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

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

#181

Post by ReviewMeta »

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…

We've been noticing a big surge in the number of really inauthentic looking reviews - I'm talking 1,000 written over just a few days, 100% unverified, and some obvious manipulation going on with the product versions. Here are a few examples. I just don't understand how Amazon isn't catching this low-hanging fruit.

Here are just a few examples:

https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MF81QMS https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/Headphones-Microphone-Earphones-Compa...

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

#182

Post by crankylinuxuser »

michaelt wrote: post #167
TeMPOraL wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the most dangerous things in a kitchen is a dull knife. (And mandolins without guards!)

Dull knives require multiple times of stress, and sawing motion to abrade through the thing. And with more power means accidents are easier and more damaging.

A proper chefs knife (I prefer santokus) should be professionally sharpened, honed before each use, and will be razor sharp. I only need to lay the knife on a steak and pull, and it cuts right through. The cheap $20 knives are usually serrated (nigh unsharpenable) and double as hacksaws.

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

#183

Post by salawat »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #118
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…

I have to assume that there's a team of about a dozen engineers at Amazon whose entire job is solving this problem, and every so often their boss has to write a report up to SVPs about how their attempts to solve the problem are going. I imagine it involves a lot of really cool machine learning algorithms and also some simple but obvious hacks, like just blacklisting certain wide IP ranges of known bad reviewers. I i…

You're looking at it wrong.

As much as I hate that hack Edison, he's right: you're reporting you've discovered X new ways to not solve the problem.

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

#184

Post by Paul-ish »

Unklejoe wrote: post #169
Razengan wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can see a reviewers review history on Amazon.

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

#185

Post by HelloMcFly »

r00fus wrote: post #138
elektor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend that you copy and paste the Amazon link to https://reviewmeta.com/ and https://www.fakespot.com/ to see how many of the reviews are actually legit.

Any browser extensions that use reviewmeta or fakespot so that I don’t have to cut and paste the URL? Ideally I’d like to simply filter out all fake reviews and recalculate the stars rating.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-revi...

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f...

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

#186

Post by ashelmire »

derefr wrote: post #107
fogetti wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you go to Amazon's seller forum you can see how those little snowflakes who call themselves merchants complain about the fact that they couldn't remove all the negative reviews. I guess in the end they all find their ways to get rid of negative reviews.

I mean, sometimes, it's justified. Should a negative review about a wireless-charging bug in a phone stick around once the manufacturer pushes out an update to the firmware that makes the bug go away? This is why app stores only show reviews/scores for the current version of the app. There's no such thing as "versions" of a product, though. (Or, well, there are product revisions with distinct UPC codes, but an OTA fi…

Shouldn't the app maker have to prove that the new version doesn't have the same problem?

It's not justified, it's just a way to swindle consumers.

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

#187

Post by TheShrug »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #182
michaelt wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the most dangerous things in a kitchen is a dull knife. (And mandolins without guards!) Dull knives require multiple times of stress, and sawing motion to abrade through the thing. And with more power means accidents are easier and more damaging. A proper chefs knife (I prefer santokus) should be professionally sharpened, honed before each use, and will be razor sharp. I only need to lay the knife on a steak a…

I agree with the GP in that the average at home chef doesn't need anything more expensive than a $45 Victorinox 8" chef knife. With moderate to proper care, you can keep a cheaper knife very sharp.

While you may be statistically correct, anecdotally my family has hurt themselves way more often with sharp knives than we have with dull knives. It's probably due to being used to a dull knife before switching to a sharp one, but I still can't stand by that adage from our history of personal use at home!

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

#188

Post by orthecreedence »

kian wrote: post #146
orthecreedence wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to be somewhere between "not enough resources to fix" and "wow, we are making a ton of money off this 'problem!'" There are so many patterns of low-hanging fruit: "I haven't used it yet but it looks great" "Seems ok" "It's useful" "The shipping was slow" On any given product with any measure of popularity, probably 10-20% of reviews consist of those formats. One-word sentences with some kind of bland/useless a…

If it's that easy to fix, and helpful, a chrome or firefox extension seems warranted. Do you have two days to spare? Let me know when you're finished, I'll definitely use it. ;-)

It would be much harder to fix on the browser side, because you'd have to page through all the reviews (sometimes tens of thousands) and remove fakes, then re-adjust the star amounts.

That said, it could be done...would probably take more than two days without direct access to the data though!

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

#189

Post by function_seven »

Paul-ish wrote: post #184
Unklejoe wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can see a reviewers review history on Amazon.

Yeah, but that's just reviews.

On reddit or other more general sites, you can see their entire comment history. Hopefully you'll notice that a tiny tiny portion of their comments are related to products or reviews.

In other words, you can get a feel for if the person is genuine or not.

Of course, that doesn't 100% rule out paid shilling by (otherwise) honest people, but you do get a much better sense of the veracity of reviews on a site like reddit than you could ever get from Amazon.

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

#190

Post by ekovarski »

salawat wrote: post #183
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to assume that there's a team of about a dozen engineers at Amazon whose entire job is solving this problem, and every so often their boss has to write a report up to SVPs about how their attempts to solve the problem are going. I imagine it involves a lot of really cool machine learning algorithms and also some simple but obvious hacks, like just blacklisting certain wide IP ranges of known bad reviewers. I i…

You're looking at it wrong. As much as I hate that hack Edison, he's right: you're reporting you've discovered X new ways to not solve the problem.

Nicely sums up a lot of corporate project meetings.
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