Black Friday Shoppers: Beware of Fake Five-Star Reviews (wsj.com) 71
As shopping takes off for the holiday season, so do phony reviews -- and pressure is mounting on major retailers to fight back. From a report: More than a third of online reviews on major websites, including those on Amazon.com, Walmart and Sephora, are fake, meaning they are generated by robots or people paid to write them, according to Fakespot, which identifies fraudulent reviews. The problem has become so pervasive that the Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on violators, and lawmakers are pressing Amazon to do a better job of policing reviews on its website. This month Apple Inc. pulled all product reviews and ratings from its online store without explanation. Amazon, Walmart and Sephora dispute Fakespot's findings but say they are taking steps to make their reviews more reliable. In Amazon's case, it said it has spent more than $400 million to protect customers from review abuse and other fraud or misconduct in the past year, and that it prevented more than 13 million attempts last year to leave inauthentic reviews on its website. Further reading: When Is a Star Not Always a Star? When It's an Online Review.
Always google. (Score:3, Interesting)
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If the text is just buzzwording and no actual content it's a fake.
I'm just waiting for 5 star reviews on "Rise of Skywalker" - or is it "Demise of Star Wars"?
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I'm currently looking for a good 34 inch monitor, and the number of reviews is a bit overwhelming. All monitors have a ton of good and bad reviews.
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Re:Always google. (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody buys a monitor, finds it acceptable, and takes the time to go to the retailer website to post a review.
Actually, I do.
I review most of the stuff I buy om Amazon, good, bad, or ugly. Even the little stuff usually gets a review. I don't give very many 5-star reviews, mostly 3s and 4s. I try to write a fair review of the item mentioning the good and the bad.
If it's just "acceptable", I'll say so. If it's really a piece of shit, I'll say so and give the reason(s) I think it's a piece of shit. If it's awesome, I'll say so and give it 5 stars, but it's really got to be good to get 5 stars.
I've probably done hundreds of reviews of Amazon stuff, and I hope they benefit people looking to make a decision on buying something.
Re: Always google. (Score:2)
I used to post reviews to Amazon until I was shopping for a pixel 2xl case literally the same day the phone came out and noticed nearly 1k 5 star reviews from verified purchasers on one particular case, numerous of which mentioned having the case for months. I posted a reply to several of them calling them out as fake, and shortly after that my account was banned from posting anything at all on Amazon due to "unusual review activity" and they had deleted all of my reviews. Apparently Amazon doesn't take kin
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Negative reviews may have a legit complaint, but people love to dogpile.
A large percentage of negative reviews appear to be written by idiots who don't understand what they've purchased. This nvme SSD is a piece of crap because I can't plug a SATA cable into it. Or This 34" monitor gets 1 star because it's too big for my desk. Or (stumbled upon when I was shopping for a camera lens) "This Nikon lens looks very nice, but I have to return it because it doesn't fit my Canon Rebel.
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I saw one that complained of fan noise on a fanless graphics card.
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The problem with monitors (and a lot of other products) is that some manufacturers will initially produce a really good monitor, and once it's out there and has gotten a good reviews they'll swap out the components to something cheap and then ride out the reputation they got. So it can be the case that both the good and bad reviews can be true - depending on which version of the monitor they've gotten.
One way to sniff this out is to look at the time stamps on the reviews - if the old ones are good and the
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I forget now what the article was, but I found identical reviews on different sites, even including the shit spelling & grammar.
It's shite. (Score:2)
Simply don't bother with it. It's so shit they should call it brown Friday.
Does anyone believe good reviews? (Score:5, Informative)
Just my 2 cents
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Me too, although it occurs to me to wonder if some online seller has thought to one-star his competition.
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Indeed! "My ear-pods popped out and killed our puppy."
Whatever work-around one finds to fake reviews probably doesn't scale because if everybody does it, the scammers counter it.
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I usually just browse the bad ones just to get an idea of what to expect. Just my 2 cents ;)
I do the same. If I see recurring complaints about certain aspects of a product, I assume that's probably a real issue, or a potential one.
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Are they smart enough to report similar specific problems across multiple reviews?
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Re:Does anyone believe good reviews? (Score:5, Interesting)
You can usually tell if they are real because they talk about important real world issues and give a realistic account of them.
For example I wanted to buy a USB battery. Reviews talking about real world capacity and current measurements (with photos of the test set up and meter), talking about the fact that it can be charged while also discharging unless you need the USB-C port which is used for both, they had credibility.
For stuff like that at least if it doesn't live up to the hype you can just return it. As long as it's not going to cost a fortune to send back it's no big deal.
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Re:Does anyone believe good reviews? (Score:4, Interesting)
The best idea is to browse the 3 star ones. 1 star is usually because someone is irritated that something arrived damaged or it is some competitor or drama queen. 5 star are usually fake.
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It goes both ways (Score:3)
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In other words, Americans are fucked.
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From there, in most cases, it's fairly straightforward to sift through the lower reviews and find those that actually suggest inferior quality/defect vs. user incompetence/oops-i-ordered-the-wrong-thing-and-now-am-very-angry/shipping problems. Requires effort that many are not willing to expend, unfortunately.
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The idea is, everybody knows that the company is saying good stuff about their product, so people instinctively look for bad reviews, because they already got the "good news", and people think they know that "bad review" is actually accurate and the good one might not be.
As for the idea that most reviews are fake... they are. Companies own "affiliate" sit
Good point (Score:2)
Re: Good point (Score:2)
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And it's Chinese vendors which do the most review abuse on Amazon. That's why the Amazon Marketplace is a cesspool with virtually no adult supervision and should be avoided lest you get stuck with crappy/counterfeit shit.
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Hyperbole much?
How to prevent fake idea .... (Score:2)
Usual anti gaming things like one can not review and award points for the same product. Some meta checking to see if people are awarding points fairly. A few trusted super reviewers with infinite points to kick start the review system ...
Wondering if anyone in Slashdot community is aware of such a system of crowdso
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I hate to be a broken record about this, but the correct way to handle review trustworthiness is by letting users rate reviewers. I worked for a startup called MediaX, Inc. in Santa Cruz that did websites and web games. It was grossly mismanaged, so it went away, but that's not the interesting part of the story.
We were hired by Creative to create a music-selling site whose name may be familiar to you in spite of the fact that they shitcanned the project after we finished development, because it was called M
The star system is broken (Score:2)
Trusting reviews from people you don't know make no sense to begin with. You can probably believe most bad reviews, but good reviews are very hard to trust.
Even if you ignore paid for reviews. Many people post a review after 20 seconds of obtaining the item. It does not tell you much.
What would be useful is to use social media to figure out who you know that bought that item before and put you in contact with them. And get their reviews.
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Neither movie critics nor JD Power (isn't that an infomercial company that sells juicers?) are trustworthy. They are like politicians -- you can tell they are lying because their lips are moving.
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Trusting reviews from people you don't know make no sense to begin with.
And yet we've been doing it for a long time.. That's why movie critics are a "thing".
Note that you somewhat know movie critics. You can follow some particular critics and you get to understand how they think about movies. In turn that enables you to calibrate your opinion based on their opinion.
Then, their opinions become useful to you.
Though, I wouldn't trust a basic scoring system. IMDB ratings, for instance, have been off their game for about 10 years.
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I can't search for anything on Amazon without having to wade through tons of listings for Chinese crap (and I'm not saying the Chinese don't make some good stuff, just that they make a disproportionate amount of pure junk)
Amazon are only interested in the sale, and are relying on their name, somewhat inaccurate reputation for cheapness and near monopoly status to keep going. Sure a lot of stuff is cheap, because they sell unregulated crap that doesn't remotely pass consumer protection laws, but it's hard to
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Re: The star system is broken (Score:1)
Yes, but that sometimes is meaningful. It can mean that the shipper is irresponsible, or that it's something that inherently doesn't ship well.
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Filtering at the source would help (Score:4, Interesting)
Apply a basic filter to posting of reviews:
It's not perfect, I can think of ways an operation using actual people to write fake reviews can use those people's delivery addresses to get around the filter, but it'd add enough friction to the process of generating fake reviews to make it unprofitable.
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Not good enough. Sellers are willing to reimburse entire purchases for fake five-star reviewers, especially for relatively inexpensive items, which means that people are legitimately buying items, delivered to their own homes. As a result, there's no obvious internal data the reseller can identify which distinguishes a fake review from a real one. The only thing they can do is look at potential heuristic data, which can naturally be gamed by posting a few lower-rated reviews of normal products they might
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A five-star review on a product someone got a reimbursement on should be a pretty massive red flag in most situations. Unless the reimbursement is happening through external channels, that should be easy to catch.
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Obviously, the reimbursement happens outside official channels, or as you say, it would be trivial to catch. Or, the reviewers are allowed to just keep the products, in which case there is even less of a trail to follow. Again, don't look for easy answers here. Online retailers like Amazon are spending millions and millions of dollars combating this, and they're still having very limited success.
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How do you think those scams work? Basically the seller sends the buyer some money to buy a product and leave a review. If they buyer complies they get more money to repeat on another product. The "reviewer" gets more
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A five-star review on a product someone got a reimbursement on should be a pretty massive red flag in most situations. Unless the reimbursement is happening through external channels, that should be easy to catch.
They are. It happens frequently. I was contacted by a seller about this actually. On a developer forum a seller was offering a product for "testing" for "free" supposedly. I posted in the thread asking a question. For this seller / manufacturer you make the purchase on Amazon and review it. Then they said they would PayPal you the money for the purchase in return for your review. (It had to be this way so you would review it, and it would come up as a verfied purchase). Very shady in my opinion.
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Amazon already has that filter. Unfortunately they buried it where most people will never see it. You have to scroll all the way down (but not all the way to the bottom) to the text that says "See all ### customer reviews" and click on it. That'll take you to the page to sort and filter the reviews. In the dropdown under "Filter by" there's an option to limit the reviews to just those who have made ve
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"The account posting the review has to have bought the item [here: on the Amazon platform] and the shipment has to have been delivered [... and ..] picked up ..."
I have written perhaps 3 or 4 "reviews" of products that I bought within those ~15 Years that Amazon exists. Based on the argument given and cited above only one of them would have made it through this filter. Why? Because I read Amazons reviews (and other details) online, went to a local shop, looked up the stuff on the shelves and decided then wh
Just... (Score:1)
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Just read the bad reviews. There is where you will see if the product is good or not.
There is also where you will see if the person reviewing the product is an idiot or not. On Amazon, reviews of computer components such as memory and video cards are consistently 5 - 10% 1-star across the board, and the reasons given indicate pretty clearly that some people just shouldn't be allowed to buy that kind of stuff.
Caveat Emptor (Score:2)
...if you don't understand fake reviews on the internet in 2019, I'm sorry, that's like being too stupid to understand how to cross a street.
How 5 star reviews backfire (Score:3)
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If I see anything that seems to be mostly ir all 5 star reviews, I become suspicious and assume that they were written by paid shills.
Of course, but that's just the stupid shills. The smart shills realize they have to counterbalance the rave reviews with a few grumpy, whiny, uninformed and crazy low-star reviews. You know, the kind of reviews that make you think there's nothing actually wrong with the product and a whole lot wrong with the reviewer. And that's really the problem here, maybe you spot a pattern to filter out real reviews.
But if that became some kind of popular trick that is common knowledge and guides advice you to, well th
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Sales people are really creative when it comes to this, and they catch up. Not impossible to find truth about product, but that for the most part is not going to be reviews especially on th
Fakespot's methodologies are a bit questionable (Score:2)
Having seen the grades and also scrutinizing the actual reviews to the extent a human can, I'm not completely certain as many things are as fake as they say they are. If Fakespot were to, with their grade, also include some extra data explaining the poor grade as well as some P value, etc. underl
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No, not that easily. They spend tens of millions every year, they have hundreds of people whose job is to try to clear out the mess. It would take a structural change in the way reviews are handled, and whatever they do will piss people off.
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At a bare minimum, they could provide some additional review data to those customers who care (e.g., average rating from verified purchasers, unverified purchasers, and total average, etc.)
Friday (Score:2)
Reviews (Score:2)
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Especially Amazon... (Score:1)