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Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

This came up recently: Article summarizing the embedded video "Data Proves Amazon Reviews with 'Free or Discounted Disclaimer' are Extremely Biased"

http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-are-b...

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Just to promote your link a little more incase anybody browses past it - the video in the post is very interesting, it was at the top of reddit a few weeks ago[0]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk

The video is a well produced and informative plug for a startup that produces a browser plugin to filter out incentivized reviews and to replace ratings with filtered ratings. The startup is ReviewMeta[1] - and you'd think they would be pivoting after this decision.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53i2wo/i_analyzed_1...

[1] http://reviewmeta.com/

On that note, I'm sure this announcement will make for an interesting day over at ReviewMeta.

Searched to see if anyone here mentioned ReviewMeta. If anything, this will make their service even more important because the beauty seems to be in tying all the fake reviews together, not necessarily using these keywords.

Hmm. They actually may have a really good pitch to make to Amazon if they're even interested in being bought. If they have some really good models for detecting fake reviews (which presumably they do beyond disclaimer string matching), that might be a good investment for Amazon to make for enforcing their new guidelines.

True. I'm close to Tommy at ReviewMeta because we're "competitors" in the supplement space (he's a great guy), but I'm not sure what his end game is.

What's infuriating is that you know that Amazon has the talent and data to stop all the fake reviews. Makes you wonder why they allow it..........

I ended up installing the plugin after their video went viral, although I haven't used it yet to make a purchasing decision.

They could pivot to filtering reviews based on web of trust - users could be able to provide a set of reviewers they trust, or it finds reviewers a user has a lot in common with.

I don't review most Amazon products, mainly because I'm lazy. But I do like them. That means that if I were exchanging the product for a review, then in all likelihood it would be a positive review.

I suppose it is a bias even if that wasn't the intention.

The bias is that many of these people are serial reviewers that have been selected because of their willingness to leave positive reviews. They jeopardize their participation if they leave a negative review.

The quid pro quo is simple: leave positive reviews in exchange for more free stuff.

you can read results many way, including "this means that incentivized reviews makes otherwise lazy but happy customers, to leave a review."

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