This is an important thing to tackle too. Amazon is notorious for allowing shady practices like Sell product A for lots of 5* reviews, then change the product listing to a completely different thing (which may or may not deserve 5) ...
Another aspect is review solicitation. eg: ios games often pop up with their own modal of "Rate us" and if you click 5 it redirects you to app store to make a review, if you click 4 or less it redirects you to a feedback form. They grease the path for positive reviewers.
iOS: That’s 100% against the rules. Much like other dark patterns like forcing a sign up or location access as gating to the rest of the app. Or using notifications for advertising.
Now if only Apple would enforce those (or stop doing them themselves).
I've thought about starting a page to call out the apps that abuse push notifications for ads to show that Apple isn't enforcing its rule.
> 4.5.4 ... Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
The worst offender is DoorDash. If you turn off push ads, after you place an order it will prompt you to turn on notifications "to get the latest on your order". Agreeing turns on ads. You get the prompt even if you already have order update notifications enabled.
To all commenters quickly pointing out the ways this rule is far from perfect: you are completely right. This being clarified, is the alternative doing nothing? Because that's where we are.
When the FTC says "we're cracking down on online reviews" with things like this the average Joe gains more confidence in them, so yes, the doing nothing approach is actually better IMO.
How about; do things that you can enforce and expect a positive net impact from, do things in a way that will address the dozens of obvious first impression questions that came up here due to lack of specifics. If you’re going to do it, put some thought into its execution and administration.
And most of all, don’t make global generalizations on commentary that is quite specific and on a very particular topic.
Well step 3 is the part they just made illegal. If you are OK with breaking the law, nothing is going to stop you until you get caught and fined. Presumably the getting caught and fined part will be enough deterrent.
Please re-read. The FTC defining it as fake means nothing if the FTC does not, in practice, crack down on it regularly.
The FTC can say it's illegal to do X, and all companies can do X with impunity if the FTC, in practice, does not do anything about it when companies do X.
I don't know this seems to be fairly broad statement that could allow enforcement for any number of schemes:
> The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the experience of the person giving it.
And how do they even audit it? Do they require only users who verifiably used/purchased the product to submit reviews? Do they require the reviewer to actually use the product? for sufficient amount of time so that the review is more than just "first impression"? So many loopholes, this won't change anything except perhaps a few big marketplaces but it's doubtful they will be able to police it
I don't have the most faith it will be easy to execute but I would imagine:
- Some disgruntled people at company's could leak directly, which would make engaging in this behavior riskier
- Random individuals or competing companies could monitor product reviews and report. For example, show that an Amazon product ID used to be for another product 3 months ago when reviews were written.
I'm optimistic. There are a lot of regulations (including digital regulations) that everyone ends up following even if the government isn't monitoring things themselves. The risk of penalty just needs to be high enough, and hopefully places like Amazon realize the downside/penalty of fake reviews now makes it worth policing.
It obviously won't help your "first impression" review problem but that's not the intent of the law and not sure why the government would be involved in that. A lot of movies don't hold up well on a rewatch, too. If you are that particular about buying something that lasts X years then you can seek out dedicated advice blogs/youtube channels.
That's actually a really good point. I can review a can opener in a few minutes. Either it opens the can or it doesn't. How would I ever review something like a Ford F-350? I don't even have a trailer heavy enough to test the towing capacity.
Well, that's a bad example ... The can opener I had for the first 50 years of my life left a dangerous crazy sharp metal edge around the opening which I cut myself on more than once. The Oxo can opener I've had for the last 10 years rolls the edge as it cuts and removes the entire top of the can; what's left is extremely safe, at least by comparison with the old style.
Then again, when I was much younger, I had a backpacking can opener that was useful when hiking in places where sometimes buying canned foods made sense. It was about as large as a very large postage stamp, and crazy good for the size and weight. I wouldn't want to use it at home (much), but it was awesome when I had to carry it around.
So, even for can openers, the story can be complicated.
Also, assuming that the primary purpose of an F350 is towing is ... interesting. Lots and lots of them here in rural NM (as much as anyway, anyway), and they are rarely towing anything.
Not debating the practicality here, but even if you need your truck to do something only once in the entirety of your ownership, it needs to be capable of this all the time. Towing, crawling, etc.
I disagree. I've never had a vehicle that does 100% of whatever I'd want a vehicle to do. At some point we need to make tradeoffs and accept that we'll either have limitations or need to solve some problems in a different way.
Letting something that is 1% of operating hours for a device drive requirements strongly is often a mistake. With some obvious exceptions because e.g. I cannot choose when I am going to engage in maximum braking and defer it to a different vehicle.
They do make trade offs. Just not the same you might make. The F350s are limited on where they can park and are a pain in the ass to drive around a city. Some people tow stuff more frequently than they go into the city though, so it probably is a reasonable trade off to them. Also comes with some other perks like comfort and more beefy off road capabilities. Something that is valuable in rural areas even without towing.
I tow stuff about a dozen times a year and live in a city. I drive a Tahoe because not being able to tow when you want to is a pretty big inconvenience even though I’m a single occupant driver 90% of the time and it’s way bigger than I “need”. Turns out it’s quite comfortable and I just like it, even if I wasn’t towing ever.
I went years of renting vehicles just to tow. It sucks in a lot of ways. No one just wakes up and thinks “I’m going to tow some stuff”. You’re doing it for a reason, there’s probably a high amount of labor involved in that reason, trying to do it all in the rental window or find an appropriate vehicle on the day you need it. Is a challenge. I’ve set rental reservations then it rains so I can’t do the work I needed to. Clear skies tomorrow but have to wait a week for another rental to be available. It’s a hassle.
Another thing I struggle with is my towing needs fluctuate a lot. Earlier this year I was doing a construction project and ended up needing to tow stuff practically every day for 6 weeks. If I tried to do that any other way than owning a capable vehicle, it’d have been logistically challenging. Trying to time vehicle rental with trailer and equipment rentals would have dragged the construction project out to easily triple the time just by adding delay, probably much longer. Not to mention the cost of it all. Which the bigger vehicles do cost more, but they are assets even if depreciating. When you rent it’s pure expense. The rent cs own calc can flip quickly.
Sure. I'm not saying it's completely unreasonable.
Here the person was saying "once in the entirety of your ownership". If it's really once in the vehicle's life, then you really should rent something else when you need this.
I understand renting vehicles to move stuff is a PITA. I've used the hardware store's trucks several times and it adds a lot of anxiety to a project (though I've never had a really tough time with availability).
Ah I think he was making a point about the need being Boolean more so than a literal meaning of once. You said 1% which probably matches up to my usage of the tow feature. All good though, those rentals are definitely the most available but they rarely work for me as I usually need more time. They design it to be highly available for short store-to-home trips.
Occasionally I still rent, sometimes I need a bigger truck than I have due to weight.
I bought a truck for similar reasons (was tired of constantly having to rent/borrow cars to tow or haul/pick up something that doesn't fit in a "normal" car). I got a lot of utility use out of it over the years and I do honestly agree, even though I now almost never have to use it for anything truck-related I'm still very happy with it, it's very comfortable and reliable. I'd buy another one in a heartbeat. The convenience of knowing I can spontaneously throw anything I want in the back without ever thinking or planning about it in the rare cases I do still occasionally have to is just the cherry on top at this point.
> but even if you need your truck to do something only once in the entirety of your ownership
I'd just say rent something for that one off time in its entire ownership. Otherwise, I'd be daily driving a 26' box truck because I moved apartments every few years.
One time I had to ship a few pallets of stuff across the country. I guess I should have just bought a semi-trailer truck as a daily driver.
I can rent a box truck for moving easially enough, and generally I know far enough in advance that I can reserve it.
However I've never found a truck I can rent to two. Sure I can rent trucks, but they come up with a large pile of fine print which says I cannot two. Even those box trucks cannot tow, or can tow but only their trailer which has specific restrictions on what you can use it for. Oh, and the trailer they allow you to use has surge brakes which are terrible.
I've rented trucks to tow a few times over the years. Enterprise truck rental has trucks for towing, just a weight restriction.
But to be honest the vast majority of times I've needed to rent a truck to tow something it's because I was renting something towable. I can't imagine I'd bother renting some equipment from one place just to rent a truck from someplace else.
The only trailers I can find for rents have surge brakes (or not brakes at all - and thus too light duty for what I want to haul). I'll keep my trailer with electric brakes just to avoid those.
I see a ton of 5 star reviews that just say something like "Super fast shipping!" and think, "OK, have you even opened the box? does it work? is this review for FedEx?"
Amazon is loaded with LLM generated reviews now. They stand out as overly wordy and rambling while being light on any critical discussion of the product.
Some will be obvious, such as a review for a book or game or other media item that hasn't been publicly released. I would expect a platform such as Amazon would have responsibility to suppress reviews for items that are not, and have never been for sale. A flood of reviews all coming in immediately after the product goes on sale, or a statistically improbable distribution of geographic locations would also be suspicious.
Im curious about the opposite practice, sharing reviews across several SKUs. I basically stopped looking at reviews because they were unrelated to the one I was buying.
I get that some products have configurations, like color and size, but often times wildly different products are grouped together.
On mobile they make it pretty hard to read reviews (or maybe im in some sort of A/B test where I'm only allowed to ask their LLM about what the reviews say?)
Rating averaging methods _should_ treat scores with fewer data points as less trustworthy and either suppress showing the score or apply some early-rating bias. I.e. if users are sorting by rating new products should never be near the top.
Otherwise it should be possible to sort products or even brands/sellers by age and prefer older ones with more reviews.
I'm not sure Amazon does the first though ATM, and it definitely doesn't do the latter.
This doesn't help when every useless chinese widget on Amazon with a RNG created brand name has literally thousands or even tens of thousands of fake reviews. Yeah like 10,000+ were so enamored with this {insert useless item here} that they felt compelled to leave a 5 star review. Amazon has totally sold out like eBay. I don't shop on either anymore because it's hard to find real brands and feedback and reviews are fake. Not to mention the blatant fakes of major products ...
Unfortunately some of the weird things I need I can't figure out who else sells them. I can search amazon or ebay and find someone but they don't have a presence elsewhere (at least not that I can find)
Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials: The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services
If you covertly switch the product, then the reviews shown are from people who did not have actual experience with the product.
Something similar to this happens on eBay. Sellers will sell a product say a usb adapter, cheap and fully functional, users leave reviews and then the seller changes the listing to be a completely different item, retaining all the previous ratings and sale counts. How would this apply here is a good question.
Wouldn't like to assume but regulatory bodies usually think about these things in advance no ?
Haven't ebay reviews always meant to be about the seller and not necessarily the product? Ebay started with the expectation it was normal people auctioning used goods. Having reviews for a specific product doesn't make sense when there is no fixed product. Obviously things have changed over the years but the site is still largely built around those assumptions.
Yeah so when you view a listing now from a business it will show "100 units sold" but you're right it's crazy you can just change the whole product. I think it's specific for the business sellers.
I mean, step 3 would be illegal... your question is impossible to answer, since you hand waive the illegal step as saying "they do it in such a way that the FTC isn't going to crack down on".
This is basically the equivalent of saying "How are you going to stop crime X if they commit crime X in a way that let's them get away with X?"
Either they find a way to enforce the rules against step 3, or they fail to do so. We can't know yet.
The online shoppers, that I know, have learned to pass on products with a few high reviews, in a highly competitive space. If the signal weak, it's not something to trust.
* Step 1, take a product with a terrible rating
* Step 2, create a new SKU for the exact same product so it has no ratings
* Step 3, get a handful of fake 5-star reviews (in some way the FTC isn't going to crack down on)
* Step 4, blast the old terribly reviewed product that now has good reviews on marketing
* Step 5, get 10s of thousands of sales, $$$
* Step 6, let the terrible reviews pour in
Repeat to step 1 (possibly under a different brand name).