Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately 1* are often bragging of some maniacs who bought a fork and they complain it is not working great as a spoon, or just black PR from the competitors. Whole reviews system is not working.
The key is the ratio of crazy to sane 1 star reviews. Mostly crazies? Then the service is probably good. But if there are many sane 1 star reviews? Might be a bad place.
Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
241–250 of 289 posts
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought a light fixture that had a design flaw that turned it into a fire hazard. I contacted Amazon and provided proof, hoping they’d take the product down and prevent harm to others. They did initially but within a few days the same exact item with matching SKU and photos was listed. I have an entire category of items I will never buy from Amazon. They don’t look out for customers ahead of time, only on the backen…
My wife has bought a handful of flat-pack cabinets and shelves over the last year, and it has been an experience in frustration, and furniture half assembled for weeks while we wait on a weirdly sized bolt to arrive from china because it was missing, or in one case, an entire door, or in another case a handle had been tapped to the wrong size (too big) for the bolts. The crazy thing is these $100-250 products ship wi…
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Silk is particularly bad. Order anything "silk" from amazon and you are almost certainly getting satin. Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down. Amazon should be busted for false advertising. Millions of products filled with lies and amazon does absolutely nothing to curate (other than removing comments warning others that a product is fake).
> Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down. Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other peop…
I have no way to get the review back up or to contest the action.
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#244مشک آن است که خود ببوید نه آنکه عطار بگوید “Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).” This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read. As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those revi…
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#245Earlier 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…
you're supposed to report this to amazon customer service not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#246Earlier 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
Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.
Much cheaper to just buy out the governments (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/summary?id=D0000...) that could make legal trouble for you.
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't agree more. After the founder of the company itself Brendan Eich was fired it only went downhill
Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage, then went on to create Brave, which is yet another Chromium wrapper just with bad crypto monetization and other scummy practices.
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#248I sell books on Amazon.com through their KDP Direct platform, and I have one book with two different covers; each is its own "book" in their catalog. FakeSpot repeatedly marked reviews I knew were valid as fake; I knew this based on the fact that the same reviewer reviewed the "other" book and that review was NOT flagged as fake. And this happened multiple times, and sometimes the wording of the two reviews were diff…
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer eBay at least it’s cheaper and the sellers care about reputation
With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.
Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Amazon is complicit in fraud.
It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate. They also have a massive problem with fake bad reviews where a competitor spams competing products to try to increase sales of their own. They have so many flavors of fraud that it’s very hard to get it right consistently at scale. Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Redd…
They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.
I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.
Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI company or the word "without": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes