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Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

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Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#2

Post by doppio19 »

For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#3

Post by rasz »

doppio19 wrote: post #2

For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.

Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#4

Post by i80and »

rasz wrote: post #3
doppio19 wrote: post #2

For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.

Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil

DeepSpeech shuttered in 2021. The repo was just made read-only the other day

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#5

Post by doppio19 »

rasz wrote: post #3
doppio19 wrote: post #2

For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.

Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil

Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.

Re: Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

#8

Post by ashoeafoot »

rasz wrote: post #3
doppio19 wrote: post #2

For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.

Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil

So they wrote a ping pong shader for monetization going with the user or selling out the user.
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