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Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

FINALLY.

"In addition, the order requires the defendants to notify Amazon, Inc. that they purchased Amazon reviews of their Quality Encapsulations Garcinia Cambogia capsules and to identify to Amazon the purchased reviews."

Online reviews don't work without trust. Maintaining trust is done by Amazon in this case, but sometimes the job is too big, especially at this scale. Amazon needs better tools perhaps, but the judgement of a court, backed up by a state? Damn, that is a powerful way to ensure there is some minimum level of trust in the marketplace.

I'm against too much government interference in the marketplace, but it's in everyone's interest to increase trust in the marketplace rather than let it become a market for lemons.

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The thing is that trust with Amazon is just not about the product reviews.

I have been genuinely amazed by Amazon service, delivery and choice but those days are over.

Years ago some right on woman ticked me off for recommending her a book that you could just get on Amazon. At the time I thought her attitude was a bit extreme - essentially she was already of the boycott Amazon persuasion. At the time I could not care less for bookshops, that battle had been lost and Amazon gave choice, delivery and price that couldn't be argued with.

Years later I have almost came to this woman's conclusion. What has changed? There are lots of small trust things. It seems that Amazon will gladly tender and take on the most odious work for the spy agencies that the rest of Silicon Valley would not touch with a bargepole. It doesn't appear that Amazon want to pay any taxes, which is all very clever but I would prefer to see a society where businesses pay taxes and individuals don't. But, despite these problems, I will still want Amazon stuff.

Now if the reviews are not trustworthy and I can't trust them to have the best prices then that is it really, I stop being a customer of Amazon and, a decade after crazy woman scorned me for buying from Amazon, I become of the opinion that she was right all along with all her talk of 'illegal monopoly' and 'tax avoidance'.

Trust is a fragile belief-y thing and when it has gone it has gone.

> FINALLY

Identities in comment sections have always been fake and anonymous and this is a good thing even if it results in occasional spam reviews. Legal action to enforce real IDs would make the internet worse.

I don't get it. I'd expect highly technical forums to value anonymity despite its drawbacks but I'm continuously disappointed.

I don't see where the parent post (or FTC page) mentioned real IDs?

Identities in comment sections have always been fake and anonymous and this is a good thing even if it results in occasional spam reviews

Comments are not the same as reviews.

This is why Amazon, for example, has "verified purchase" status for reviews. Reviews can influence a buying decision and are integrated as part of a platform. Comments can influence a buying decision but they live outside the platform and can always be made anonymously on any other platform.

The issue in this case was someone purchased fraudulent reviews on someone else's platform where the platform's integrity is severely diminished through that fraud.

I support anonymity, as I said I'm in favour of less government interference in markets, but in this case, we need a bigger stick because Amazon and other marketplace platforms don't quite have the technical tools to fight fraudulent reviews.

Also I don't think there's a mention of using real ids?

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