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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

#241

Post by acheron »

ytpete wrote: post #114
astura wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumer Reports was (and still is!) so trusted because it is the one publication that lacks the usual conflicts of interest that every other publication has.

The Wirecutter (now part of NY Times) is another that doesn't accept freebie products, if I recall. They do use affiliate links, so they have incentive to want you to buy _something_, but no incentive to give any particular brand or model a biased review.

I still can't believe people actually click on affiliate/tracking links. I get things based on Wirecutter reviews occasionally, but I always go to the product separately so it's not tracked.

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

#242

Post by acheron »

skunkworker wrote: post #147

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 guess if you're interested in the opinions of college students and 23 year olds.

The real trick is finding an obscure forum on your topic. That keeps off the kids and the astroturf.

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

#243

Post by specialist »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #204
skunkworker wrote: post #147

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 indic…

> good product initially

Yes and: With Amazon's comingling, you could unknowlingly receive a knockoff vs original.

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

#244

Post by chaircher »

pixl97 wrote: post #221
raziel2p wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The other risk here is that you'll have '100 million' dollar company that makes a good product, and it gets bought up by one of those multi billion dollar groups designed to suck every bit of profit out of companies like it. The product and support will quickly turn to trash, but peoples momentum will allow the new parent to profit handsomely off the transaction. Simply put, every single product a company puts out ne…

a great example is doc martens, and then infuriatinly once we'd all jumped ship to solovair they went the same way

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

#245

Post by chaircher »

greenail wrote: post #238

The 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.

They are presumably a lot better a getting reviews they don't like taken down

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

#246

Post by greenail »

chaircher wrote: post #245
greenail wrote: post #238

The 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.

They are presumably a lot better a getting reviews they don't like taken down

You'd think so but they seem to be extorted the worst. Are the lawyer review sites run by lawyers?

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

#247

Post by sq_ »

skunkworker wrote: post #147

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.

Similarly, my policy has basically become "find the relevant little subreddit or niche forum for $category" and then read/ask on that. Has worked out pretty well so far.

Especially if it's a product category that gets daily use from the people who purchase whatever it is, it seems like there's usually some passionate people around who know what they're talking about. Only issue is that you can get deep into the weeds on personal preference stuff.

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

#248

Post by skeeter2020 »

jeanvaljean2463 wrote: post #224

As a rule, I always check the four, three, and two star reviews since they have the least propensity for a scammer to create and waste time. 1 and 5 star reviews usually are an inane mix of "They're TERRIBLE" or "FANTASTIC" with no additional information, whereas the 2,3, and 4 star reviews will normally go into specifics that warranted the stars being removed. Not only that, but they are normally much fewer in numbe…

the problem with 1 or 5 star reviews is that most "real" reviews are as useless as the fakes. They tend to be emotional responses based on shallow, immediate experiences. Thanks social media.

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

#249

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

kabes wrote: post #225
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really isn't true. Remember that FB has many, many users and (presumably) many, many scammers, so one would expect to see lots of scams. I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user). So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.

My experience is different. I have many times reported a profile like this. Exactly as described above, a child can see it's a scam account. And then a couple of days later got message that after review the profile doesn't violate the community standards.

really? That's very odd (not that their reporting system sucks, it definitely does), but that you need to report it.

Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).

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

#250

Post by cortesoft »

willis936 wrote: post #70
cortesoft wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was hard to compete with free online reviews.

Replace "free" with "valueless" and the prospect of competition looks brighter.

Does it? It doesn't matter if we know the reviews aren't as good, people still don't seem willing to pay for good reviews. Many companies have tried, but I haven't heard of any success stories yet.
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