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Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

I've been an Amazon customer for 15 years. Have literally bought $50,000+ worth of stuff from them. In other words: rock solid reputation.

Amazon has deleted even my critical reviews. Go figure.

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Same with me - I'm over $80K in purchases based on my data request to them (excluding business where I admin a business account with multiple purchasers).

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.

What if friends of these fake review circles get themselves hired into Amazon to be on the teams that validate the reviews? It is possible that Amazon is so big, they would not detect this problem.

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.

I think it's possible. There was a case back in September [1] where six "third-party sellers consultant" were charged with allegedly bribing up to ten Amazon employees to restore deleted items.

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...

> Of course, those people were caught and that goes against the "not detect this problem" part.

We just never heard about the ones that weren’t caught ;)

The question seems to be: what can we do to limit Amazon?

Buy from alternatives and give them feedback. Shopify has made it pretty easy for anyone to start a e-commerce site and then there are other places like etsy.

One little thing left: notify users about the existence of these sites.

And good luck finding them on Google...

Do we need to build a hackernews/social aggregator for new shops?

While I understand that people find any reason to believe they hold status higher than others but they shouldn't believe that when they are faced with a company with billions of customers worldwide. If you continued to buy from Amazon (racked up $50K in spending for 15 years), it's clear that removing your review didn't matter to their bottom line so no reason to care.

Your missing the point. It has nothing to do with their identity, it's the fact that telling apart fake reviews from ones written by real people is a hard problem, but generally you won't find a bot account with 15 years of history. The implication here is that if Amazon truly cared about surfacing legitimate reviews only, they would've kept the one from that account since there's very low probability of it being fake.

> Your missing the point.

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.

Businesses make decisions on the margin. The $50k is history, it's the next dollar that counts.

We are not talking about whether I will continue to buy from Amazon or not; but whether my reviews could be fake or not, and whether there is signal in my reviews or not. That is what I meant with the words "rock solid reputation".

Your point (if coherent, hard to say) was not articulated well.

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 agree.

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.

> if the OP continued to buy

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.

OP is saying that Amazon has exactly zero reasons to change its ways if it makes zero difference to their income. They deleted the reviews of a reputable customer. Will he keep on buying from Amazon like he did before? Yes. So will there be any downsides for Amazon for deleting reputable customers' reviews? No. Money will keep flowing, resentment is irrelevant. So, they will keep deleting reputable customers' reviews, because changing that takes effort, and effort costs, and cost have to lead to more profits to be justified.

The exact same logic goes for fake reviews. If no profit is harmed, no need to take action.

Don't bother; if this person was serious about making a point (instead of just ranting) they would've used their real account.

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