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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

> How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this?

How do you know they don't, and have via whatever mechanism decided that they make more money if they choose not to?

They are trying and failing - my wife is a seller and easily 20-30% of completely valid positive reviews from repeat customers disappear without a trace.. at the same time a racist tyrade of a review from a buyer who has swastika as user avatar is impossible to get rid of ( 5 or 6 tries so far)

File an online criminal complaint at German police. We really don't like swastikas.

reading this, feels like ebay is a really nice place to sell stuff.

They might have their own issues, but feels more authentic.

Really? I feel selling stuff on ebay has a 1/5 chance get scammed.

I don’t know what categories you shop there, but I have never been scammed. Often make sure to contact the seller beforehand though.

It’s easy to get scammed SELLING on eBay. Buying is not much if a problem as you can get a refund easily as a buyer.

I sell a huge amount of stuff on eBay (retro computing / gaming items) and have found it to be a really fantastic and friendly community. Perhaps it depends on the items being sold?

Probably. You are selling in a niche that scammers likely don't care about. If you were selling a Macbook or iPhone, there'd probably be a lot of shady buyers.

I've bought a ton of stuff on Ebay, but only ever sold a laptop when I wasn't getting any bites on Craigslist. It was a limited-edition Dell laptop, so the buyer was really enthusiastic about it and you could tell he was a normal person and not a scammer.

Fortunately I live in a big city now and have never had issues selling in person via CL/Kijiji.

I've sold a couple hundred of items on eBay and I've never been scammed.

There are many 3rd party sites (like fakespot.com) which do a better job than Amazon does and are not incredibly sophisticated. Amazon just doesn't care, that is the only conclusion that is possible to draw from the available data. They are not even doing a half-assed job, we're talking about a fractionally-assed job here, perhaps even milli-asses.

Amazon could easily do at least as good a job as fakespot, and then followup with consequences for review fraud. They could also implement various policies and use the huge amount of data they have available to go well beyond that level and make some headway against the problem. But they haven't done so. Because they can't be bothered. Because people being suckered into buying shitty products hasn't hurt their bottom line yet. They are complicit.

Just because those 3rd party sites are not targeted by fake reviewers.

They are not 3rd party review sites, they are 3rd party sites for algorithmically analyzing the reviews on amazon for a given product.

How would fakespot be targeted by fake reviewers?

Adversarial attacks. You tweak your fake reviews until fakespot is convinced your reviews aren’t fake.

Like not post them at once.

"We at Amazon think it would be a shame if an algorithm flagged your {insert fake 5-star Chinese product here}.

Have we mentioned we offer a Premium Seller Protection service that will ensure nothing... untoward happens to your listings?"

I was in the market for headphones. I bought a pair and was looking for another because I was dissatisfied. I saw my exact model under another listing...but oddly it had ~150 5 stars. I thought no way in hell THESE were loved by everyone. Every single review was made in the same day, with broken English reviews.

These were electronics, and knockoff airpods to boot. But if I 100% need the real thing, I buy else where. For example I just purchased several bottles of Vitamin D for my infant. I'm not trusting Amazon even though Amazon would have shipped faster.

I never buy anything on Amazon that I put in my body. They really need to get this issue under control. It's a huge trust problem for me.

Totally agree. I won't but stuff on Amazon for ME to eat. Much more so anything that's going into a baby's body.

Been using Swanson Vitamins for about 10 years. Decent website, excellent vitamins. Smaller mom and pop b-to-c that has been online since the first .com bubble.

My wife uses it for our family as well. If you watch you can catch really good sales as well.

I felt like they know there's a large industry built around it and now that it will likely just adapt to taking simple measures like that. By leaving it the way it is for now it's super easy to spot product pages with fake reviews by anyone that cares to look.

It's impossible that giving customers sub-optimal recommendations is good for amazon.

Definitely not, long-term. But plug it into a product manager's A/B test and I guarantee it boosts things short-term.

What's to boost? The customer would have selected the better option and been more satisfied, and Amazon would have brokered the deal either way. They still need their hammer.

Maybe in A/B tests, customers who see a product with 4.9 (fake) stars are more likely to click Buy than customers who see the same product with 4.3 (honest) stars?

My theory is that they have metrics for selection they are trying to optimize. If customers only bought the 10 best of any item, how could some PM get a promotion for increasing phone charger selection 100x?

I find it unlikely, since they don't really have much customer lock-in, so reputation matters a lot. It doesn't make many disappointing purchases for customers to start looking elsewhere first.

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