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FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews

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201–210 of 281 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sort of has happened for Apple users. For all sites whenever you signup for a website a random password is generated. And then when you re-visit the site you use FaceID/TouchID to automatically pre-populate the password. At that point it really isn't a password in the traditional sense. And for an increasing number of sites it bypasses this step entirely and just lets me use FaceID/TouchID.

Why single out apple? This is the experience for anyone who uses a modern password manager

Most people don’t and won’t change if change requires effort. In contrast by making a password manager functionality the default on Mac/iOS, Apple carries the average user into better security.

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

#202

Thanks. About 8 years too late to save my business... Scanner911. Killed by fake reviews on Apple's App Store. RIP In reality vast swaths of the world economy are entirely fake, supported with fake reviews, or fake analyst stock calls. It can be argued that much of the value in the technology space is entirely fake. Look at the current insane multiples. My point is that all this lying is supercharged due to Fed print…

money is fake but "printing all that money" cushioned many of the economic side effects of the pandemic

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call Amex, tell them my story, get money back immediately 'pending investigation', and never hear another thing. Don't abuse it, they have top notch investigation. When you spend on a credit card, it's not your money they're stealing. I've used it probably 5 times in 10 years, and never had a problem.

Agreed. AMEX really goes to bat for you. The few times I have had an issue they go after the issue with tenacity. No hassle to me beyond a 2 min phone call.

I had the opposite experience: the one time I've tried to use this with Amex they were completely useless. We had a fraudulent $200 charge on our business card, and Amex ruled in the merchant's favor after being presented with an unsigned PDF "receipt" that was nothing but the text "Digital Software... $200"

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

#204

Honestly fake reviews are to the point where naturally I’ll just google “$product_name Reddit” and get some more honest reviews than anything I find on Amazon. Yes there will be astroturfing, but you can also get into some more niche communities with more real feedback and discussion.

I recently did this looking for an under-sink water filter. It’s usually useful, but in this case the recommended products were from a Reddit post from 2.5 years ago. More recent Amazon reviews indicated this was a good product initially, then the quality declined over time.

That’s another tricky thing to fix: products have the same page and information, but the product does change over time. And that’s hard to indicate in a review because the changes are so subtle.

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

#205
I keep thinking this ends with credibility ratings weighing reviewers. Similar to how Google uses the odds that you're a real human to drive their captchas, we'd see a credit rating applied to your email account and this is used across platforms to determine if you're an established normal human or a spambot or a troll and weigh your opinion accordingly.

It's dystopian but I don't see another route out of this growing crisis of credibility online.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Email a login link or temp pw. Passwords gone.

Ok...so on to more inconvenient methods? Medium tried it. A real drag.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

There's a risk to this as well, though - marketing becoming more important than quality, and difficulty for new products to make it into the market means stifling of innovation, which can lead to semi-monopolies. In the case of Eizo and Wacom it's probably fine, but Apple are a bit more dubious.

> In the case of Eizo and Wacom it's probably fine

I can quickly name up their primary competitors in this space, and for some reason (note: definitely anecdotal) I do see that for them, for the last ~5 years they are now being fiercely competed from both budget and professional angles.

> but Apple are a bit more dubious.

Me too. While Apple is definitely stumbling right now, unlike the previous two there is no serious competition for Apple. While Windows might be fine on a desktop that was built for-spec by specialty builders (and Linux render farms!), laptops are definitely still subpar even for the best attempts (like Acer's D series and Microsoft's Surface laptops). For iPad, I can say that Microsoft and Samsung are only the somewhat competent here, especially that stock Android is still atrocious when it comes to tablet factors, and ChromeOS still generally uses Android apps.

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

#210
post #117
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now also fine game companies releasing broken products. Do you have any example where this happened?

Pick any big budget game released by a AAA studio or publisher

This seems exaggerated.
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