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FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

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Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#161

Post by shrikant »

Scoundreller wrote: post #99
thow-58d4e8b wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me

The social networks don't mind the bots if it leads to engagement. Their "anti-bot" policy is a joke. They know who the bots are. They only ban the ones that are anti-engagement (which they can also determine).

Absolutely this.

Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.

(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)

My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.

Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#162

Post by johanneskanybal »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #137
locallost wrote: post #133

Generally I'd say product reviews are one of those ideas like passwords that work but don't survive introduction to the general public and mass use. The problems of authenticity are obvious, but I've also noticed that people who rely on word of mouth from their friends and colleagues are generally happier. And why wouldn't they be? A colleague tells you this e.g. monitor is perfect for your line of work so you get it…

Stop trying to make no passwords happen. It won't happen

The only reason for (consumer) passwords you have to remember is lack of an accepted good universal id in general. Here in Sweden it's provided by the banks and has a 94% share of smartphone users, if you look east you have other bigger markets with similar stats. Most passwords already have disappeared or are disappearing, the laggard cases will catch up too, I'd love a similar one for my "work persona".

Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#163

Post by thom »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #152
yellow_lead wrote: post #2

I wonder if they have any intention of going after Amazon - probably not.

FWIW I find useful info in many reviews on Amazon. It's still better than everything else I've seen out there. It sucks to have to spend so much time trying to find the nuggets of honest info, but they are there.... unlike most non-Amazon sites I have had the misfortune to use in the past. On Amazon it's easy: if it's got hundreds of reviews, it's probably mostly fake reviews. Even for those products if you spend som…

The only useful reviews on Amazon in my experience are 1-star reviews. But the absence of 1-star reviews doesn't imply a good product, so I've frankly just stopped buying stuff from Amazon that isn't clearly a name brand and not replaceable by a counterfeit. The idea of trying to buy even something as simple as a cable on Amazon based on reviews fills me with dread.

Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#164

Post by locallost »

jasode wrote: post #160
locallost wrote: post #133

Generally I'd say product reviews are one of those ideas like passwords that work but don't survive introduction to the general public and mass use. The problems of authenticity are obvious, but I've also noticed that people who rely on word of mouth from their friends and colleagues are generally happier. And why wouldn't they be? A colleague tells you this e.g. monitor is perfect for your line of work so you get it…

>people who rely on word of mouth from their friends and colleagues are generally happier. The problem is that the vast majority of my non -grocery items are not purchased by my friends & colleagues so word-of-mouth information isn't available. E.g. I buy stuff like hi-end camera gear, woodworking tools, audio equipment. Even more common items like books don't work because my friends don't read the same type of books…

That's true of course, but I guess my point is it's better if you have it. I realized this since I know a lot of illustrators, and when I first started seeing them at work I saw a lot of them have the same setup: Macbooks, EIZO monitors, Wacoms etc. At first I thought it was a cult and group think, but eventually I realized they save a lot of time on figuring out what to get. There are probably better things than what they have, but what they have works good enough and that's fine.

Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#166

Post by cblconfederate »

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #118

Platforms that make a business out of scaled access to advertising services such as Facebook should be held liable by the FTC for all the knock offs and fraud there that they deliberately do nothing about. Every single time a person submits an Intellectual Property infringement notice to one of these companies, those scumbags narrow the request down to the one "piece of content" that was flagged and allow related con…

Platforms all over the internet, including google, are about to experience this. With the economy going fully online everyone has an incentive to game the system, and algorithms cannot deal with millions of users doing this. They 'll have to hire human staff to do the reviewing, which does not scale.

Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#167

Post by ratww »

lazide wrote: post #27
ghaff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviews were more "expert"-based 20 years or so again in magazines that had some editorial oversight and processes for selecting and reviewing products. Of course, there were far fewer reviews available, companies still gamed reviewers/magazines but in different ways, and there was sometimes outright fraud around benchmarks, etc.

A huge portion of those reviews were payola, plain and simple. If a reviewer didn’t provide at least a somewhat positive review (even for complete dreck), they were often blacklisted.

I have friends who used to be in the music instrument journalism industry, and the common approach was to only review what they liked.

They got a guitar or synth that was bad? They would just tell the manufacturer they would rather not say something bad.

Of course, after a while readers started asking questions, so the answer was to review products from companies not advertising in the magazines.

Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#169

Post by DavidPeiffer »

foota wrote: post #56
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebay seller reviews have been fraudulent for 20 years or more (not ALL reviews, of course). And i think you are talking about the times before NewEgg had 3rd party sellers.

Honestly, I think 3rd party sellers are half the problem. Eliminating them won't fix everything though, since there are sites where the 1st party itself is dishonest (e.g., yelp), but if you trust the site and it is all 1st party then you're in a good state for reviews, since there's little incentive for anyone to fake them.

>Honestly, I think 3rd party sellers are half the problem.

Totally agree. Right now there's a spread from anyone can review anything (yelp, Google reviews) to purchase required to review. What if only 1 out of 20 purchases, selected randomly, were allowed to place a review?

Single person review shops become easier to spot - they are suddenly ordering way more than typical. Returns might skyrocket, which is expensive for everyone involved, however there's now another signal available to spot odd patterns of behavior.

Inclusion of a restocking fee, which is obviously not popular with consumers, is another option which would help make it more expensive to fake reviews.

Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

#170

Post by jbverschoor »

shoto_io wrote: post #148
jbverschoor wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email a login link or temp pw. Passwords gone.

I share accounts (legally) with friends and my wife. How are we going to log in separately?

Forward the email ;-)

Or just add an extra email to the account

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