Your 1 star review will get auto deleted.
Amazon has deleted even my critical reviews. Go figure.
Critical reviews do get taken down (I've no idea why). My reviews are legit - I don't have time or interest in anything other than providing feedback. Most stuff is fine, but some is obviously fake or junk. I'm always specific, they could literally buy the product and test it themselves.
You could be a good corporate drone and do your job for 97% of the time, and in 3% of the cases delete bad reviews for your friends. Unless someone is doing really great statistical analysis, this could fly under the radar for a very long time.
Of course, those people were caught and that goes against the "not detect this problem" part. But if you were to scale down this operation from 16 people down to just one or two, it seems like it could work.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-marketplace-fraud-scheme...
We just never heard about the ones that weren’t caught ;)
I am not. You should re-read my point. Whether their review was rejected or not didn't stop them from spending $50k on amazon. They are as replaceable as warehouse workers.
The $50k thing has nothing to do with status, it has to do with amazon already possessing a very good signal as to whether or not this account is "real".
It is potentially interesting in the context of whether or not amazon is in fact serious about improving SNR in their review system.
I am just saying Amazon has no reason to differentiate between real people or bot people if the OP continued to buy from them despite their critical reviews being rejected. Amazon doesn't care about their past purchase history as long as they buy more from them in future. Whether they spent 50k or not didn't make a differentiating factor for Amazon.
Again, the goal isn't to "stop bots from buying", but rather to stop them from posting fake reviews. You're reframing the whole discussion to something that has zero relevance to the discussion.
Now what I do find inexcusable are reviews that are obviously not for the product I am looking at. I will report abuse on those but I do admit that I do not go back and check if they removed
Just to be clear, I was OK with users leaving 1 star if they didn't like it or even better had some constructive feedback. But many were like "great app": 1 star, or "Hi single guy here, and ladies around?": 1 star.
In my experience, users won’t go out of their way to leave a worthless review. So if your app doesn’t nag, you have less spam. But that also means you miss a lot of legitimate people who don’t have the time or knowledge to leave good reviews.
Gift and curse etc
I understand what you mean, but the phrasing of "forcing" someone to optionally do something is odd.