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

Post by _thisdot » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 10:26 AM UTC

dns_snek wrote: post #148

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…)

> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews. Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result. Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform." Under reviews there's going to be a message saying…

Post by ajsnigrutin » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 10:33 AM UTC

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #69

colonial wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Post by okanat » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 10:45 AM UTC

bjord wrote: post #156

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.

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 11:12 AM UTC

dns_snek wrote: post #130

chrischen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have extremely generous return policies then reviews matter less. They are still relevant if your'e trying to optimize for buy once for life, but in that case you should just be going for established brands instead, where their reputation is their review.

They don't build them like they used to, in my experience most consumer electronics/appliance brands that are still considered high quality are just coasting on the reputation they built up in the 70s, 80s and 90s. In many categories it's getting almost impossible to find products that aren't just generic whitelabeled junk resold by "established brands".

Post by _thisdot » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 11:17 AM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #147

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

Some company said they know where I live and they will pay me a visit if I don't remove the bad review (product was dangerous). That was on Amazon.