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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

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This story is kind of old news - anyone on chat groups who speaks chinese knows about these.

The thing is - chinese nationals using ingenuity to trick money out of americans, that's a recurring theme in the modern world.

> using ingenuity to trick money out of americans, that's a recurring theme in the modern world.

Fake reviews aren't "ingenuity," they're dishonesty and fraud that exploit a high-trust culture.

High-trust cultures are valuable, hard to create, and easy to destroy. The reaction to all this online review fraud is going to be default mistrust and wasted effort by consumers who are going to be forced to constantly second-guessing information or get scammed.

The only way to describe this is as an unfortunate inevitability of review systems as a whole.

I'd say of unmoderated (or poorly moderated) review systems. E.g., we don't see this on Angie's List or Houzz.

I've found that the only way to get useful information out of most Amazon reviews is to look at the 1- & 2-stars, trying to filter out the fake competitor hits, and see if there are any consistent issues that aren't DEU issues. Then look at the 3- & 4-stars and see what seems to be good. That said, I expect it'll only be a matter of time until this strategy is no good.

Another factor is reviews with pictures depending on what you are buying. In any case I cancelled Amazon prime. They wont be getting my money once my membership expires. I rather pay for a service thats worthwhile to me. I rather get my things at Walmart or BestBuy due to convenience and now BestBuy will price match Amazon.

For all the problems that Amazon has, there is a long history of Best Buy actively pushing consumer-harmful practises that I would still rate them a lower choice.

The first one that comes to mind is forcing printer manufacturers to not bundle USB cables so they can separately sell them at a high markup

I usually only buy things they can't bully themselves into like Macs or Surface devices, or gaming consoles. However, I was not aware of such awful nonsense.

If people wanted to fake review Angie's List or Houzz, they would do it.

I'd say this is exactly where some kind of web of trust could work. Meaning that everyone is shown the reviews of their added family members, their trusted people (with less weight) and so on and on. If they betray the trust the system could even have a "trust less" button. It'd actually give people the ability to choose who they trust.

Are you kidding? People I know have TERRIBLE judgement when it comes to products. Who builds trust based on that characteristic?

But a web of trust based on, "I like this reviwer, so I trust who they trust" seems reasonable.

So now I have to spend time reviewing reviewers? This smells like the next bullshit job (or, since I'm not even paid for it, just a huge waste of time).

I am really curious if this would actually work. I also think if you trust a reviewer and it turns out they are a bad reviewer than your trust rating should lower. (you turned out to be a bad reviewer reviewer)

That said I have no idea if this would. Seems those 87k people mentioned above would just trust each other to raise their trust ratings.

Its not about total trust "rating". That not how web of trust works. You, the informed and responsible user, have to look at who their connections are.

It's more like Linkedin: if someone adds you and they are a mutual connection with a bunch of coworkers you like, that's good. But if their mutual connections are all social climbing spammers, you know they either are one themselves or don't know enough not to fall for that stuff.

I imagine automatic reputation building for socket puppets will be right next on the market after such change.

People used to pay a premium for people that got out of their way and found the actually good stuff. Nowadays it's just more lucrative to build some trust and use it to defraud people as soon as possible.

I don't know where this path leads, but it's not looking nice.

You don't normally need to trust their judgement as long as they aren't straight up lying. As long as they are making an attempt at being truthful, you just have to try to evaluate their review from their perspective.

E.g, Janet says product X works really well and she loves it, but you know she likes them with a certain feature that you don't like. therefore you should stay away because the product probably has that feature you don't like

It all depends on how you use reviews, I guess. I look for obvious problems and cost that in. Anecdotally it’s fairly difficult to hide bad reviews. It’s your expectations that make you unhappy; I don’t expect much buying a product sight unseen.

You see the same issues on Yelp. Reviews are always a secondary indicator of quality compared to, say, experiencing it yourself or getting a recommendation from a friend. I’d guess that the review style that is best depends highly on the good or service being sold, much like establishing consensus, and there is no general purpose review pattern that works well.

I'd say this is exactly where some kind of web of trust could work.

There is a temporal dimension to this too. Everyone loves their new toy just as they unbox it. What interests me is reviews after having used it for a few weeks or months.

Amazon has all the data it needs to filter reviews by “people who have actually bought this, review left after n weeks”.

> Angie's List or Houzz.

Ok sure, you can put it down to moderation, or you can put it down to size. What is the size of Angie's list to Amazon?

Not only that, but Angie's List covers services that only reach a small market. So a fake review for any individual product has a much small potential reach.

I'd say that's an additional way to describe it.

Yep.

To me, the real bullshit is the expectation that anything other than a 100% 5/5 score is an indicator of serious fault.

If you leave 4/5 as an eBay review for example you have pretty much offended the seller.

Most products sold on eBay / amazon are too simple for detailed seller ratings to matter. The usefulness of a 5 star review system is far higher when there is a wide and fairly continuous spectrum of expected performance (food, airbnb) compared to a binary choice between "something this simple really shouldn't break so easily" and "it works fine".

There really should just be a "things went fine" and "something went wrong" toggle, with the option to leave a more detailed bit of feedback. "93% of people had no issues" is a lot more meaningful than "4.3 stars" to me.

Like on Fiverr where if I leave a 3 star review for substandard work, below expectations set by their portfolio, I feel like I've killed their dog.

Important to mention: ugly in terms of i assume illegality of this in many countries. I’m also convinced there are many countries when something like this is either fully legal or not covered by law this or another way. So “ugly ugly ugly” but technically and legally the caravan goes on.

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