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Comment by dvduval | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'll get down voted, but I think it's a legitimate question to ask: if someone offers me a refund in exchange for my review, and the product would benefit me, why shouldn't I accept it? Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers? Perhaps it's a small merchant trying to get started in the face of big corporations doing other things to cheat the system (ex. pricing out competition to capture the market). Could it be that I'm helping a small business get started by getting a free product in exchange for a review? There's no way to know for sure. But I can imagine that some people would indeed take this offer and I don't necessarily blame them. Should I?

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> Is it my duty to protect [...] other consumers?"

Calling them 'consumers' rather than 'people' seems like a use of dehumanizing language to assuage your guilt. At least, that's how it comes across to me. When you accept a bribe for a review you're screwing over the living breathing human beings who might make the mistake of assuming you aren't a liar.

But it's not in exchange for "a review", it's in exchange for a 5-star review. If the review isn't 5-stars, the person doesn't get their money.

Amazon does offer a legitimate program for brands to offer free gifts in return for reviews, but it doesn't require those reviews to be positive.

> Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers?

If you follow Kant, the argument is pretty much this: if everyone would do that, nobody could trust any reviews. The right choice, according to Kant, is that which you can want to be made into law for everyone. You don't want reviews to lose all meaning as they're important information for people to learn about the products, ergo you mustn't fake it.

Should you blame them? Yeah, but it's a pretty small infraction and they're a small cog in a large machine, so don't be too harsh.

Yes, thank you for entertaining this idea at least. There is a certain amount of logic that people who post a review, which is optional, have some sort of motivation for doing it in the first place. And then there's also the idea that the seller, in this case Amazon, is relieving themselves or their own responsibility to review the products that they sell before putting them on the market.

The issue is not whether you should accept a situation which appears to be mutually beneficial to you and the entity soliciting the review. Corporations are typically going to make decisions about the things they do based on income to to corporate entity. While this usually aligns to consumer need and demand (for happiness even), it usually doesn't as a whole. Facebook seems to give people what they want, but actually they figured out how to progressively remove choices from users to get EXACTLY what they want without the users realizing what had been lost (time, attention, focus, desire for a unique product vs. the product resulting from the software driven dogma of the crowd, etc.)

The question should be whether or not the embodied process is fair, in whole, to the users? As much as we worry about "right" API design here (or what is the perfect framework for CSS?), you'd think we'd worry about how bad we are screwing users with all this software optimized to make startups, founders, VCs and private equity firms more an dmore money with less and less effort.

Well if you were the victim of a false review would you shrug it off because the reviewer used the same rationalization you are proposing?

Because it's obviously a bribe.

My view: It's fine, as long as you disclose it in the review.

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