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Comment by julius | Hacker News Reader

Good idea. Thanks for making that site.

I am an asshole. I copy&pasted a fake 5 star review from Amazon, using a fake account. Do you have a plan to stop brands from doing this to you?

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This was the first question that occurred to me.

Just a couple of days ago I needed to buy another iphone USB-lightning cable. If you want to get a sense of just how broken Amazon reviews are, try searching for one of these. It's a nightmare minefield of 4.7+ rated products that have these highly dubious 5 star ratings, but with a telltale sizeable chunk of recent 1 star reviews.[1] So I ended up having to also check various meta-review sites or other product review sites just to to buy a stupid cable. For certain product categories, reviews have become mostly noise.

[1] I tend to discount really effusive, highly detailed 5 star reviews for basically mundane products. "This ethernet cable was both highly attractive and yet lighter than others I've bought in the past. I plugged it in and it immediately started working! I was amazed!"

Positive reviews are noise for me on any product. For products I don't care enough about to do independent research, I evaluate them exclusively by reading 1 and 2 star reviews, ignoring the additional noise of "the product didn't ship on time" type reviews, and deciding if the specific complaints made in the rest are things I care about.

Are you open to the possibility of competing brands bombarding decent products with negative reviews?

FWIW, almost every [negative, because I'm trying to warn others about wasting money] Amazon review I leave is removed for arbitrary reasons set out by Amazon. They seem uninterested in contributions like "this mouse was $30 not 6 months ago, and the current $90 price tag is unconscionable. [LG G602 mouse]" The few times I've complained about shipping problems (as you suggest you've seen) they also removed those.

Well, you're not actually reviewing the product. Sure, I wouldn't mind a time series of the price history of an item esp in cases with large jumps. But, generally the point of reviews is to tell me about the product. I can do my own evaluation of what I am willing to pay.

Hijacked product pages and price swings are two of Amazon Shopping's biggest vulnerabilities from my view. Do you know of a price history website/app like you're describing? Sounds like a very good idea.

camelcamelcamel [0] tracks price history for Amazon listings

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/

If I’m reading your review of a mouse, I want to know how well the mouse worked. If I want to know the price history, I’ll go to camelcamelcamel.

You telling me the mouse was cheaper before doesn’t help me decide which mouse to buy today.

Amazon is correctly removing your reviews, because neither of your examples are things that belong in product reviews.

Do not leave price related reviews. The prices change daily. You may leave a bad review because you think the price is too high. Tomorrow the mouse may cost $10, but your one star review is still there ten years later.

Shipping problems do not belong in product reviews. The listing is for a PRODUCT, shared by any number of amazon sellers. Amazon provides seller reviews to comment on seller's shipping problems. (If you are leaving these as seller reviews, then I apologize for assuming, and you are correct)

I've taken to running all my amazon purchases through fakespot dot com first. It's highly discouraging.

They have a chrome extension FYI that shows their data/status on a product page on Amazon.

> Amazon automatically provides you with the cheapest version of the product you’re looking at,

Nice; thanks, Amazon.

> even if it’s potentially fake.

Yikes! Hope I don't get one of those!

> Most of the time you cannot even return these items!

That's just rubbish though, Amazon returns are so easy, if the price is only marginally lower elsewhere I'll order from Amazon just because - if necessary - returning is easy, third party or not.

I'm not sure if I get the point of it, if I can't tell if the product's a 'fake', aren't I happy? If I can (and I'm not happy with it anyway) I'll just send it back?

I think the ship has sailed on the trustworthiness of online reviews from rando people. Pretty much every store or review site that aggregates user-submitted content has done a poor job of removing spam and fake reviews, and people are finally starting to realize how worthless the ratings are. Even if someone does crack this nut and figures it out, they won't be believed because of how fake everything has been for the last 20 years.

I think the best thing online stores can do at this point is just nuke all user-submitted ratings and reviews. They're 99% garbage.

>I think the best thing online stores can do at this point is just nuke all user-submitted ratings and reviews. They're 99% garbage.

Yes, in order to re-start, but what then? The whole user reviews concept is bonkers, I would add that there are - besides "fake" reviews - "real" ones BUT written by clueless people (in good faith, but completely disconnected from an objective rating), and in this it is also way off the "5 star" rating where 4 stars are already "not so good".

I think the "restart" goes back to trusted reviewers/companies offering reviews as their business. E.g. Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, etc.

Then it's entirely how much you trust the reviewers, and whether you agree with their matrics/tastes.

Maybe there should be leagues of reviewer companies that can get promoted and relegated, based off of how well their reviews align to purchasing boosts and complaints. That's probably a horrible idea.

I really like wire cutter but they convinced me to buy an awesome convection toaster oven that takes seven minutes to lightly toast a piece of bread on its highest setting.

My "favorite" useless review is the "I just got it and unboxed it. I haven't used it yet, but I know it's going to be good!" five star review. How I hate those.

>How I hate those.

Exactly, and rightly so.

But as well the "negative" ones like (I swear I have seen more than one of these) "The item arrived but it is a darker yellow than what seen in the pictures on the site." which may have some meaning if you order - say - a scarf to match a coat (but you'd better go to a shop with the coat and find a matching colour scarf) but doesn't really apply to - still say - a chainsaw or a power tool.

Loosely related, but flickchart is a moving ranking site whose tagline is: "If they're all 5 star movies, which one's the best?" I wonder if something like that could be adapted for product review sites? I suppose that would require you to have purchased 2 different cast iron pans, for example, to pick a favorite though.

Well, there wasn't a huge incentive for the biggest players to actually fix the problem. As long as Amazon was able to push the cost of returns to others, they only cared just enough that it didn't hurt their brand. This goes for both bad products and poorly advertised products.

Now that there have been some recent rulings that Amazon is liable for defective products they sell[1], we might see a difference as they put actual effort into it since it's more directly related to the bottom line of their e-commerce business.

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/court-rules-amazon-liable-de...

I have found that the best method is to just add "reddit" to my search of the product name. While it is most certainly gamed, you still see mostly real content as well as descriptions and pictures of issues.

Seeing 4 posts with pictures of the same failure on reddit is a pretty good sign the product has a problem.

How about, for someone to post a review, you have to take a picture of yourself with the product. But before you take the picture, you get randomly assigned a number. You must post a picture with that number in the photo. Then either do magic machine learning to check, or have a review process. Better, have it be manual. Get more people in the process, not less. I think this is an awesome idea, which would be completely ruined by fake reviews, but I'd feel much safer if there were like 1/10th the number of products but knew with certainty that a real human vetted and cared about that specific review.

How does this prevent shill reviews?

"I am a competing asshole. I copy&pasted a fake 1 star review from Amazon to make your good product sound bad."

Fake reviews are certainly a big challenge. I introduced a credibility system for every user, similar to Reddit's karma so people can see how trustworthy the user is in the Buy For Life community. As mentioned by others, people trust reviews on Reddit, I try to achieve the same.

I could also imagine picking reviewers by interviewing them initially - someone who owns and uses the product for a while.

> I introduced a credibility system for every user, similar to Reddit's karma so people can see how trustworthy the user is

But theres a problem with that: people create an account, build up their reputation for a while posting credible reviews then when they're large enough and have a good rep/trust, start taking money for their reviews.

A similar thing happens on Reddit -- people build up an account to have lots of karma (sometimes they're literally just bot accounts reposting tons of posts), build it up for a few months, then sell the whole account off for money after the account has 100s of thousands of upvotes/karma.

Ever try fakespot?

It might be my cynicism talking, but I've started distrusting these meta-review platforms as well. I've used fakespot quite a bit, but I don't have the time to investigate them and figure out where exactly the money is coming from to power the website and company behind it. Could it not be easily used to distort perceptions of listings based on who pays Fakespot more?

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