All the Product Reviews Money Can Buy | Hacker News Reader

All the Product Reviews Money Can Buy

nytimes.com

35 pointsdanso20 comments

> Many of the reviews arrived in a matter of minutes, and all were left without comment.

I think the example is misleading. It confirms many people's beliefs that they they can detect fake reviews based on characteristics like length, quality of the writing, etc. But anyone who notices those characteristics, and many people do, could write a much more sophisticated fake review. From what I understand, there are plenty of services that will do that.

Has there been any discussion on how to solve these sorts of issues recently? Clearly, going after the people doing them won't always work, as there will always be another platform.

Does a site like amazon only allow people who purchased the product through then leave a review? How about other sites?

It is very common for sites to allow non-verified purchasers to leave reviews. Amazon works this way. You'll see reviews on Amazon all the time where people specifically mention that they bought it somewhere else. I've always wondered why someone would leave a legitimate review on Amazon for a product they didn't buy from Amazon. Maybe the answer is that they aren't legitimate though.

Some review software notes when a reviewer is a verified purchaser. I look for that when reading reviews because at least they have the product in question.

That makes no sense to me. I can't imagine feeling strongly enough (positively or negatively) about something that I bought locally (or wherever) to bother commenting on Amazon. What does Amazon get from accepting reviews that are likely fake?

Sometimes companies would pay (or reimburse) for their "preferred" reviewers to purchase a product off amazon so they can leave favorable reviews as a "verified purchased".

Sometimes the reviewers would be honest and say they are reviewing on behalf of company X. Sometimes not.

Anyways, all of this is a roundabout way of saying that even reviews from verified purchasers may not be 100% honest.

Reviews on Amazon are a disaster. It's a virtual battlefield where dishonest competitors hire hordes of people to post negative reviews about their competitors.

Amazon could very easily put a stop to this by simply requiring that a person must have purchased the product on Amazon and have a purchasing history. Add reasonable heuristics (for example, you can't leave a review for a blender before it was delivered or for a weight loss product three days after you got it) and things could start to make sense.

Amazon can definitely make reviews legitimate and useful again but they are not interested for some reason. I don't know what that is at all. Allowing non-buyers to leave reviews makes no sense.

They'd order the product and send it back.

I mean it is bad that people can leave fake reviews, but it is even more messed up that amazon can sue these people for essentially breaking their tos.

It is on Amazon to find technical solutions to technical problems like this, not the government.

It's a technical problem that people commit fraud?

It strikes me as odd to characterize civil suits as "the government". Maybe private enforcement organizations would be harder on fake reviewers ;)

Civil courts, and the laws which they apply, are both products of government. It would be extremely odd to characterize them otherwise

But here, Amazon is the plaintiff. The government merely provides the (ideally neutral) structure. And common law goes back millennia. Would guys with baseball bats be a better option?

> But here, Amazon is the plaintiff.

And...so?

> The government merely provides the (ideally neutral) structure.

Yes, the government provides the courts, the laws that the courts enforce, and the laws that provide compulsory processes associated with legal actions once they are under way, and mechanism to enforce the remedies determined by that system. Resort to the legal system is a resort to government.

> And common law goes back millennia.

Not sure what that has to do with the issue of whether action the civil court system is aptly characterized as a use of government. Governments have been around for millennia, too. (And the actual complaint here isn't exclusively common law, though it does touch on that in the form of breach of contract; but it also has statutory claims, as well.)

> Would guys with baseball bats be a better option?

Whether or not the civil court system is a better option than guys with baseball bats is an orthogonal question to whether or not it is fairly characterized as a resort to government.

Fair enough. Civil suits currently depend on government. I find it hard to read comments about resorting to government without considering alternatives. I don't like government intrusion into personal matters. But it is nice to have a more-or-less neutral arbiter for disputes.

We're already finding that arbitration rather than courts to settle disputes puts the public at a much greater disadvantage than corporations. I don't think that's a good thing as corporations already wield much too much power. Arbitration also keeps cases from becoming public knowledge which again, not good for the public.

Well, yeah, I don't think it should be surprising that public institutions are sometimes better at serving the public interest. That's sort of the whole point of having them.

The technical solution is to identify them and sue them on technical grounds.

Leaving fake reviews is damaging Amazon's business model, so why shouldn't they be able to sue?

It's not a technical.problem -- people using a service offered by another with conditions in violation of those conditions is a social problems for which remedies have been available for some time. It's one of the major types of things for which the civil.justice system exists.

Everyone still is trying to work around the fact that you can't believe what random unknown people say, either in a bar or on the Internet. There is no solution; just stop believing it.

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