I write fake online reviews • Hacker News Board

Re: I write fake online reviews

#61

Post by bradleyjg » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 1:16 PM UTC

tzfld wrote: post #59

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

>Why provide free services to billionaires? So you don't contribute content to large social networks neither, isn't it?!

Not much, no. But I’d argue that’s different anyway. Facebook is a quid pro quo. They provide me a service (distribution) in exchange for my content. Verizon gives me nothing in exchange for my survey response.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#62

Post by nickjj » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 1:17 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

Reviews really help small businesses who don't have millions to spend on marketing and traffic.

For example I sell online video courses and reviews (legit of course) help quite a bit with sales. This is independently, not on Amazon or another platform.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#63

Post by bradleyjg » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

skj wrote: post #58

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

Do you value reviews written by other people? If not, some certainly do, and you're providing a free service to them.

No, I’m not providing it to them. I’m giving it to amazon to do with it whatever will profit them most.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#64

Post by ojosilva » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

I think independent consumer reviews are a very valuable service to the (shopping) community and, yup, to humanity. It seems contradictory to collate "shopping" and "community", but in general people do spend a lot of time and, duh, money shopping to improve their lives.

Counting on peers to help you shop, what you shop for, how safe and reliable the product is ("Could this toy hurt my kid?", "Is this tattoo remover safe?") are not to be taken lightly.

Online product/services reviews are a huge milestone on how we interact with the world around us. It even causes me anxiety to try a restaurant without having checked it online for reviews... Any effort on how we can better correlate opinion and experience is not just helping "billionaires" here. It's helping everyone who want some feedback to help cut through flaky, moronic marketing that we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#65

Post by bradleyjg » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 1:25 PM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #62

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

Reviews really help small businesses who don't have millions to spend on marketing and traffic. For example I sell online video courses and reviews (legit of course) help quite a bit with sales. This is independently, not on Amazon or another platform.

That’s how they exploit us. They tell us we are helping the small business owner or the phone rep and play on our natural fellow feeling while the main beneficiary is the giant, faceless multinational.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#66

Post by Joe-Z » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

bubblethink wrote: post #48

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

>Why provide free services to billionaires? Also why I never saw the point of sites like quora. Why are all these "subject matter experts" spending countless hours writing free content for a platform that is ultimately locked in and going to either a) Be infested with ads or b) Going to charge money (like the publishers' racket in scientific publishing).

At least for Quora (or rather StackOverflow for me) I could understand it as satisfying a need to be in a community of experts and exchange ideas on more fringe topics. Also it‘s probably a good thing to put on your resume if you have amassed sufficient fake internet points ;)

Amazon reviews however... you‘re just a drop in the ocean and there‘s certainly no community. Thus you‘d have to pay me if you want me to engage in this.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#67

Post by Joe-Z » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #64

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

I think independent consumer reviews are a very valuable service to the (shopping) community and, yup, to humanity. It seems contradictory to collate "shopping" and "community", but in general people do spend a lot of time and, duh, money shopping to improve their lives. Counting on peers to help you shop, what you shop for, how safe and reliable the product is ("Could this toy hurt my kid?", "Is this tattoo remover…

Well yes, but it‘s not like the flaky, moronic marketeers don‘t know people like you exist. So reviews just become another topic of optimization for them.

Re: I write fake online reviews

#68

Post by linuxftw » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

bubblethink wrote: post #48

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I write no reviews at all. Also, take no customer service surveys. Why provide free services to billionaires? Let amazon hire a product review staff. Let Verizon supervisors monitor the quality of the phone staff. Let uber hire secret shoppers. These companies are all exploiting your good will to enrich themselves.

>Why provide free services to billionaires? Also why I never saw the point of sites like quora. Why are all these "subject matter experts" spending countless hours writing free content for a platform that is ultimately locked in and going to either a) Be infested with ads or b) Going to charge money (like the publishers' racket in scientific publishing).

In the case of Stack Overflow, it's a great place for organic linking to your own content.

"You can do xyz in order to accomplish this task. Source: "

BAM. Just translated internet points into $0.002

Re: I write fake online reviews

#69

Post by StefanKarpinski » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

What is with HN always deleting the word "Why" from the beginning of titles? I get that it can be a filler word, but it can also significantly change the meaning. For example, the blog post that introduced Julia to the world was titled "Why We Created Julia" [1] and if the "Why" had been deleted it would have completely changed the sense of that title. In this case, it's a fairly benign change, but I've seen this drastically affect the meaning of posts recently. It seems like a bad practice that is at odds with HN's excellent policy of respecting original titles of articles.

[1] https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia

Re: I write fake online reviews

#70

Post by paul7986 » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

Everyone hates this but we need...

A digital driver’s license/ID card type of thing for using the Internet(by country), especially considering deepfakes. You can still post anonymously but it won’t hold much weight vs. using your real name/ID. Something that if posting junk your reputation/credit/trustworthiness takes a hit!