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Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harder to spot them

181 点作者 admiralspoo超过 4 年前

31 条评论

ilamont超过 4 年前
I&#x27;d like to know how it&#x27;s possible for third-party sites such as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com</a> to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably.<p>Same question applies to Twitter. Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts and bot networks pushing spam, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;coronavirus-live-updates&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;859814085&#x2F;researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;coronavirus-live-updates&#x2F;2020&#x2F;0...</a>) while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes.<p>ETA: Regarding comments along the lines of, &quot;it&#x27;s in their best interest to let fake reviews continue as it boosts Amazon&#x27;s sales.&quot;<p>I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon&#x27;s growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big &amp; small competitors.<p>Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.
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mdorazio超过 4 年前
This topic comes up quite frequently on HN. It boils down to the risk-reward ratio. If you&#x27;ve never tried to sell anything on Amazon it&#x27;s probably not obvious how ridiculously important positive reviews are to your product sales. I cannot overstate how important they are in the beginning, given the way your average online shopper decides what to buy.<p>What this means is that sellers are faced with an absolute imperative to get positive reviews at any cost, otherwise they die, while the flip side is that <i>if</i> they get caught manipulating reviews they maybe get de-listed and start over again. This imbalance leads to exactly what you see now, and it at least seems like as long as positive reviews are so important (in the absence of curation) this will be an arms race.
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perl4ever超过 4 年前
If all that&#x27;s happening is fake good reviews and bots upvoting bad ones, it&#x27;s not a problem if you take the approach I do and think is the only correct one:<p>1. Only read the bad reviews<p>2. Ignore the fake or irrelevant bad reviews<p>3. Ignore the good&#x2F;bad ratio<p>Of course, if people are good enough at faking bad reviews, then there is a problem, but I like to think I can tell, and it isn&#x27;t something that is practical to scale.<p>The whole idea of treating reviews as some sort of voting mechanism that determines what you should buy makes no sense. The way I look at it is, is there something non-obvious that is a dealbreaker? That&#x27;s what reviews are for.<p>If I was running an e-commerce site, I&#x27;d simply not allow good reviews at all. Maybe have a sales counter that would serve to show how many people didn&#x27;t complain.
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raphlinus超过 4 年前
An ultra reliable query for scammy products is &quot;1TB USB flash drive.&quot; This product does exist in legit versions for about $200, but almost all of the (relevant to the query; many are for smaller capacities) hits are scams in the $30-40 price range. I believe these are mostly lower capacity thumb drives that have been hacked to report 1TB; this tactic has high danger for data corruption.<p>The fact that these listings are so easily gamed is to me a sign of something seriously wrong at Amazon. I know from experience how hard the abuse problem is (it was my job for a couple years at Google), but this should be Amazon&#x27;s bread and butter.
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satya71超过 4 年前
Something I want from a store is curation. I want them to do the hard work of evaluating whether the product is worthy of the customer&#x27;s money. Amazon (also copycats like Walmart) is failing at this basic task. That&#x27;s why more of my online dollars are going to Costco, Target, and others who do the work.
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2bluesc超过 4 年前
Not just fake reviews (where fake means no product was ever bought), but also reimbursed 5-star reviews.<p>Instagram + Facebook are blasting sites like Rebatest[0] in my face for some reason. I&#x27;m shocked Amazon lets such sites exist. I&#x27;m not opposed to people asking for reviews, but insisting they are 5-star reviews seems terribly unethical. Not surprisingly, they have a referral program as well...<p>Intrigued by this several hours earlier today, I signed-up because who wouldn&#x27;t want a reimbursement for a _good_ product they would have bought otherwise? Let&#x27;s see how this goes, low expectations.<p>Searching Google for &quot;rebatest vs&quot; naturally yields competitors Rebaid[1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rebatest.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rebatest.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rebaid.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rebaid.com&#x2F;</a>
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hinkley超过 4 年前
I have a weird selection mechanism for purchases. It’s not my only mechanism, but it informs the decision. As much as I enjoy a well made item, what really upsets me is something that should be much better than it is. Buyer’s remorse is a huge issue for me.<p>So I look at the people who are panning it in their reviews. If they are coherent and reasonable, I’m going to think twice about it. If they are incoherent, shrill Karens, then everyone has those and it’s no big deal.<p>I do the same for development tools and libraries. It doesn’t catch everything, and I may see their point but am willing to deal with a consequence they couldn’t stomach. It does seem to help, especially with biased reporting.
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crazygringo超过 4 年前
It&#x27;s funny -- a lot of products are 90% 5-star reviews, but nearly all the top reviews on a page are 1-star (the ones that get voted up as &quot;most helpful&quot;).<p>This actually seems to solve the problem. You read through a bunch of them, and use your critical thinking to figure out if the problems are real are not.<p>Because the first couple are often just &quot;this product broke after using it once!&quot; which you can just ignore, because that&#x27;s always going to happen to <i>somebody</i> and for some reason people love to upvote it.<p>But then you&#x27;ll either start to notice a theme, or not. If there&#x27;s a theme (8 of the 10 top reviews complain that the handle breaks, or that it&#x27;s not compatible with Macs), then you can be pretty sure it&#x27;s legitimate and probably want to look for a different product. But if there isn&#x27;t any theme except &quot;it broke immediately&#x2F;arrived damaged&quot; and then you start seeing reviews where people are like &quot;it works fine&quot;, then you&#x27;re good.<p>I dunno, but that seems to work for me. So thank goodness Amazon has the upvote button -- if it didn&#x27;t it would make finding meaningful reviews a lot harder.
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mschuster91超过 4 年前
The &quot;old analog&quot; world has solved this problem long ago: Consumer review magazines and NGOs (e.g. &quot;Stiftung Warentest&quot; in Germany) that review and rank products on objectively measurable criteria, with dedicated niche magazines (especially in computing) going on deep dives for reviews.<p>Why can&#x27;t Amazon do it like Facebook and have a set of publicly trusted reviewers organizations whose reviews are shown with a &quot;trusted review&quot; mark and ranked higher?<p>Also: why can&#x27;t regulators step in and demand that:<p>a) Amazon does not commingle inventory from different sellers to prevent fraudulent product from entering the system and being &quot;washed&quot; in the process, as well as provide end-to-end (from ingestion in the warehouse to the parcel at delivery) for each and every product they ship<p>b) Amazon employees have to manually review changes to product descriptions, varieties etc. so that &quot;switch-a-roo&quot; schemes where a vendor sells, let&#x27;s say, plant seeds and then shifts the product description to laptop chargers while retaining the reviews.<p><i>This</i> is the advantage that physical retail stores have: they at least know what they are selling and that it is reasonably free from fraudulent product.<p>Amazon is the unregulated Wild West, and frankly this has to stop.
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mmhsieh超过 4 年前
this might be part of the Return of the Brand.<p>friend working at Bose tells me: yeah, i know our IP is getting ripped off and we are getting either outright faked or clone-faked; but we are confident that people will continue to buy Bose because they trust the brand. brand loyalty might cut through whatever consumer preferences are shaped by the likes of reviews.
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badrchoubai超过 4 年前
A family member of mine recently ordered some wireless headphones, in the box was a card asking for a 5-star review in exchange for another pair of the headphones. They also ordered some school supplies with a similar offer in the box.
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dmalvarado超过 4 年前
I&#x27;ve stopped judging a product on 5-star reviews. Between two products, I will chose the product with the _least_ 1-star reviews. But obviously, this method breaks down when a product only has 50 reviews. Also, I would expect a somewhat normal distribution of reviews for a quality product. More 5s, than 4s, more 4s than 3s, etc.<p>4, 3 and 2 are where the most honest reviews are. High 1 count is indicative of quality control issue. 5 star reviews is either a customer who was immediately excited about product or a fake review.
jwdunne超过 4 年前
I was looking for books on “dark psychology” (don’t, they’re garbage).<p>One book I found had great reviews. So good, in fact, two different verified purchasers were compelled to write the exact same review verbatim.<p>I mean if you’re gonna write a book on “dark psychology”, make sure you don’t screw up when you’re using it on your readers.
tmaly超过 4 年前
I still think companies like Consumer Reports serve a valuable service at least for bigger ticket items.<p>Fakespot it definitely useful and I use it quite a bit.<p>There seems to be a gap for lower priced items. I mean I don’t want to spend all day pasting in urls into fakespot for a $10 item.
tempsy超过 4 年前
I&#x27;ve just given up on buying anything from Amazon that isn&#x27;t sold directly by them or isn&#x27;t a brand name I recognize. That eliminates a solid 80% of things that I deem &quot;eligible&quot; to buy.
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fortran77超过 4 年前
Nearly every time I order things like small kitchen gadgets, barware, office accessories&#x2F;supplies, I get a card saying that if I write a 5-star review, and send them a link to it, they&#x27;ll send me a &quot;free gift.&quot;<p>I suspect there are a lot of reviews like this that aren&#x27;t 100% fake (they&#x27;re from different people who actually paid full price for the product) but are solicited and therefore not accurate.<p>(I&#x27;ll never review a product where the vendor makes an offer like this. I used to report it to Amazon, but I don&#x27;t think they care.)
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Simulacra超过 4 年前
There&#x27;s a great app you can get called FakeSpot analyzes the reviews, and provides some clarity to the reviews on Amazon, and Best Buy.
strombofulous超过 4 年前
I swear I see an article like this on HN at least once a month (actually, according to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=amazon&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a>, it&#x27;s probably closer to about once a week) and the comments are always the same, let me save you (the person reading this) some time and summarize what these comments are going to look like:<p>&gt; I&#x27;ve lost all faith in Amazon, now I use Walmart, where I get cheap junk but at least I know it&#x27;s real cheap junk<p>&gt; Amazon has so much data! How have they failed so hard to stop this?<p>&gt; I swear I see this type of article posted every other week on HN<p>&gt; I was recently hit by this! They even shipped it in totally real looking packing and outer shell, but the serial number wasn&#x27;t valid&#x2F;the company selling it had no record of my purchase&#x2F;when I dropped it and the casing popped open I could see it was not authentic&#x2F;etc<p>&gt; This is largely because of comingling<p>&gt; Check out fakespot&#x2F;reviewmeta, they can analyze the comments and tell you which ones are fake<p>&gt; This is Amazon&#x27;s fault for making reviews so important for the seller
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tmpz22超过 4 年前
The scarey corollary is that all fake user-generated content is becoming harder to spot, from Yelp reviews, Youtube comments, Tinder profiles, News stories, Facebook posts, etc. And this is before the wide adoption of deep fakes by these outfits.
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switch11超过 4 年前
People don&#x27;t understand the whole reason behind fake reviews not being removed<p>Let&#x27;s go through a series of questions<p>A) Will lower review ratings lead to less sales at Amazon or more sales at Amazon?<p>B) will clear division between &#x27;best in class&#x27; products and inferior products give Amazon more monopoly control over the market, or less?<p>C) Will the difficulty in getting easy fake reviews get more people to jump into selling things at Amazon or less?<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><p>Amazon needs a Tragedy of the Commons type of situation<p>That more and more small businesses jump in, generate sales using fake reviews, and give Amazon its cut<p>This in terms makes existing businesses smaller and more dependent on Amazon<p>They basically want 1 million companies each making $100,000 to $1 million a year at Amazon<p>Commoditization, so whoever Pays Amazon the most, can be boosted<p>And these &#x27;pay to play&#x27; businesses are INDISTINGUISHABLE from the actual best businesses<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i>*<p>Their aim is NOT<p>1) The best companies and the best products sell very well and get the best reviews<p>2) Customers buy more and more of those products<p>3) Those companies (providing the best products) become bigger and bigger<p>Their aim is &#x27;Glorification of the Mediocre&#x27; - Commodification and Mediocritization of EVERYTHING<p>1) Every company&#x27;s products sell almost the same<p>2) Companies are dependent more and more on &#x27;advertising&#x27; at Amazon<p>3) Amazon&#x27;s cut becomes higher and higher<p>4) An end point where Amazon can take 50% to 75% of what customers pay<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><p>Look at Audible and what terms they have there after becoming a monopoly<p>Same for ebooks where they are close to becoming a monopoly in US and UK<p>They first want 65% cut (if you don&#x27;t give them exclusivity)<p>Then they want ebook and audiobook authors to spend out of their paltry 35% cut - to advertise their product on Amazon<p>So they are, in effect, asking for a 75% to 90% cut of what customers pay<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i>
robotron超过 4 年前
I&#x27;ve lost all trust in Amazon and competitors. I try to buy direct from the company producing the product when I can. The shipping times aren&#x27;t much different. Maybe no same or next day.
LargoLasskhyfv超过 4 年前
Simple solution: combine it with ubiquitious social scoring, and make real names&#x2F;government issued IDs mandatory for any review. See the graph lighten up with the fakers. Shun. Done.
gandalfian超过 4 年前
The FT article that kicked off this flurry suggests a guy was making £5000 a month from selling his free stuff. It must be an extreme example but with that much temptation...
coronadisaster超过 4 年前
I haven&#x27;t bought fron Amazon in a couple months...Ebay is usually cheaper for the stuff that needs to be bought online (or hard to find in stores).
Havoc超过 4 年前
Yeah the only time it’s any use is on ebooks to determine roughly how popular the book is. Ie review count rather than content
harshulpandav超过 4 年前
I’m having this idea —<p>Amazon should allow only bad reviews or reviews that speak negative points about a product. In addition to that amazon should show only the number of purchases made.<p>Fake (paid) reviewers usually write good about the product to support sales<p>As a user after reading the description of the product i would be interested to know where the product fails.<p>With this model, fake reviewers will have to write fake bad reviews on other rival products which is expensive to do and easier to spot them based on patterns.
RockmanX超过 4 年前
funny, I thought AI&#x2F;DL has been ready to save the world for a while since everyone is bragging its power but until now Amazon still faces fake reviews problem.
AniseAbyss超过 4 年前
If you can&#x27;t spot the difference are they really fake?
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techbio超过 4 年前
Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware<p>Nothing new under the sun.
paul7986超过 4 年前
Ive always thought (noted here a bit ago) that the Internet needs a verified government ID. Each time you use it to comment on Facebook or any website you are helping verify the veracity of what your saying is true. If you don&#x27;t use it then what your saying is socially&#x2F;culturally in question, which I think either a minority or majority are already doing in terms believing what they read on the Internet.<p>Of course I dont think anyone here likes the sound of the above, which i thought of after seeing deepfakes videos (was downvoted heavily).<p>If downvoting love to understand the negatives of such a system?
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dvduval超过 4 年前
Maybe I&#x27;ll get down voted, but I think it&#x27;s a legitimate question to ask: if someone offers me a refund in exchange for my review, and the product would benefit me, why shouldn&#x27;t I accept it? Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers? Perhaps it&#x27;s a small merchant trying to get started in the face of big corporations doing other things to cheat the system (ex. pricing out competition to capture the market). Could it be that I&#x27;m helping a small business get started by getting a free product in exchange for a review? There&#x27;s no way to know for sure. But I can imagine that some people would indeed take this offer and I don&#x27;t necessarily blame them. Should I?
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