Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For • Hacker News Board

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#71

Post by mc32 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:41 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #64

jameslk wrote: post #55

There will always be a desire to pay for reviews, since 70%-80% of shoppers check reviews before buying[0][1] (and growing[2]). Amazon could help fix this problem by creating "sponsored" reviews. This way a company can pay for reviews in a non-scummy way, a reviewer (and Amazon) gets paid, and a customer can tell whether the review was paid for or not. Or just pass laws to regulate reviews. 0. http://www.peopleclaim.…

I doubt that sponsored reviews would solve it - if they wanted to be shady they would astroturf it anyway. Marketing departments with multimillion dollar budgets still engage in that. As for regulating reviews what could possibly work for that? Real ID would be unduly oppressive in chilling effects in addition to opening up barratry and harassment of reviewers. Even if fake reviews fall under false advertising laws g…

What about independent reviewers like consumer reports, or similarly disinterested party?

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#72

Post by EnderWT » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:44 PM UTC

This topic keeps coming up in the news, and I've altered my shopping habits because of it. The competition has gotten tougher with Google Express, Walmart delivery and pickup, Target pickup, etc. When I order from one of them or make a trip to the store, I can at least verify the item I'm purchasing is from the manufacturer.

When looking at the reviews on Amazon, countless times I've seen reviewers mention to not buy the item from a particular seller because it was not genuine or was defective. If I'm not sure about the brand, I'll search it to see if its legitimate and if there are reviews/complaints on other sites. I'll also use buying guides when determining what to buy instead of Amazon reviews.

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#73

Post by 13of40 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:47 PM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #54

snegu wrote: post #24

Last night I finally abandoned a book that was absolute trash, but had 83% 5-star reviews on Amazon. Looking at the reviews now, I see that most of them are written by people who only write 5-star reviews (it has an F-rating on Fakespot). Feeling like kind of a dummy right now.

Name and shame!

The Art of the Deal has an F, with 57% low quality reviews.

"Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is high deception involved."

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#74

Post by entee » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:49 PM UTC

EnderWT wrote: post #72

This topic keeps coming up in the news, and I've altered my shopping habits because of it. The competition has gotten tougher with Google Express, Walmart delivery and pickup, Target pickup, etc. When I order from one of them or make a trip to the store, I can at least verify the item I'm purchasing is from the manufacturer. When looking at the reviews on Amazon, countless times I've seen reviewers mention to not buy…

This is a huge issue, several times I've received fraudulent goods when shopping at Amazon. It has made me completely avoid shopping for certain items there and makes me wary of trusting anything on the site where quality/reliability is an issue.

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#75

Post by Jach » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:51 PM UTC

throwaway287391 wrote: post #43

laurex wrote: post #23

There was a great Planet Money podcast on the genesis of ReviewMeta which I've been using on Amazon reviews since. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

Since listening to that podcast a few weeks ago I've also started checking both ReviewMeta and FakeSpot for every Amazon listing I think about buying. It's really made shopping on Amazon a frustrating experience -- well over half the products I've checked (in a couple specific product categories) have had F or D ratings according to both sites. I've wondered if some of these are false positives (i.e. ReviewMeta flags…

Consider that if you go buy an equivalent item at a box store, there aren't any reviews, the company (sometimes companies) with products on offer just happens to have enough money to get the stores to stock them over any potential competition. Similarly with fake and paid reviews, those companies happen to have money to do it (and do it better than competition, they can't all be using the same github script). A company with money to do things like that surely has some amount of money in the product itself, so what you get will probably work out as well as what you'd get from the store...

The bigger problem for Amazon I think is fake products and inventory co-mingling, rather than fake reviews per se. But while others are complaining about the 5-star system not being very good (there's a fancy Bayesian system I've seen before that's better..), at least Amazon shows you the distribution, reviewers can upload photos, and it lets you filter by star count to get a sense of the things said for various ratings.

I'll have to start trying out the fake review spotting tools. But I don't think my current behavior will change that much...

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#76

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:54 PM UTC

msikora wrote: post #63

ReviewMeta has a great Chrome plugin that shows the "real" score (after removing all even slightly suspicious reviews) right in the toolbar https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-revi...

The funny thing is I think Chrome plugins suffer from a similar problem and quite dangerous too because they can steal your information. I reported a fake clone of Privacy Badger a while back - positive reviews with the only difference being the fake one had a very low number of reviews/downloads. I'm very conservative with the extensions I use now

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#77

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:55 PM UTC

netinstructions wrote: post #68

And I've had issues trying to leave less than perfect reviews - seems like only after I spend time typing up the review (and sometimes uploading photos) does Amazon come back and say, sorry can't publish this. Seems like a dark pattern to encourage only positive reviews. http://www.netinstructions.com/amazon-dark-patterns/

YES! I have this happen to and notice the same patterns. I honestly think there is grounds for a lawsuit here. Whether or not that would be a successful lawsuit is another question, but the threat of one could get Amazon to change its tune.

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#78

Post by NTARelix » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 11:58 PM UTC

EnderWT wrote: post #72

This topic keeps coming up in the news, and I've altered my shopping habits because of it. The competition has gotten tougher with Google Express, Walmart delivery and pickup, Target pickup, etc. When I order from one of them or make a trip to the store, I can at least verify the item I'm purchasing is from the manufacturer. When looking at the reviews on Amazon, countless times I've seen reviewers mention to not buy…

Makes me wonder how many of those guides have been paid for, or at least what level of influence advertisers have on them. Nevertheless, I agree that a quality guide is well appreciated, however hard to come by.

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#79

Post by awinder » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 12:00 AM UTC

"We have built a lot of technology to assess whether or not we think a review is authentic”

Really now? Has amazon considered firing those teams? Because that tech is beyond broken.

Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For

#80

Post by CamelCaseName » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 12:00 AM UTC

prolikewh0a wrote: post #4

JohnTHaller wrote: post #3

It's common knowledge among most techies that the majority of Amazon reviews are fake and that counterfeit items are a big issue, but most of the general population is completely unaware. I was searching for an inexpensive pair of polarized sunglasses last week and the "Amazon Recommended" ones had an F on FakeSpot with 70%+ fake reviews.

How legitimate is FakeSpot though? I find nearly everything has an F with a high amount of fake reviews when I use it.

Some categories are simply flooded with fake reviews where you won't find a single honest listing in the first 3 pages.

That said, there are plenty of A rated products in my experience. All of my products are A-rated, and unfortunately many of my competitors are honest too.