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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

Technically, the pervasive Amazon counterfeit problem is unrelated to the fake review problem. Both are serious problems that Amazon does little to combat, but they're not the same. The counterfeiting is more insidious because Amazon is entirely at fault for mixing legit merchandise with counterfeits. Fake reviews on the other hand aren't Amazon's fault. That's just the world being filled with heinous assholes out to make a buck by cheating, lying, and stealing from everyone else. At best Amazon could independently audit and review all products themselves. Actually if they did that I'd probably start buying from them again...

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Amazon absolutely has to deal with the fake review problem. In some ways, you can think of it as analogous to google search. Google's moneymaker isn't the search; it's the ads. But Google spends a lot of time fixing search quality and dealing with people gaming search results because otherwise the ad revenue disappears.

I wouldn't be surprised if the actions Google took to push Amazon results off the first page product results skewed the Amazon product catalog towards gamed marketplace results. Amazon was getting a free ride on Google's results sort of like Wikipedia for a fairly long time. Now you have to dig to find links to either of them. The effect on Amazon may also be a result of pricing changes Google made around 2015.

I'm surprised to hear about this, as I frequently find myself having to explicitly -amazon -$ and other things to keep garbage product listings out of my google search results.

Amazon kind of audits and reviews products, or at least has an official program for sellers to solicit user reviews: it's called Amazon Vine [0].

For the reviewers (the "Vine Voices"), it looks like this: on a regular basis, you can choose a product to review (based on your past reviews, purchasing history etc., maybe - they don't disclose how that works), and Amazon sends the product to you. Within one month, you have to post a review.

You can post whatever review you want; to become a Vine Voice, you need a reasonably high reviewer ranking (mostly based on "helpful" votes: [1]). The reviews are labelled as written by a Vine Voice.

As a side note, I know a Vine Voice, and they get emails from companies offering to reimburse them for a product in exchange for a five star reviews every few days.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/review/guidelines/top-reviewers.html/

I don’t ever want to read any reviews by someone who gets free product, so if that’s how vine works, it’s broken by design.

Why though? If getting the product for free isn't contingent on you writing a positive review(only on writing one at all), why would it be broken?

The incentive structure can get seriously misaligned if you receive the product for free. You want to keep getting free products, which means that you want to make the person giving you the products happy. Amazon is giving you the products. Amazon is happy, or at least there is a common perception to that effect, if you rate things highly because then more people buy things from them. So you rate more highly so that you can keep receiving free products.

Not only that but, IMO, you can't really objectively review a product you didn't pay for and buy out of your own free will. "That's neat" for a product you got for free can easily be "waste of money" if you had to pay for it.

Most product reviews you see by bloggers and youtubers are seeded this way. Vendors understand that when people are curious about a product, they search for it and click on some reviews. It’s common practice to make sure that they have results by giving them to reviewers.

Reviewers generally fall into 3 categories.

The small time reviewers who are excited to get free stuff, and want more free stuff in the future. Aside from their delight of free product, which gives a major positive bias before they even unbox, there is also the fact that if they trash a product, nobody is sending them one again.

Then there is the professional reviewer. They monetize their website and youtube channel heavily, and they live or die by getting product to review. If they trash a product, they face a huge risk of not receiving anything from that vendor again.

The third is the fully independent outfit that has a revenue stream completely detached from the product, and often have to buy it on their own. This is very expensive, and not many consumers pay for reviews. Consumer Reports is an example.

As a result, almost any kind of review you find is likely worthless, and should be treated as a paid ad.

> As a side note, I know a Vine Voice, and they get emails from companies offering to reimburse them for a product in exchange for a five star reviews every few days.

Amzn should pay extra for those. Then ban them:)

> Actually if they did that I'd probably start buying from them again

Not that it would inherently solve the problem or prevent pay for play, but it would be a great strategy for Amazon to have an independent review company.

There are problems, though: 1. How do we trust that there's some objectivity, particularly as it relates to things that compete with Amazon products?

2. How could reviewers possibly cover any significant amount of the vast number of products Amazon sells?

I'd bet a lot of the fake reviews would disappear if they just:

1. Limited users ability to post reviews to say, 3 per year and no more than 1 in any given month.

2. Limit users ability to post more than one review per vendor, per year.

3. Only allow reviews by verified purchasers.

I think they'd just put in 365000 fake accounts, and continue posting 1000 fake reviews a day

365,000 credit cards, 365,000 delivery addresses?

If bots worked, they wouldn't have had to resort to real humans on Facebook to get reviews.

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