What about where businesses get to partner with the review site. Then the review site lists positive reviews up front and hides the negative reviews. Non-partners get the reverse treatment. The reviews may all be legit but the presentation is skewed. I'm looking at you Yelp.
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
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a rhetorical question. What more do you think they should be doing?
Very simple - if they have fake reviews, they should be fined. If they can't do anything about it, they can innovate a "Customer Obsession" business model. It looks like Leadership Principles go down the drain when it affects the top line.
How do you propose to identify fake reviews? What is about a fake review that makes it fake? What is about a person writing a fake review that makes a fake reviewer?
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is bit simplistic. Before the internet, if you were going to buy something that was supposed to have objectively measurable properties, there would likely be a magazine/zine/journal that would include reviews by domain experts. Shovel? Laptop? Scalpel? Engine oil? Covered, you just bought the magazine. The problem now is that the magazines are generally not as good at covering all the options, many of th…
Before the internet, brick and mortar stores and distributors had 'buyers' who were intimately familiar with products in their particular sector. They would review products and decide how many to order if any. If you wanted to sell some consumer product you'd have to ship pre-production models to the buyers. They would test them and tear them down to see how well they were built. That imposed reasonable quality stand…
This is also simplistic. I lived before the Internet, and I can't remember the number of times I tried to buy some sort of product from a specialist store that turned out not to carry a product because they instead carried those of a competitor? Was it because the one they carried was better? Sometimes, perhaps. But often it was because of a better business arrangement, and those arrangements were often informally exclusionary to competition.
With online commerce, and particularly Amazon, the testers are now us, the consumers, and the scale of testing is far wider and deeper, which seems like a good thing in some respects. However, apart from the onus now falling on us, which might or might not be a good thing, there's the problem of getting past the "top rated" items in a given domain, and that might be a really big problem.
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a rhetorical question. What more do you think they should be doing?
They should probably build the right tech to detect fake reviews and dismantle fake reviewing rings. But this is not an opportunity of growth for Amazon. It is not a business critical area either and certainly is not perceived as meaningful threat or weakness. More aggressive investments in this area aren’t justified because it truly doesn’t have a clear effect on the bottom line. Reputationally, I doubt they care. A…
I'm not clear on whether the majority of fake reviews come from "fake review rings" that could be identified, or from what we might call "certain business practices" which could be extremely hard to detect. Do you have any sense of which one dominates?
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> really isn't a password in the traditional sense. Can it be sniffed out with XSS? Can it be sniffed out over the wire on the university Mitm'd network? Can it be stored on the server in plain text? The user experience might have changed, but many of the security aspects have not.
I'm pretty sure that poor passwords ("password1!") and password reuse combined dwarf basically all other password-related security issues, thus getting users to use a randomly generated password on every website is a magnitude of order more secure. On top of that, in cases of XSS or a MiTM you've probably already lost and no password alternative will help you.
Webauthn is secure even in the case of XSS and Mitm, in the sense that the attackers still cannot access the credentials without user intervention. It tool a long time to convince me, too.
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#236Generally 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…
Just yesterday I had the itch to watch through Trigun. I was floored when I realized that it was $40 on Amazon Video (streaming), but $22 if I purchase the DVD. Amazon's costs are __LESS__ for the streaming media than for the company/people selling the physical DVD. Ridiculous doesn't even begin to properly describe that behavior. If companies are charging premiums for services that cost them less to run, I'm damned…
There are a whole lot of other factors that go into a price besides the cost of the good.
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we've lost Journalistic rigor, Logic, and Critical Thinking. Take off your rose colored glasses and read your history more critically and you will realize that we never had it to begin with. Oh there were a few good journalists, some who knew logic, and sometimes people used critical thinking. However people are the same as people over all time. If anything we are slightly - just slightly better. We just remember t…
More accurately, that snake oil salesman could only reach the people he parked his wagon in front of. It's not the content, it's the reach.
Newspapers had a lot of reach. Look up yellow journalism...
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#238The retailers are the obvious targets here but if you've ever searched for a lawyer you end up in a strange world of impossible distributions of reviews. This decision is typically much more critical than what fidget spinner you order.
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#239if there is a way to game the system a business will try. The reason content social farms exist. You can hire a content farm to inflate your product reviews and increase sales and voila call yourself a growth hacker. My wife spends hours reading reviews before buying a product on amazon, we just bought a coffee machine and she spent hours. Who knows what review is real and what is fake. I suspect soonish there will be an AI to create fake reviews on any e-commerce platform and that platform has another AI to defend / spot the fake reviews. AI vs AI. - 2 cents
Re: FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure that poor passwords ("password1!") and password reuse combined dwarf basically all other password-related security issues, thus getting users to use a randomly generated password on every website is a magnitude of order more secure. On top of that, in cases of XSS or a MiTM you've probably already lost and no password alternative will help you.
Webauthn is secure even in the case of XSS and Mitm, in the sense that the attackers still cannot access the credentials without user intervention. It tool a long time to convince me, too. https://webauthn.me/introduction
True but mostly meaningless. XSS and MiTM allow attackers to take over and pretend to be the user after a legit user logs in. The attacker cannot store the credentials and use them later, but they have full access in the moment.