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Comment by iplaw | Hacker News Reader

How in the world will this new policy be enforced? I see only one possible outcome:

The reviewers who used to begin their review with "I received this product at a discount in exchange for a fair and honest review" will now begin their review with "I totally paid full price for this product and am a legit reviewer without paid-for bias."

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Amazon knows if a product has been bought with a discount and the amount of the discount; it can outright ban reviews from people who bought with a discount, or put these reviews up for special "review" (either human or automated).

You can still leave a review when you didn't buy the product via Amazon (or at all), so in theory vendors could send products outside of Amazon to get reviews. This however would become very complicated, and Amazon could still spot and review reviews that don't follow an Amazon purchase.

The only option left for vendors would be to ask reviewers to buy the product on Amazon for the full retail price, and then refund them outside of Amazon; not impossible, but difficult.

This change may be good in theory, but it will make it very hard for new products to exist at all / rise above existing ones, esp. given the way Amazon search engine (A9) apparently works -- ie, strongly favoring products that already sell a lot, even if they don't quite match the search keywords.

One could think of another option, which would be to offer users the possibility to filter out all reviews that don't come from a "verified purchase" (incentivized reviews aren't "verified purchase"), but still let them exist.

Conducting any transaction with an Amazon customer outside of Amazon is against the seller agreement and cause for removal.

first of all it is illegal to lie like that. so most reviewers will not do that.

also, amazon employs statistic engine (i am afraid to call it ai yet) and also a lot of humans who constantly monitor content (results of which goes back into stats engine)

so yes - they can enforce it on a global scale.

It certainly is not illegal to lie like that, or astroturfing would be illegal. Sometimes lawsuits arise from astroturfing, but the practice itself is legal.

You're wrong. Here's an example:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/07/warne...

Well, he's right in the sense that it's not illegal to lie - it's the companies paying the people who don't disclose who bear the liability.

I think it's a stretch to think most reviewers will care about the legality (especially because it's pretty unlikely to get enforced against them) but it may get the "career reviewers." I wonder what proportion of these reviews are from those "whales."

Every once in a while the FTC goes on a rampage and Amazon not doing due diligence to ensure product reviews it uses to sell it's wares poses too much of an organizational risk as its one of the largest targets out there.

I know from first-hand experience that as soon as you ask to deviate from a more or less standard workflow on leaving a review in exchange for a discounted product, MOST reviewers flock away. Of course very few reviewers might do illegal things, but these will be minority and highly unscalable for a purposes of launching product (plus these people will be quickly caught by amazon itself)

Amazon already annotates reviews to indicate if the reviewer has purchased the product on Amazon.

The scheme discussed here involves buying the product, so Amazon can't identify these reviews as being incentivized (unless they track use of discount codes)

Of course they can, and have for some time: the "verified purchase" badge does not show up on reviews that come from an incentivized purchase.

A business that runs on a perfectly legal, accepted practice is not the same as one which employs illegal or unacceptable methods. Like perjury laws, it doesn't make people honest in court, but it encourages it and provides for penalties or redress.

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