
Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews - sefrost
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/oct/20/facebook-fake-amazon-review-factories-uncovered-which-investigation
======
x0054
Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a
hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I
would search for "target arrows" on Amazon the first page results would be for
legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of
6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for "target arrows" I get pages
and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I purchased several sets and returned them).
The crappy ones are also selling for $30 per set but they are made out of weak
aluminum and come bent up. To get the nice American made ones I have to got
10-20 pages deep or search by brand name and even than the real ones are
usually on page 2 with page one featuring the same crap from China. Now, don't
get me wrong, I am sure they can make quality arrows in China, but what makes
it to the top of Amazon is utter crap.

I noticed this with many other products as well, but the arrows is a
particularly noticeable example because it's something I regularly replace as
they get beat up and destroyed (I shoot a lot).

~~~
simias
It's really baffling to me how despite being one of the largest companies in
the world and being centered around e-commerce Amazon doesn't do anything
about these issues weakening their core product. I say "do nothing" not "fail
to stop" because I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon does anything at all
to prevent or discourage these behaviors.

I wonder if it's because they push the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
mantra too far. After all, their current approach is successful so why risk
changing anything? That would also explain why the website overall looks so
dated in many areas.

~~~
da_murvel
I don't think it's baffling at all. Facebook is the largest social media
company, and what do they do to try to stop all of the propaganda, troll
factories and hateful things going on there? Naught. They know that they are
the largest company and therefore doesn't have to do anything as long as their
position stays the same. Which it seems to be doing. Yes, there are people
leaving the platform but where do they go? There is no real contender,
therefore Facebook will remain number 1.

~~~
simias
I don't think it's completely the same thing though, this propaganda and
trolling could arguably be a positive for Facebook by driving engagement. Of
course there's a balance to maintain but it's not necessarily all bad.
Socially and ethically it might be bad but bean-counting-wise it might not be
that terrible. Facebook doesn't really care if people trust what they see on
the platform as long as they generate pageviews and get ad impressions.

On the other hand I don't see how fake reviews and bootleg items do anything
but hurt Amazon by making people distrust the platform. You don't want to add
friction to the buying process by making people triple check that they're not
getting duped.

And it's not like it's a new problem either, lack of trust was a huge issue in
the early days of e-commerce, I'm sure Amazon doesn't want to return to these
days where you felt like you were swimming in a sea of scams.

~~~
alexgmcm
The problem is that before you bought stuff largely from Amazon.

Whereas now it's more akin to eBay which always suffered with scam problems
(and responded by giving buyers far more power - which then resulted in buyers
scamming sellers instead of the reverse).

I wish it could return to the days where you just bought stuff from Amazon -
or at least make it very easy to only search for their products.

~~~
mikehollinger
Have you tried eBay recently? I’ve bought a few things from there in the last
year and found it pleasant and professional.

------
DanielleMolloy
I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-
time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review
history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them
on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so
(but this is one of many Fakespot metrics).

I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every product was
crap with fake reviewing. After wasting an hour on this I ended up not buying
from Amazon. Rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese crap and counterfeit
industry on their platform is likely to become Amazon’s death if they don’t
admit their mistake and turn the wheel now.

~~~
tammer
While this could be seen as off topic, I don’t think it is: I strongly
recommend purchasing that bike light from your local bike shop. If you have a
local bike shop, it is likely struggling. But it is also likely that the
lights they have on offer there are specifically selected for their utility,
particularly their utility in your locale. Perhaps it will be a few dollars
more than Amazon, but you will reap the benefit.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Depends on the shop, I guess. My local bike shop carries quite a lot of cheap
garbage too, but at high markup. I also have trust issues with many such
shops. I know some where at least one person working there seems competent,
but in most I've been, I get the distinct vibe of employees being domain-
clueless salesmen paid to push things (similar to what's typical in
electronics/home appliance stores).

~~~
r3bl
I use Google's reviews to check that, always sorting by worst grades first.
Saved my ass a few times, especially as an expat.

------
bingbingo
Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my
prime subscription.

My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them
were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll
send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I
found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally
started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can’t refund me.

Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren’t
delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called
them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and
suddenly couldn’t find my address anymore. Well guys you’ve delivered 10k+
worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!

My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they
missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the
rep said “Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item”. He figured it
was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the
state.

~~~
walrus01
Amazon customer service is now quite terrible. Anecdote: I know somebody who
has an office that is literally within a 2 block radius of Amazon HQ in
Seattle (the new Doppler and Day One buildings). Getting Amazon's third party
delivery contractors to successfully deliver to their office suite door, in a
high-rise office tower, has been an amazing struggle.

Deliveries get sent back as "rejected" all the time, when the delivery person
has actually not even bothered to sign in at the lobby and go up to the office
suite floor. More than a half dozen phone calls and chats with Amazon customer
service, requesting that they edit the delivery info for the building, have
been pretty much fruitless.

~~~
dcosson
This has been similar to my experience recently with a package marked as
rejected.

It's a shitty caught in limbo situation - they refused to acknowledge even the
possibility that the delivery service might not have made an honest effort to
get into the building, and they wouldn't let me cancel the order without a
penalty, but they couldn't tell me where my package was and had no way of
contacting the carrier for me to schedule another time for delivery. There
also seems to be no policy to automatically retry the next day. All they could
do was take my phone number and then the delivery company might call me later
if they felt like it. It was very bizarre.

Since then I have stopped using free 1-day shipping, because at least in
larger buildings UPS and USPS can generally get in fine as they're delivering
multiple packages every day. The random small companies that handle the one
day shipping seem to be a lot less reliable.

~~~
walrus01
> The random small companies

At least in Seattle, the "random small companies" are frequently some random
dude with a van and a phone app. They're doing ubereats type package delivery
now. There's a pickup center at north Aurora and 145th where a motley
assortment of drivers pick up packages and take them to the customer
destination now.

------
cs702
Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are
offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star
reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to
deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

~~~
astrodust
The only way to describe this is as an unfortunate inevitability of review
systems as a whole.

~~~
toss1
I'd say of _unmoderated_ (or poorly moderated) review systems. E.g., we don't
see this on Angie's List or Houzz.

I've found that the only way to get useful information out of most Amazon
reviews is to look at the 1- & 2-stars, trying to filter out the fake
competitor hits, and see if there are any consistent issues that aren't DEU
issues. Then look at the 3- & 4-stars and see what seems to be good. That
said, I expect it'll only be a matter of time until this strategy is no good.

~~~
dcbadacd
I'd say this is exactly where some kind of web of trust could work. Meaning
that everyone is shown the reviews of their added family members, their
trusted people (with less weight) and so on and on. If they betray the trust
the system could even have a "trust less" button. It'd actually give people
the ability to choose who they trust.

~~~
drb91
Are you kidding? People I know have TERRIBLE judgement when it comes to
products. Who builds trust based on that characteristic?

~~~
nerdponx
But a web of trust based on, "I like this reviwer, so I trust who they trust"
seems reasonable.

~~~
tokyodude
I am really curious if this would actually work. I also think if you trust a
reviewer and it turns out they are a bad reviewer than your trust rating
should lower. (you turned out to be a bad reviewer reviewer)

That said I have no idea if this would. Seems those 87k people mentioned above
would just trust each other to raise their trust ratings.

~~~
nerdponx
Its not about total trust "rating". That not how web of trust works. You, the
informed and responsible user, have to look at who their connections are.

It's more like Linkedin: if someone adds you and they are a mutual connection
with a bunch of coworkers you like, that's good. But if their mutual
connections are all social climbing spammers, you know they either are one
themselves or don't know enough not to fall for that stuff.

------
perpetualcrayon
*-star reviews on all of the major review sites are 2-dimensional. They should be 3 dimensional (0-x stars) + time. This way if clusters of 5-star reviews show up in an extremely short period of time it's a red flag. Instead of seeing a static "this product/service got x stars", we should be able to see "this product/service, within the last 1 month, received on average x stars". And then you can extrapolate, oh they received on average 2 stars before they upgraded their product, and now the product is getting 4 stars. Or something like: "this restaurant was getting on average 1.5 stars last year, but recently they're getting glowing reviews. Maybe they fired the manager?".

~~~
bootlooped
Fake review services have already figured out how to slow-drip reviews. If you
put a mediocre product on Amazon and buy reviews, there will be no legit
review history to compare against either. It's a tough nut to crack if the
fake reviews are linked to real purchases already.

~~~
perpetualcrayon
I'd say by slow dripping the reviews won't they have to contend more with the
"real" reviews? After all by pushing a bunch of 5 stars quickly the average
will be bumped up substantially and be unaffected by real reviews. At least in
this case they'll have to contend with legit reviews and will not be as easy
to sprout all the way to the top of the search results for same reason.

~~~
jobigoud
It's the same no? If there are 10 times more fake reviews than legit ones and
they can spread them over time, you can't use the distribution to detect it.

~~~
perpetualcrayon
I think there are probably a number of reasons it's different.

1) 1000 5-star reviews with maybe a handful of 3,2,1 star reviews trickling in
as actual consumers realize their mistake is less of a signal not to buy than
if I see another low review trickled in amongst the 10-20 5-star reviews.

2) The company defrauding by purchasing the reviews is not going to make their
money back as quickly probably since they won't end up on top of search
results as often. So these companies will be stretched a lot thinner and
probably recoup their expenses a lot slower than if they start instantly
showing up on top of peoples' search results. And in order to keep from
"floating" a bunch of free stuff without reviews they'll have to be extremely
coordinated about how they distribute their products and request recipients to
provide the reviews in order to make it a worth while pursuit.

------
jobigoud
Also this very interesting Planet Money episode #838 about people all over the
world receiving weird packages full of random Chinese items that they never
ordered.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/27/606528176/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/27/606528176/episode-838-a-series-
of-mysterious-packages)

Turns out they are phantom packages from vendors on Ali Baba and TaoBao gaming
the review system. This is called "brushing".

They managed to interview a "brusher". So the brushers have to make themselves
look completely real during the buying process, hesitating, clicking links
from different vendors and only after a while select the actual item they
target. To get the "verified purchase" tag something has to be mailed
somewhere. But instead of the actual item the vendor sends a package with
random stuff and sometimes they send these to addresses of previous unknowing
international customers to make it look more real.

------
plink
I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value
to are the negative ones. Also, I've extremely curtailed any purchasing on
Amazon as I've come to perceive the majority of their marketplace to be a
degenerative crap house.

~~~
dragontamer
I met a family member (like 2nd cousin or further away) at some wedding a few
years ago. I only talked to him once, but he was very clear about this
situation. He owned a hotel, and was trying to track down the writers of bad
reviews on Yelp. Primarily, as the owner of the hotel, it was his job to find
out what's wrong about the hotel and improve it.

But he started to investigate some of the 1-star reviews, and came to the
conclusion that these people didn't exist. He dug through all the receipts, he
tried to track down and correlate the time with when these reviews popped up
and tried to track down any issue. His ultimate conclusion was that a number
of the 1-star reviews on his hotel were simply fake.

The discussion continued to talk about tort law, and how he's unable to even
get a person to sue. He can't sue Yelp, because Yelp wasn't the author of
those posts. So he was basically helpless to defend against 1-star reviews. In
any case, if people can fake a 5-star review, they can also fake a 1-star
review. And based on what I discussed with this man years ago, it seems like
it really is happening right now.

Its probably easier for a Hotel-chain to leave bad reviews on their
competitors. There are only so many hotels in a given area, and Yelp easily
allows you to list all of the competitors in your region. Its probably less of
a thing on Amazon, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't exist there
either.

~~~
gitgud
So you can leave a review without even using the service or product on Yelp?

Without a verified purchase, why would anyway take the review seriously?

~~~
koolba
How would you even implement a verified purchase? For a hotel _maybe_ you
could forward an itinerary (which can be faked) but there’s probably no
receipt for a random taco stand that only accepts cash. Granted the latter
does not care as much as the hotel but whatever they do would need to cover
everybody.

~~~
markdown
After thinking about this problem for... umm... 30 seconds...

Allow users to write reviews, and then send a message to the hotel owner
saying "X has posted a review of your business. Do you accept that X was a
guest on X date?"

The hotel owner is forced to verify the stay before he gets to see the review.

Of course he'll know all about the outliers who had a bad experience and
complained at the hotel and might want to lie about the guest staying, but
such guests are usually _very_ motivated and willing to prove their stay with
receipts, photos, etc.

~~~
ttty
Then the hotel owner can put a ton of fake positive reviews and verify all.

------
kaffee
Let's not forget that these fake reviews are being paid for. That's clearly
better than non-paid-for fake reviews. That is, there's _some_ friction for
the malicious actors.

Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email.
Friction can do a lot of good.

This is all to say that it looks like Amazon and others (e.g., Steam) are
doing the right thing in requiring a verified purchase in order to leave a
review.

But it does seem like there's an easy improvement that Amazon could make:
offer amnesty to people who report (after the fact) that they left a fake
review. The review would be marked internally as fake (and this would impact
rankings, etc.) but the vendor would be none the wiser.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
> That is, there's some friction for the malicious actors.

Fake reviews are just another form of marketing, like traditional junk mail.
Making mail spammers pay postage doesn't seem to have changed the fact that
most of the snail mail I get is junk, even in the digital age. Charge
reviewers a quarter or a dollar to leave a review. If I was passionate enough
-- one way or the other -- to leave a review, I'd pay it! I'll bet it would
squelch the fake reviews overnight. Just tune the charge to find an acceptable
signal-to-noise ratio.

~~~
AdverseAffect
Charging for reviews doesn't solve anything. The company paying you for the
review will then just reimburse you for the cost of the fake review as well.
But you'd get rid of almost all honest reviewers

------
abruzzi
A bit off topic, but companies/organizations that use punctuation in their
name make sentences look screwy. The organization in this article is “Which?”
which the Guardian faithfully reproduces (without the quote I used). As a
result, every time the name of the organization comes at the end of a
sentence, the Guardian doesn’t end it with a period, they end it with a
question mark. This made me go back and reread at least one sentence because I
thought I misread it. I read the sentence as a statement, not a question (and
it was a statement.)

~~~
howenterprisey
Completely agreed. I think Wikipedia has the right idea for dealing with
company names like this - use title case and omit anything that isn't
pronounced. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trademarks#General_rules)

~~~
joegahona
AP, CMS, and any other grown-up style guide would eschew goofy punctuation in
company/brand/band names.

------
acjohnson55
The fantastic podcast Reply All did an episode on this a few months ago:
[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-
all/124)

~~~
maximp
I just heard this yesterday! Can second, great episode.

~~~
iliis
So... Five stars then? ;)

(But seriously, HN comments are actually great at recommending things.)

~~~
technofiend
Definitely HN is the latest in a long string of sites that _were_ good until
the general public discovered them, Reddit being the most recent example.
You're right: love the suggestions here and I hope the signal : noise ratio
remains favorable for a good long while.

------
whatever1
I was looking in Amazon for a protective case for the iPhone XR that my SO has
preordered.

Apparently there are many cases and even more reviews of very happy customers
(verified purchasers as per Amazon) who were making very positive comments on
the perfect fit of the case (on a phone that is not yet on sale).

~~~
jobigoud
Probably the inventory variant scam. They added the new case as a variant of
older ones and got the reviews carried over.

------
entropy_
I don't live in the US/UK/Europe so Amazon deliveries are things I pay a lot
for and take a while to get to me. So when I buy something, I have to be damn
sure I'm going to like it. That's lead to the following strategy: filter
reviews to only look at 1-star and 2-star reviews and make sure you can live
with it if _all_ the things people say there end up being true. It's served me
well so far and no amount of 5* reviews will change my decision to buy or not.
Also, I look for things elsewhere, and only go to Amazon for buying, I don't
use their search. That helps a lot as well

------
pergadad
"use the reporting tools" \- as far as I'm aware there is no reporting tool
for "this product is fake" and "this review looks fake".

If they did want to fight fake reviews they would make reporting easy.

They'd also not allow completely different products to be listed on the same
page.

...

------
mancerayder
A colleague recently pointed me to fakespot.com, where you paste the URL of a
product (like an Amazon product) and (it seems) it does an ML type analysis to
score the likelihood of fakeness in the aggregate of reviews with a score and
then highlights the likely fake ones and why it thinks what it thinks.

There's surely a market for verification for customers as much as there's one
for the criminally-minded sellers.

~~~
shostack
Which begs the question of why Amazon isn't offering this themselves, or doing
it in the background in a way that prevents this from being the problem it is.

I have to wonder at some level if in the short term this boosts their sales
figures, but long term erodes trust in buying from them and diminishes their
stranglehold.

I used to trust Amazon reviews to the point I'd often not read a ton or
research reviews else where before purchasing.

These days I often opt to just buy from a retailer from a name brand. With
Amazon increasing prices it often isn't much difference in price and there's
better quality control.

It has officially become a chore to buy something on Amazon if you care about
doing any due diligence.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
I would guess that the reason that Fakespot works is that not too many people
use it (relative to the total number of Amazon users) so people writing fake
reviews don't specifically try to beat it.

Anything Amazon is doing, the people writing fake reviews will specifically
try to counter, so Amazon has a much harder job cut out for them.

------
qwerty2020
Great planet money podcast on this [1] with owner of site [2] that tries to
surface fake reviews.

[1]
[https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370)

[2] [https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/)

------
a-dub
This sort of thing seems pervasive these days. I see it on Yelp, Google
Reviews and Amazon. (hell, the NYT has had pieces on people buying their
competitors products en-masse just to give them 1-star reviews and move the
relative needle in terms of Amazon reviews).

It will have to be fixed though, it seems that buying things sight unseen only
really works when you have a lot of evidence (reviews) that the product is
good.

Seems like a good way for an upstart to differentiate themselves.

------
denzil_correa
Another example of Campbell's Law playing out [0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law)

------
Gerardd
Nowadays, going on Amazon for product hunt is equivalent to searching for a
malware-free good quality torrent.

------
huy-nguyen
I now check fakespot before every Amazon purchase.

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling
you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever
do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot
is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake
review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat
people.

~~~
Applejinx
"markets find new ways to cheat people"

This is a fascinating construction. To me, it makes perfect sense (and reality
seems to be heavily underscoring this perspective) but I feel it challenges
some profound assumptions very commonly held by Western culture, about how the
world works.

If markets replace normal transactions with the optimal ways to cheat people,
as a natural consequence of what markets are, how can we disrupt that
phenomenon and replace markets with something else that selects for other
values?

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
> _how can we disrupt that phenomenon_

Traditionally the answer to "How can we stop people from getting cheated?" is
to introduce consumer protection regulations and actively punish the cheaters.

------
wilsonfiifi
One way to solve this problem would be to create a curated directory of
reputable sellers on amazon and just link to their products. Sprinkle some
Algolia magic dust for search and voilà. Easier said than done but it’s a
start.

Actually it seems one site/app is doing that [0] haven’t tried it personally
but they seem to have the right idea IMHO.

Edit: I should have linked directly to their about page [1]

    
    
      [0] https://canopy.co
      [1] https://canopy.co/about

------
jliptzin
Amazon is worth an enormous amount of money. They can afford to solve this
problem. Here's one idea: invite regular amazon users with accounts active for
at least > 1 year, who have some kind of verified identity/address, and ask
them to become certified reviewers. Give them amazon credits/coupons in
exchange for reviews of all the items they've purchased in the last 6-12
months (if they haven't yet left a review for those items). Don't pick people
who have only been purchasing a few items from the same vendor. Find people
who have a purchase history in line with the average user, not a company
insider trying to game the system.

This way you don't have this perverse practice of incentivizing people to
leave positive reviews on items they want for free. If a reviewer is found to
be fake/scamming the system, just remove all their reviews and block them from
future reviews.

It's time to stop allowing the raw internet to leave reviews. The scammers
have won. Time to move on to a more sophisticated filtering system. This feels
like email before gmail came along and largely solved spam. It'll get better
again.

~~~
beckler
It's probably more profitable to leave it the way it is... Which opens up the
door for a competitor.

Imagine if there was a different site that became known for its highly
reliable ratings. It would eat Amazon's lunch and dinner.

~~~
hef19898
The more I think about it the more potential weaknesses I see at Amazon that
can be exploited by a competitor. At least in the traditional retail business,
I cannot judge AWS.

------
Tempest1981
I use fakespot.com, and it’s surprising how often the ratings are deceptive.
Just paste in any Amazon product URL.

For iOS, this shortcut makes it easier:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/9id390/check_ama...](https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/9id390/check_amazon_review_quality_with_fakespot/)

------
tinkerteller
Even bigger issue on FB is fake ads. About 2 out of 3 ads I see are usually of
some very bad product but with very attractive video and headline. I've seen
people in my family buying often and getting regrets. Now I have developed
muscle memory to absolutely not trust any product/sign ups on FB.

------
graphenus
There's another side of the medal. Merchants that are trying to sell anything
on Amazon have to have some positive reviews, otherwise their product will not
be sold at all, even when the product is great. I guess that here two factors
contribute, the product is being outranked by others, which have good reviews,
and users not trusting such products.

I totally see how in this chicken and egg problem merchants would choose to
buy some fake reviews.

Now, add the problem of lack of transparency in reviews, i.e. there's no
record of rejected legitimate reviews, no record of removed reviews; and now
you have a dysfunctional system. No one is happy about it, but it degrades
both quality of Amazon and trust in it.

------
dmritard96
On this post, many commentators seem convinced amazon will have issues
resulting from lack of trust. Any leading indicators that would bring some
credibility to this claim that anyone can share? In general, the HN community
seems to be a bit more opinionated (and informed) than the average nonHN
reader wrt privacy and other things that get attention in the tech circles.
Always looking to understand the difference between HN community and the
broader populace.

------
fetbaffe
As a result I never trust five star reviews. I only trusts reviews that has
some critism.

IMDB is also a site that has gone downhill, filled with fake reviews.

------
z3t4
Markets where you can not tell how good a product is simply by reading the
technical spec or scientific tests, eg markets where fake reviews will have a
strong impact is not a market you want to enter, because everyone is hustling
and the price people are willing to pay will keep dropping.

------
BadassFractal
What are some solid sources of product reviews these days, where the reviewers
are both competent and unbiased? I will occasionally go to sweethome or
wirecutter, but I'm never sure if I'm just reading a well hidden PR piece from
a sponsor or if this is their actual opinion.

------
failrate
Ive been having a direct experience with follower bots on soundcloud. I'll
post some weird music, and bots will immediately like or follow. I do not
follow them back, so they unlike and unfollow.

~~~
jobigoud
Yeah it looks like there is a "reputation economy", even for platforms where
money is only indirect. Instagram auto follow/unfollow, Twitter followers,
Youtube likes and subscribers, etc.

You can buy likes/karma/points, followers/subscribers, and also whole
accounts.

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a burgeoning market for GitHub followers
and stars so you can look good during background checks. Or that you could buy
LinkedIn "acquaintances" and "skills" and even Facebook "friends".

I'm worried about what's next. Rotten Tomatoes? GoodReads?

------
homero
I despise Amazon now. Every search returns ads for Chinese fakes and other
overpriced fba products. I absolutely love Costco and dream about having
Costco prices and impeccable quality with Prime.

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AJRF
I assume modern journalism is just the pursuit of the ability to conflate as
many big tech names into one headline as possible. Jackpot for the Guardian
here!

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thx11389793
Protip: if you find a crap product that's being shilled for in the reviews,
you can talk your way into getting paid decently for your silence. I know
someone who was paid several hundred dollars to not leave a bad review for a
something that cost under $50. One scathing review that exposes their scheme
might lost them tens, maybe a hundred multiples of their unit profit margin.

~~~
mprev
Or you could behave ethically and not allow yourself to be bought.

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codespeedy
This is unrelated comment I know. But i did not found any suuport or FAQ on
this site. Can anyone tell me why it's saying that I am still a new user so
that I can't post anything on this site? how much time it will take to aactive
my account?

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BugsJustFindMe
Couldn't you post a five star review, get reimbursed, and then change your
review to an honest one? Asking for a friend.

~~~
DominikPeters
The offers on those Facebook groups all seem to ask for amazon profile name
before agreeing on the deal, to check your reviewing history. I doubt your
proposed scheme would be long-lived.

~~~
i_made_a_booboo
So you have to be an honest fake reviewer.

The irony.

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electriclove
Fakespot.com

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
Reposting a comment I left elsewhere:

There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling
you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever
do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot
is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake
review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat
people.

------
WindowsFon4life
If this is such an obvious issue in E mercantile capitalism, then it seems an
obvious choice for other places that money and power come into play.

------
ryandrake
Honestly, I'm shocked that in 2018, anyone believes anything they read in
online reviews written by strangers on the Internet. It's got to be common
knowledge by now that most of them are fake and often paid for, and that some
companies manipulate which results you see based on not-quite-above-the-board
criteria. Who actually takes these things seriously anymore?

~~~
BadassFractal
I'm more interested why this isn't something that Amazon didn't decide to
police. They know when someone purchases something from their store, they can
limit reviews to those people who have many confirmed purchases from them and
perhaps have some kind of human validation to them (showing ID?). Just
spitballing here, but it seems like a solvable issue.

