
Amazon changes its review policy - fern12
https://madgeniusclub.com/2017/12/10/amazon-review-policy-change-more/
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omegote
I don't think it's gonna make a difference. At least in Amazon ES, most
reviews are written by top reviewers who have made their "career" by first
reviewing small products bought by them and after that they're gifted other,
bigger products (using 100% OFF coupons so they appear as verified purchases).
The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated
long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value.

And Amazon ES is full of those.

~~~
morganvachon
> The moment you find a review with several pictures and paragraph-separated
> long texts you know it's a paid review with zero value.

Not always. I've seen tons of critical two- or three-star reviews that were
multiple paragraphs and had pictures detailing the issues with the product.
Piss off the right person with a shitty product or even an unfortunate lemon,
and you'll get lambasted for it.

And then there's people like me; I don't review Amazon purchases often, maybe
one in 20 items, but when I do I write a detailed review because either the
item greatly impressed me, or seriously pissed me off. I've never done a
compensated review (I wouldn't even know how to start doing that) and the few
times a negative review resulted in a seller offering to refund or replace in
exchange for five stars and a positive review, I've refused.

Only once did I change a review after interacting with a seller, and I left
the entire negative text intact with an addendum stating their customer
service was helpful and polite, and I was raising from two stars to three
solely because their customer service attitude and promises to improve the
product made up for the quality control issues in my mind. I did this without
the seller requesting it, but they were greatly appreciative and refunded my
purchase without me even asking for it.

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FireBeyond
For sure, the other typical 'long reviewers' are the 'Vine hopefuls'. People
trying to build a reputation for good / helpful reviews so they can get 'free
stuff' from the Vine program (where Amazon sends you products, ostensibly 'on
(indefinite) loan') to review.

~~~
slantyyz
>> ostensibly 'on (indefinite) loan') to review.

They're yours to keep, although they reserve the right to ask you to send them
back within 6 months (never happened with me). You can't give them away
(you're expected to dispose/recycle them) and you're not allowed to post
reviews of those products in other places, although I've seen that happen.

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CamelCaseName
The described policy change of requiring a customer to have spent at least $50
to leave a verified review happened in 2016... [0]

[0]
[https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/message.jspa?message...](https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=3742695)

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post_break
My latest foray into Amazon review was this. Company contacts me asking to do
review. They have me purchase the product with my own money. Then they send me
the amount via paypal. So I don't think this policy will stop much assuming
they all shift to that model.

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discreditable
I've stopped leaving Amazon reviews. Recently I was bored and went through a
few bits of network equipment and PC hardware I purchased and reviewed a few
of them. 3/6 of the reviews were rejected for being against community
guidelines with no reason provided. Even after reading the guidelines it's not
clear why they were rejected. I put in effort to describe why something got
its rating from me. For example, I discussed the strengths/weaknesses the
network equipment. From now on I might leave a star rating, but I'm not
wasting time to get a review accepted. I'll leave that to the shills.

~~~
qq66
Same thing happened to me with Wikipedia. I made a time-consuming, cited edit
to an article and it was immediately backed out. Now I completely ignore
factual errors in Wikipedia, including one that I just looked up and found is
still there at least 5 years later.

~~~
ReverseCold
Want to link to that specific factual error? Someone here could probably fix
it.

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j_s
Google crippled their rewards for reviews (1TB for Local Guides dropped to
100GB now nothing) as they gained a critical mass of participants.

There has to be a way for Amazon to Mechanical Turk reviews of reviews --
however many layers deep required!

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randomerr
Great idea. At least they get some cash with a real name attached to the
review. I hope they don't allow those pre-paid Visa cards.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I don't know that the banks "tell" vendors "This purchase was made with a pre-
paid credit/bank card" \- I've not seen a flag that shows that before.

~~~
spjwebster
Stripe give you a `funding` property on a card source [0], which at least in
the UK distinguishes between debit, credit and prepaid cards somewhat
reliably.

0: [https://stripe.com/docs/api/python#card_object-
funding](https://stripe.com/docs/api/python#card_object-funding)

I assume this is not exclusive to Stripe.

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sebringj
tldr; Amazon now requires fake accounts to pay them first.

