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Comment by plicense | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting - back when I joined Amazon, one of the new hire on boarding questions was about how to deal with bad reviews and the principle was to just leave them as it is and not delete it - I am not 100% sure about it though - can someone confirm? If so deleting these reviews seems opposite to that

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The key is whether the reviews are legit. If the review is made by someone who did not buy the product, its not a 'review'. It is then violating Amazon's rules and should be deleted.

By a large margin, the ratio of legitimate (verified buyer) to "maybe but probably not legitimate" reviewers is the worst out there at the time of this article's publishing. It's pretty clear these are not valid reviews.

Personally, I think on hot topic items like this, Amazon should simply lock down 100% to verified purchases for like, 2 weeks.

The reason they don't do this is that the people with pre-publication access to the book, while mostly the authors friends and family, are the only source of reviews for buyers looking at Amazon on launch day. They don't want to throw away those reviews, and those readers obviously didn't buy on Amazon.

They don't need those reviews in these cases. There are PLENTY of real reviewers in a high profile case like this.

I've reviewed plenty of items I didn't buy, mainly library books but also photo equipment on hire and tools and gadgets on loan from friends. Often being the only or second review.

Since my only investment is time ( or at most the loan fee ) I am not emotionally attached to the object and try to be as objective as possible.

Conversely I have sometimes postponed leaving a negative review of something I have bought until I can sell it on... cynical but no point cutting the bridge from under me

This isn’t new. Or isolated.

The news said it clear, some of the customers buy the book in a store, there is no evidence they didn't read it. And clearly big companys' values they always claims, such as 'leave bad reviews alone', 'don't be evil', they do not really want to obey it. They claim a rule, and break when they want, this is the real game rule.

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