31–40 of 101 posts
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One might think that with the rise of AI/ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier Why would one think that?
Especially because AI/ML can used to generate fake reviews as well.
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Or quite the reverse, such as the last set of "Panasonic" batteries I bought off Amazon. After about 3 months all 12 had leaked and were dead. I'm damn sure they were not Panasonic. The reputation damage was to amazon, not Panasonic, and I resolved not to buy batteries from Amazon ever again. No doubt a fake Lacoste would disintegrate in a fraction of the time of a genuine shirt. Know what's ridiculous? I trust Pound…
> No doubt a fake Lacoste would disintegrate in a fraction of the time of a genuine shirt. Such a statement has no grounds to stand on. There are non-genuine items which are of the same or better quality than the genuine ones. You cannot just put them all in one bin.
Amazon do, that's the problem.
As you provide no citations either, your assertion seems to have no more grounds. The chances of counterfeit being better quality are so vanishingly rare as to be headline worthy.
I think it's several things are going on. First, this new breed of companies is highly eutrepreneurial and competant. Maybe it's youth. Maybe it's the fact that they emerged recently as winners from a high competition dynamic... If Google or Amazon declare they will now be running schools, I'd be a lot more interested than if Unilever or Shell did the same. I know we're concerned about their power, size, monopoly power & vested intertest in the anti-privacy camp, but credit is still due... I think.
Second is the power of ....power. The modern economy is top heavy. Most markets are structurally hard to break into. "Normal people" can't just start company doing banking, insuring, medicines, transport, tobacco, energy, gambling. There are upstart-hostile rules, locking out new and/or small players or structural reasons preventing small players.
"Can't" is strong. Uber started a transport company. But, there are structural and regulatory reasons that make most large markets much more closed than search engines and online shopping. There is no chance for a thousand entrants, with winners emerging from a wide field. This leaves the field open almost exclusively to large companies running lower risk gambles.
Third.. third is financing. Financing has changed in ways that I don't understand well enought to express concisely. There is a lot of financing available these days, via "back-channels." The less formal sectors like VC and (much bigger) corporate lending.
Think of what california's VC & angel complex does. It is, in many ways, the heart of the startup ecosystem. Promising founders get to take big chances without liability. This makes it possible to start a Google or an Uber.
How would SV look if founders had personal liability, like regular small business people? How would it look if they were limited to bootstrapping? Startup financing is an exception, and a relatively small one. Elsewhere on earth, finance is a much more closed shop. You have to be an insider of some sort.
Financing is (to quote Buffet) *resource allocation.
Take for example, "leveraged buyouts" and similar arrangements. Leveraged buyout means that I get a loan from you to buy company X, which then owes you repayment. Some form of this is how Russia's oligarch system came to be. It's how a lot (most) private sales of comapnies happen. It's how infrastructure companies happen. Mining.
I don't quite understand it. The big risks are go to the financer, but the profits don't. Regardless, the structure exists and being big is a prerequisite.
Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods and fake reviews. One might think that with the rise of AI/ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier but Amazon doesn't seem to be doing any thing. In which case, allowing them to handle money seems like a recipe for disaster. As for the Ant Financial comparison, I find it hard to believe that Amazon is not utilizing the reserves it gathers by se…
I would have thought that on Hackernews of all places people would recognize the scale that is involved with a site like Amazon and recognize that fixing this problem is far from trivial.
I'm sure Amazon is taking it very seriously - when have they ever shown anything but "obsession" about positive customer experiences. But it is hard, and it will take time to do it effectively without completely blocking all 3rd party sellers on the site.
Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods and fake reviews. One might think that with the rise of AI/ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier but Amazon doesn't seem to be doing any thing. In which case, allowing them to handle money seems like a recipe for disaster. As for the Ant Financial comparison, I find it hard to believe that Amazon is not utilizing the reserves it gathers by se…
> but Amazon doesn't seem to be doing any thing. I would have thought that on Hackernews of all places people would recognize the scale that is involved with a site like Amazon and recognize that fixing this problem is far from trivial. I'm sure Amazon is taking it very seriously - when have they ever shown anything but "obsession" about positive customer experiences. But it is hard, and it will take time to do it ef…
Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods and fake reviews. One might think that with the rise of AI/ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier but Amazon doesn't seem to be doing any thing. In which case, allowing them to handle money seems like a recipe for disaster. As for the Ant Financial comparison, I find it hard to believe that Amazon is not utilizing the reserves it gathers by se…
The solution to fake reviews is simple. Just ignore all reviews that aren’t verified purchase. Still leaves some room for manipulation but much less.
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The solution to fake reviews is simple. Just ignore all reviews that aren’t verified purchase. Still leaves some room for manipulation but much less.
Unfortunately the value of a fake review is so high no ML will ever be able to defeat it. The only way to fix it is with trusted reviewers but there a lot of products on there and only so many trusted reviewers.
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Unfortunately the value of a fake review is so high no ML will ever be able to defeat it. The only way to fix it is with trusted reviewers but there a lot of products on there and only so many trusted reviewers.
But amazon could hide by default reviews where no purchase has been made through amazon.
The only way to fight fake reviews is by adding a filter that would only show ones by 'trusted reviewers'. Even then, those can be bribed.
In the end, we're back to square one.
Amazon has a serious problem with counterfeit goods and fake reviews. One might think that with the rise of AI/ML catching fake reviews and counterfeits will be much easier but Amazon doesn't seem to be doing any thing. In which case, allowing them to handle money seems like a recipe for disaster. As for the Ant Financial comparison, I find it hard to believe that Amazon is not utilizing the reserves it gathers by se…
It's similar to how there are all types of websites running on AWS. Amazon is not responsible for their content.
Amazon is also a merchant on their own market place. I would expect Amazon and other big name merchants to usually sell you genuine products.