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Comment by jonstokes | Hacker News Reader

I actually know people whose job it is to write these things, and to create and maintain sock puppet personas on forums for the purpose of subtly promoting clients' products and disparaging those of competitors.

Then there are the professional reviews, which are all conflicted because most reviewers either get to keep the gear or the gear maker is a sponsor of the site/publication and the reviewer knows it. I say this as a person who's still involved in publishing reviews (of outdoor gear, mostly), and who most of the time gets to keep whatever some company sends me.

However rotten you think the adtech industry is, the state of product reviews online -- user generated, casual forum reviews, professional reviews, etc. -- is worse.

I have a standard rant about the current state of the web that I give all my family and friends, and it always ends with: "if you didn't pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement."

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The FTC requires disclosure for reviews that were written by individuals who were given a product for the purpose of reviewing it. It is considered anticompetitive and illegal to forego disclosing this about a review.

As an engineer at perhaps the largest ratings and reviews company worldwide, I would love to hear your standard rant in long form. Please pm me if you feel up to that conversation. Ideally the result would be an improvement in the quality of the content of billions of reviews.

I wish they'd extend that to requiring journalists to disclose which PR agent convinced them to write a submarine for their company.

If the news agency accepted compensation in return for writing the piece, then they are required to disclose it. Relevant FTC guidance:

> A basic truth-in-advertising principle is that it’s deceptive to mislead consumers about the commercial nature of content. Advertisements or promotional messages are deceptive if they convey to consumers expressly or by implication that they’re independent, impartial, or from a source other than the sponsoring advertiser – in other words, that they’re something other than ads. (...) As the FTC Endorsement Guides establish, advertisers’ use of third-party endorsements may be deceptive if there is an undisclosed material connection between the advertiser and the endorser – one that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/nat...

https://www.ftc.gov/public-statements/2015/12/commission-enf...

These rules are enforced. For example, Machinima recently settled with the FTC over the fact that Machinima paid endorsers to include footage of the Xbox in reviews and commentary.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/17/11254260/machina-settles-f...

I have NEVER seen at attributed article in 30 years of reading such things. Typically you are not paid to write an article, you are encouraged to write an article featuring that company, and they agreed to do advertising in your magazine or on your site.

I don't (just) care where they got material compensation. I care whether they're doing this because of influence from one of the subjects of the story -- e.g. if the PR dude wrote the story and the journalist just forwarded it on.

What would incentivize me to forward on such a review? Material compensation just happen somewhere... No one posts great reviews about a product because they were asked nicely. Unsolicited? That's fine; I consider that a review based on the merit of the product. Solicited? The first question is, "what's in it for me?"

This FTC regulation might have more teeth if the definition of compensation included, for example, influencing the hiring or employment of a relative related to the subject of the post.

Or "writing the freaking article for you".

There are probably indirect ways to "pay" the advertiser

I'm not seeing any contact info for you in your profile, or a means to PM you. You can ping me via email with my first name at jonstokes.com. I'm in Austin, too, so can meet up.

Those reviews are still averaged into the star rating, which is all that most people look at

I don't know of any studies (do you?). Do people only look at the star rating? We have done some statistics and found that star rating only tells a small part of the story. Anyone with a background in statistics knows this, though.

My personal strategy is to ignore all the good reviews. I already know why I'm interested in something. I want to know what other people think sucks about that something, and then I decide whether it is something that would bother me.

People are naturally more vocal about complaints, and if they have a serious gripe then they are far more likely to speak up in a negative review.

If they like something, that is basically meeting expectations and there is no urgency to seek resolution. So I expect a larger percentage of positive reviews to be shills, since nobody else will feel much need to post anything.

But if the negative reviews are things I don't care about (or are obvious douche reviews) that tells me a lot.

This is my base strategy as well but thinking it through it mostly means that negative smear reviews of competitors should be more "valuable" than fake positive reviews of the companies own products.

If you guys don't mind a third person in that conversation, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this issue lately and it would be enlightening to hear from others who have probably been thinking about it for much longer :) My email is my profile and I always reply. Also located in SF if anyone wants to discuss over food/drinks.

Always interested in more folks joining this conversation. It's what I do full time. I think my contact info is in my profile. I'm located in Austin so I'd have to fly out for drinks. ;)

> the largest ratings and reviews company worldwide

So, Amazon? Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by this?

Amazon is not strictly a ratings and reviews company. I don't know in total how many reviews they have.

Do those regulations have any teeth? Because it seems like it would be very hard to enforce.

If the FTC contacts you directly, expect your corporate lawyers to ask you to prioritize resolution over pretty much anything else.

You can file many kinds of complaints on the FTC website, but AFAIK, this is not one of them. It's a shame—I've encountered several websites, both as a consumer and as a startup founder, of pay-for-play reviews. Hopefully they'll create a category so that people can file complaints about this.

And if you think normal product reviews are in a bad state... well, then there are web hosting reviews. In that industry, pretty much 100% of the recommendations are driven entirely by 'whose affiliate scheme brings the most money'. Or even worse, they're like a mafia protection racket; pay the money and we'll take down bad reviews, don't pay and we'll take down the good ones and leave only the bad ones instead. Parts of that industry make the Amazon system look entirely respectable by comparison.

Then there's the state of video game reviews, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Double so when mobile apps are involved.

My favorites are reviews on the manufacturers own site. Oh wow! 480 5-star ratings out of 487?!

Look at that, the most expensive one is best rated!

Do you have an example? What makes it unbelievable? What if a product is legitimately that good?

It's not. No product is ever that good, simply because every product occasionally fails and some of your customers are awful.

True. The worst are VPN reviews though. Thats a total other league of amateur companies actually to be reviewed. Hosting companies, well its more clear who are the big players and such. vPN is a shady world - who knows who is really logging what - etc.

That's why you create a mesh route of various VPN providers. VPN provider 1 knows that you are using it to talk to other VPNs. VPN provider 2 knows that some VPN customer at VPN provider 1 is talking to website X. All the red tape and technical debt should prevent any major problems, if you know what I mean.

I personally just use Usenet for whatever people use VPNs for, I think. If I were doing something that needed to be kept from the NSA, I guess I would use Tor. Or postcards covertly hidden under rocks in public parks or whatever ;)

>if you didn't pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement.

But your own comment (that I'm replying to) isn't one, and we're not paying for it - you're speaking to us frankly and off the cuff (and if anything, against your own interests on those other sites) because of the informal club-like forum that this is. In the end I and any other readers here are giving you all due weight. in exchange everyone else speaks frankly about stuff they know about. You can read stuff here that probably posters are explicitly prohibited by their employers from posting. some guy from (insert whatever state agency here) can probably post from a throwaway but still waaaaaaaaaaay in contravention of whatever their policies are, and with only a little bit of indirection.

So it's hardly as simple as you suggest. yeah you have to read through the bullshit, but this has always been true everywhere. caveat emptor.

Or jonstokes works for a paid, members-only site that provides owner-verified reviews, making his post a subtle advertisement.

That's not a bad business idea :)

That's why I qualify with "probably". Also, it's sort of a deliberate overstatement intended to encourage the hearer to err on the side of caution.

A system that has worked for me is:

1. Foremost Does the product meet my need?

2. I ONLY take the negative reviews seriously and look for commonality between them. If I can live with those issues than I purchase the product.

3. I'm also cautious of products where users appear a bit over zealous to correct bad reviews.

Loads of products have fake bad reviews now, left by competition. The next logical step is fake corrections, and fake silly reviews on own product. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future every product has a 4.75 star average, and the shills instead of bad reviews start writing fake-sounding good ones.

This is close to my strategy, but I mostly read reviews of 2-stars, 3-stars, 4-stars. I sort by usefulness, and read about 10 of each star-rating by usefulness, then recency. I've been thinking about packaging that 'workflow' into a browser extension, but I'm not sure how often Amazon changes the structure of their review content.

> I'm not sure how often Amazon changes the structure of their review content.

All the time, I think they do a decent amount of A/B testing on product pages (which would make sense). I looked into scraping reviews and doing some analysis for this exact reason.

Indeed. I often get paid to write these types of reviews informally.

And what are you advertising?

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