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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

If http://fakespot.com/ can spot fake reviews, Amazon themselves should be able to do it. It's in their long term interest that product reviews are genuine so that buyers have confidence. If I can't trust Amazon reviews, I'll just shop at Target where at least I can handle the physical product before I buy it.

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A friend recommended fakespot to me a few months back. I tested it by pointing it to a product that I'd recently reviewed. It came back saying that the reviews were questionable, giving as an example of a shady review the one I'd just written myself!

Needless to say, I wasn't impressed with their heuristics.

Indeed. How do we know some fake-review-review site isn't corrupted and taking money to assassinate competitors?

There should be a site that reviews and rates sites that review and rate reviews, so we could finally know which reviews reviews site to go to to find out which reviews are authentic.

But then we'd need another site that reviews and rates sites that review and rate sites that review and rate reviews.

That's good: there will always be another site to do, our jobs are secured.

How do I know that you're not a shill for fakespot?

How does the person reading this comment know I'm not a fakespot competitor?

It's a tricky business, isn't it?

Good point. But, for pedantry's sake, your analogy is backwards. The person you're replying to is questioning the accuracy of Fakespot, which would make them a competitor. A shill would be endorsing the service, or placing doubt on the critical comment, as you have done.

You're totally right. I have no idea how I got that backwards!

It's in amazon's interest to suppress fake reviews, but it's definitely against amazon's interest to highlight the fact that their user reviews are often fake. The worst case for amazon is that users don't trust their reviews, and putting up a warning or score on reviews like fakespot doesn't improve the user's trust.

Amazon does police their reviews (as the article says, they've just sued another batch of companies for posting fake reviews) but they try to do it silently.

I've reported people posting hundreds of shill comments across a company's product line, I think it's nobody's job to care.

What is the rate of false positives with fakespot?

A 3rd party can afford to be over-zealous, but a first party solution can't.

It's not obvious it's in their best interest to block fake reviews. If product A has zero reviews and product B has ten glowing but fake reviews, which one makes more money for Amazon? Sure there's long-term reputation risk, but that's harder to quantify.

I mean, the primary purpose of this blog post isn't to educate the public but to point Amazon to the sophistication of their process and convince Amazon M&A to acquire them.

Do you think that Amazon doesn't already filter fake reviews? Also, people are already unlikely to write reviews, how likely do you think they are to keep writing reviews if their reviews keep getting flagged as fake?

[Disclosure: I work at AWS, but I really have no idea how any of this review stuff works]

Is there any way to make sure it only looks on (English) Amazon sites? I tried it, but it demands to look at all sites according to the description - which may not be the actual case, though.

Just don't go in the bathroom.

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