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

FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

ftc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 199 posts

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#161

Post by JustSomeNobody »

potatofarmer45 wrote: post #6

There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Especially for cheap electronics (read: headphones), products that have only been listed for a month somehow have hundreds of 5 star glowing reviews. When I do research nowadays I have to deliberately select the 1 star reviews to see if there is a real issue that's glossed over by the paid rev…

Even the 1 star reviews are fake sometimes. I feel like some of the competition in the space buy fake 1 star reviews on competitor products.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#162

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Razengan wrote: post #160
Ecolog wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is so useful in that regard. So many niches with honest and detailed reviews that I usually don't buy something online without checking a relevant subreddit first.

That statement itself seems like astroturfing. How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters? When you have a popular post that reaches the Reddit front page, you may receive messages from people asking if you'd like to promote their products.

You can't be sure of anything. All you can do is use multiple sources and aggregate the data.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#163

Post by subpixel »

potatofarmer45 wrote: post #6

There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Especially for cheap electronics (read: headphones), products that have only been listed for a month somehow have hundreds of 5 star glowing reviews. When I do research nowadays I have to deliberately select the 1 star reviews to see if there is a real issue that's glossed over by the paid rev…

Fake reviews move product, otherwise Amazon would only let you review products you had ordered via Amazon.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#164

Post by stordoff »

Judgmentality wrote: post #63
spookthesunset wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the people who get cut off are serious outliers though. Like so far out there it is obvious that they should be cut off.

The article mentioned one example of someone returning around 1/10 items. Considering how bad their counterfeit problem is now, I'd say that's pretty low when an uninformed customer could probably expect more than that many items to be disingenuous.

If it's around 1/10, it must be over a long period of time. There have certainly been periods where I've returned _way_ more than that, including things like 'These headphones I bought a year ago have broke, this hard drive I bought 6 months ago has stopped working, AND I'd like to return this expensive item I've just bought, and the only other things I've bought recently are £5-10 books'.

I suspect it's more likely to be done on total purchase _price_ - I spend a fair amount of money on things that are very difficult to counterfeit (video games), so they are obviously never returned, which probably tips the balance back in my favour (the fact that I'm in the EU, and have a statutory right to return (for any reason) may also be a factor).

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#165

Post by dspillett »

asatterfield54 wrote: post #123
function_seven wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution to this has been to find a subreddit that's devoted to the product in question. If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching. Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community. To go along with your umbrella example: Unfortunately /r/umbr…

This worked great for a while, but in the last few years reddit has become corporately dominated, regardless of moderation attempts (admins have removed moderators of certain subreddits to accomplish this, would guess based on the spend).

> but in the last few years reddit has become corporately dominated

This is always the way: once something has a large enough audience it will become a target for exploitation. This is why ad networks are juicy targets for hacks (wide spread of potential victims) and popular sites, or specific areas on those sites, like reddit can quickly become overrun by shills.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#166

Post by michaelt »

joegahona wrote: post #129
ams6110 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done. Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today. s/internet/web/

Does Consumer Reports provide any value over Wirecutter? The latter is free and has negligible display advertising.

There are claims [1] that Wirecutter prefers things they can get kickbacks/affiliate links for [1].

Of course, wirecutter claims that's not the case.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729408

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#167

Post by michaelt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #157
onethree wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped trusting the wire cutter after they shifted from recommending a $40 knife to a $145 as their best chefs knife for most people

As a layman in the space of knives, why did that cause you to stop trusting them? In other areas, I found that up until a point, the price is generally correlated with quality. I had great success in avoiding frustration and waste by following the saw "I'm too poor to buy cheap".

Sure, up until a point. If you read a review of the best SUVs and it said the $200k Bentley Bentayga was better than the $27k Toyota RAV4 you would probably say "Well, I'm sure it has its benefits, but I doubt it's better value for money"

As someone who uses a $20 knife, I feel the same way about a $145 knife.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#168

Post by vonmoltke »

duado wrote: post #88
vonmoltke wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. Why? How do we "know" they have the data? How do we "know" that can act on whatever data they have? People here seem to ascribe a level of omniscience to tech giants that I'm not certain they deserve.

You think everyone on the Internet except people at Amazon knows about this?

I don't think "everyone on the Internet" has any idea as to the true scope of the problem, nor do I that no they have a scalable solution.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#169

Post by Unklejoe »

Razengan wrote: post #160
Ecolog wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is so useful in that regard. So many niches with honest and detailed reviews that I usually don't buy something online without checking a relevant subreddit first.

That statement itself seems like astroturfing. How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters? When you have a popular post that reaches the Reddit front page, you may receive messages from people asking if you'd like to promote their products.

> How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters?

My guess is that they eventually will (and I'm sure some already do). However, one thing that kind of helps weed out the fake reviews is the fact that you can inspect a user's post history.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#170

Post by vonmoltke »

pessimizer wrote: post #114
vonmoltke wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. Why? How do we "know" they have the data? How do we "know" that can act on whatever data they have? People here seem to ascribe a level of omniscience to tech giants that I'm not certain they deserve.

> People here seem to ascribe a level of omniscience to tech giants that I'm not certain they deserve. I'd describe it as a level of basic knowledge about their own product. You don't have to be a god to analyze Amazon's data, especially if you're Amazon.

Assuming you know what data to collect and store. That isn't a trivial task. Observability on a large and complex system like this is hard. I don't think it is reasonable to assume it's easy for Amazon, and thus their inaction is based on exploiting this bad behavior.
Post reply on HN