative currency in exchange for Amazon reviews, and that currency is vacuums?! tbh I think your wife is right and you know it.

It's a waste of internet space writing tautologies. The wife is always right.

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#159

Post by like_any_other »

colonial wrote: post #62
dawnerd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some company paid be 100 bucks to change my review to be positive so they sent the money via PayPal no problem then I changed the review to say they paid me to write a glowing review and of course Amazon ended up removing the review for being harmful to their customers

Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews. Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiabl…

So Amazon is complicit in fraud.

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#160

Post by Syntaf »

Mtinie wrote: post #61
doppio19 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot. I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://…

Please help me understand why a subscription to your service should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend. I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of…

Attribution revenue is what I would consider the gold standard for these types of services.

It makes sense on paper, if the service helps confirm legitimate reviews for you and convinces you to purchase said product, they should receive attribution revenue for helping generate the purchase.

The reality is much much messier though, because often times the people who award attribution revenue have a conflict of interest against any service that could even potentially expose bad practices happening on their marketplace.

I once worked for a popular deal site that developed a price tracking extension, a certain marketplace threatened to completely ban us from attribution revenue and we had to kill the extension over night despite our users loving it.

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