Slide Caught Posting Fake Positive Reviews For Their Own App | Hacker News Reader

Slide Caught Posting Fake Positive Reviews For Their Own App

techcrunch.com

20 pointsmarrone16 comments

Headline is misleading. There's no problem posting reviews of your own products, as long as you identify yourself as being affiliated with the company. Posting ratings, on the other hand, is always unethical since they forcibly affect the average rating.

Well, the reviews were "Fake" because they were not genuinely written by anyone.

Although most of the Slide people I've met are religiously fanatical about their products, so maybe they were genuine, but posted with fake names.

Agreed. I've asked several ad people why I would want to work with them and they all say, "well, we're number 1." This answer is ALWAYS offered and never goes deeper.

Shocking!

btw, you should really check out submissions and comments by raghus here on news.yc - he's really insightful.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raghus

Reviews for startups have always been extremely artificial. In an ideal world, users would be very vocal about what they like and don't like. Surprise, they're usually NOT!

Techcrunch in particular is a traditional publicity channel that gets most of its information through heavily biased sources such as press releases, friends, etc. instead of directly from the users. This is why I find it hilarious that techcrunch should be the ones to call them out on producing biased information.

Then again, Arrington has been working to discover sites as a user through hn for example, so he may be doing a small part to correct this wrong.

I see nothing wrong with this. You'd be surprised at some of the stuff startups have to do to get out there and get initial traction, not limited to spam and "faking it till you make it".

The only thing that surprises me is that they were putting up fake reviews so late into the game. The benefits weren't that great at that point, and the risks at least mediocre. It just looks like laziness, if anything. Maybe they wanted to artificially stimulate some growth prior to that new funding round and possibly trying to get acquired, and fake reviews are just one of many methods used at once.

here is another related link:

Web 2.0 And Why You Shouldn't Fake Reviews http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You-Should...

Great guerilla marketing - unless you get caught of course.

1. You usually DO get caught.

2. There are ALWAYS more effective things for you to to do than forging positive customer feedback...

Such as improving the product so more people want it. Sounds like they employ people who aren't doing anything productive and have to dream up crap like this.

I actually think that more often than not you don't get caught.

I think it's "undecidable" because we'll never know how many do it but don't get caught.

The only thing I can say is I hope most get caught. But they're just wasting their time trying to fake value while they could be creating more value for themselves and others.

go try it, a statistically significant number of times, and tell us if you ever got caught.

That would only indicate my own skill or lack thereof at it (btw I think I'd be hopelessly clueless at doing it). You couldn't meaningfully generalize to the whole population.

Strictly speaking in terms of effectiveness, your #2 point is most often very wrong. You could be giving out free bars of gold and not have one customer speak positively of your service unless you really prod them.

People are EXTREMELY resistant to becoming advertising tools for corporations.

!Not a good sign at all, this undermines the product regardless of anyones actual opinion. I personally don't think slide is anything special, a simple flash widget. The likes of which I have seen better examples made by single independent coders in there bedrooms with no fanfare whatsoever, is this really the best idea Paypal X could come up with?

>>>>>It just goes to show that great ideas ARE worth a lot more than great execution!

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