Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews | Hacker News Reader

Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

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1,086 pointskmod479 comments

I'm seeing similar things everywhere. I stood in line for a food truck a couple years ago that offered a promotion "$2 off your order if you show us your 5-star review of our truck on [site]." Obviously, you have to do this before you even order your food so I was intensely put-off by this. I gave them a 5-star review with no comment, received my discount, then after I tried the food I edited the review to 1-star with an explanation that it probably would've been a 4-star review had they legitimately just prepared good food but gaming the reviews was a sleazeball move. The review was removed.

Every single game on the Google Play store does this now, too. Instead of just letting people review honestly, they show a pop-up saying "Are you enjoying this game?" if so, they ask you to review it on the store. If not, they ask you to review it via their own private feedback system. Not quite as bad as requiring a 5-star review, but obviously this alters the score the app would otherwise receive.

My favorite is seeing 5 star reviews that are hijacking the top to complain.

I've also seen 1 star reviews that are exalting reviews.

But my all time ongoing pet peeve is how recommendation engines especially on video streaming and video game series use numbers and star systems that are not based on any other human's input. Not a critic, not a user score, just an algorithm's confidence score on similarities.

The 1 star review that loves the product but hated the way it was shipped. Someone needs to write a textbook on the pathology of those people.

The customer paid not only for the product but also for the service of having that product delivered to them. Asking them to restrict their review to only one aspect of what they paid for does not seem reasonable.

Depends. Oftentimes the shipping problem is the carrier's fault (e.g. UPS or FedEx) and not in control of the shipper at all. Other times they packaged it poorly and it predictably broke, leaked, or melted and it's entirely the carrier's fault. But I do see a plethora of comments that seem to be blaming things like shipping delays on the seller.

And in that case, the company's response is pretty important. There's a world of difference between (a) "it was fine on our end, take it up with the shipper", (b) "we are sorry this happened and are shipping a replacement", and (c) "thank you, and we are looking into other shipping options as a result of the frequent complaints". Some combination of (b) and (c) is acceptable. (a) is not acceptable.

It's about giving proper weight to each aspect. Giving a 1 star review to an otherwise 4 star experience is dishonest if you only have some issue with the shipping (or marketing tactics), just as an example.

Right. Issues about shipping are not what product rating are for.

Of course it is a problem that Amazon does not provide a way to separately report packaging and transport problems.

"Proper weight" is subjective. Disagreeing with dfxm12 doesn't constitute dishonesty.

It does if they are on a product page reviewing a product and not, say, reviewing Amazon’s service.

I think the comment is more directed at folks who, and I noticed this weird behavior the other day myself, post tirades about the cardboard box being slightly damaged (while the goods and packaging inside are completely fine). These in particular are more akin to saying:

"hey this protective outer barrier did it's job, had a scratch on the shipping label, and successfully protected the contents. The contents were IN PERFECT CONDITION, 1 star review!!! CONSUMER RIGHTS!11!11!!1 REFUND NOW DAMAGED BOX"

The real weird part though; is how the outer packaging regardless of the quality of what is inside the box (their actual goods purchased) dominates their reviews. It's like a whole subculture, or something, I can't even begin to understand. The internet never ceases to to amaze me for the sheer breadth of absurdity one can find.

The behaviour you describe would be considered normal in Japan. There it's not a sub-culture. Pretty much any Japanese buyer would consider the packaging as part-and-parcel. And they'd complain in case of defective packaging, regardless of its functional impact.

As someone who lives in Japan that’s a behavior that a loud minority of unreasonable people exhibit, but most Japanese people I know don’t mind damage from transit like most well-adjusted humans anywhere - the delivery person might point it out when you sign for the package but it’s not a big deal. It’s more important for gifts and stuff though where the presentation is part of the gesture.

I was more thinking about B2B shipments, than consumer. The general presumption upon receipt of product at the loading dock in Japan is that slightly damaged packaging is a quality issue. It is applied to domestic and global suppliers alike. But the latter may sometimes fail to understand and vainly push back.

These are well-adjusted humans too. Just operating under a different set of criteria w.r.t. quality.

So, is it weird to say they expected the literal outer packaging to be pristine as well? I’m just saying, there must a textbook worth of analysis we can do on these people.

The list of these people is totally publicly available too, it would be great to just examine their world view to understand just who is actually wandering around out there.

There’s no way their pathology doesn’t bleed into how they impact life.

Issue here is that any given product on Amazon may be sold by numerous different sellers (and the set of sellers could of course change over time etc.). There is no indication which seller a reviewer purchased from (unless they explicitly state, but I've never seen that), so it's completely possible that they ordered from the one seller that packages the product terribly for shipping & the rest are all fine.

I have seen a 1 star review of a glass container, which broke when the buyer dropped it. I mean, come on!

Are you referring to the product named "Unbreakable Glass Container, AS SEEN ON TV"?

No no no, we need to better understand the people who respond in the Q & A section with variants of "I don't know"

I think those are a side effect of Amazon sending out emails like 'what did you think of x product? Reply with your review!' after a purchase. Why they don't filter them out, I don't know.

Edit, I mean the ones that ask you questions about a product you purchased

My theory: I think Amazon is showing the unanswered questions to random people, and they answer "I don't know" to make them go away.

Amazon sends sends the questions out and presents them as if you specifically were being asked by somebody.

It's like if Amazon built a guide map by walking up to people on the street and asking, "how do you get to the airport from here?" and writing down the response verbatim. A reasonable person would tend to respond, "I don't know" rather than ignoring a direct question asked of them.

I’ve done this, and stand by it. Since Amazon allows you to rate the delivery by third party suppliers, but not by itself.

On the whole Amazon is good, but occasionally in the past it was poor, however there was no Avenue to raise that.

Shipping is part of the purchase process.

If the product is good, but the shipping is not, buyers deserve to be informed.

If there are separate reviews for the product and the shipping of a product (still tied to that product, but also the shipping carrier that was used for that order) then a split review (one for each) is legitimate. Otherwise if there's only one review spot, EVERYTHING is on the table.

And in shipping we could distinguish packaging and transport. I would like to rate both.

One of the problems here is when Amazon has one shared item listing for multiple sellers.

A bad review for the product due to one seller's shipping hurts all the other sellers too.

Luckily we have rotten tomatoes as a decent indicator of actual critic reviews. Until they start gaming the reviews to boost movies they (subsidiary of Comcast) want to promote.

You think they aren’t already?

Personally I couldn't care less about the critic reviews/score, but the audience score is usually spot on for the stuff I'm interested in.

Sadly it only used to be that way for me. In genres I liked, the consensus could be all the way down to 30% and I knew I would enjoy it, as in 30% and above would be a good movie for me. But then things with 70% positive audience reviews in the same genre started being imo the dumbest poorly written, composed, experiences...

I guess this is a sign of getting old and out of touch? or the presence of shills? I dont know but I know not to trust them

I like to use the audience score as well. I found it has some pitfalls occasionally, although they can be fun.

Certain movies attract a very narrow and enthusiastic, that will upvote the movie disproportionately (people not interested in the kind of movie will not even vote). A my little pony movie can get as good scores as the Godfather. Maybe it is, who knows.

Yeah, this is why critic reviews are still needed.

Portal, the game by Valve, has some rabid fanboys. I only played it this year because my computer was unable to handle it. I was disappointed with how easy and short the game was. Style over substance for someone who enjoys Baba Is You or Riven.

Anyway, the first several negative reviews read like this: "Are you seriously looking for a negative review? Come on! The game is amazing! Buy it!"

I hate the people who don't cast their vote to represent just their opinion, but rather try to get the score where they think it belongs.

" Absolutely amazing dont listen to the "gamers" that havent even played it yet and just love to get on a hate train. " (10)

" A fantastic game troubled by some technical issues. It's obvious that right now it doesn't deserve that 10/10 (with some patches tho? possible), but I'm still scoring it like that to counter all the review bombing GTA kiddies (more depth, rotfl) and trolls that haven't even seen the game. " (10)

The above from the most overhyped game of the year.

> Portal, the game by Valve

Published in 2007.

> I only played it this year

Portal is to a great extent a tech demo for its unprecedented "portal" rendering. This enabled some very 3D puzzles of a style that gamers hadn't seen before. Of course it's going to look a little pale in 2020, although you'd hope any original bugs were fixed.

Sharpshooter fallacy: shooting a rifle at a barn and painting a bullseye around the biggest cluster of hits.

"Portal is to a great extent a tech demo" (therefore it shouldn't be judged as a game)

Yet Portal is sold as a game in its own right. Riven was released in 1997 and is still a delightful intellectual challenge today, with nothing really like it. It's very much the opposite of modern games with a built-in GPS system telling you where to go. Riven is clunky, pixellated, but integrates good puzzles and a well thought out world in a way I haven't seen anywhere else. It was also a technical feat at the time.

Like I said in my Steam review, I believe Portal popularity comes from the fact it's a puzzle game attractive enough to draw people who don't play puzzle games.

Baba Is You is going to be a classic 20 years from now, despite its ugly graphics. In hands of anyone else, it would be just a gimmick, like Portal. But the idea was masterfully executed.

Portal was made as full game, tech demo was earlier Narbacular Drop.

(personally I think Portal is a great game, but obviously it won't satisfy hardcore puzzle-solvers. however I don't think every game have to be about tricky puzzles)

Could you not pay full price for the first order then if you liked the food done the review and show them next time?

Or returned the $2 once the 1 star review was left.

>Every single game on the Google Play store does this now, too.

it will be a problem until the transaction is A-B with the merchant.

as long as there is a central entity between the two profiting somehow (yelp,google play, amazon, ebay, etc), it'll always be gamed like that, hoping the central party stays willfully blind to the gaming of the rules.

And the central party will stay willfully blind without legislation -- it affects their profits.

Google reviews are massively edited upon complaints. A while ago I rented a pretty nice and expensive apartment in Southern England. I was the first tenant and there were huge pipe leaks and other horrible construction issues, like a misaligned lift that kept trapping people inside. Neighbors next door, who owned apartments built by the same company, had different but equally annoying issues. And the company didn't do much to fix them.

After moving out, I left a pretty elaborate 1-star review in their Google profile. This triggered tons of very descriptive 1-star reviews, as customers were asked their opinion by a Google bot. After a few months, they were also deleted. Said company has been featured by Bucks newspapers as they bully locals that oppose their tactics to allocate land by bribing councils. I guess there's nothing like having aggressive solicitors.

Selectively removing negative reviews is so sleazy, one wonders if it is actually even legal. Surely there's some truth-in-advertising legislation this falls under?

Not a lawyer but I think in the US, you have the right to remain silent. I don't think a law can compel anyone to publish anything. Might be the first amendment.

Yes, it's sad.

I've had Yelp and AirBnB remove reviews. I don't know what to do about it. They Yelp one I can't verify the service (a dentist) didn't get better. The AirBnB one I can tell nothing was fixed because the issues are verifiable in the listing itself.

Third-party anonymous reviews. It would have to be anonymous because Airbnb bans users for reviewing outside their platform.

https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/02/18/how-i-got-bann...

> because Airbnb bans users for reviewing outside their platform.

Wow, it get more and more evil the further I read down this thread. What a shitty, shitty companies are involved in all these shenanigans!

I'm sure in some cases older reviews aren't relevant but in other cases they are quite important as they describe the host's attitude.

I met a person that rented the same horrific Airbnb I rented in Snoqualmie, WA. They were horrified too and wanted their money back. Airbnb said it was possible but they had to check with the owner. This was two years after my stay and after the host had been warned multiple times and had their superhost status stripped!

Typically, the right to remain silent is associated with the right to refuse self-incrimination in a criminal proceeding, which is part of the fifth amendment.

The law can compel publication, but that power is typically used for material arising in judicial proceedings or documents of inherent public interest (like the Watergate tapes, etc.). So, it would be unlikely to apply here.

Nor am I one. However there are surely differences between chilling free speech (removing speech), litigating against slanderous speech, the illusion of (but not actually) a public forum for reviews of all sorts (particularly if there are ratings but legitimate low rated reviews are removed), and retaliating against those who've publicly reviewed.

It is far more credible to believe that a loose association of similar tactics across a small number of large business entities might reasonably create a chilling effect upon speech.

An example; as a renter I have heard rumors of others who've left low reviews in public places and find it difficult to find willing renters in the future. I have no basis for this but the process of qualifying a renter is also opaque so I have no evidence to refute it either. It isn't unreasonable to think market forces could coincidentally cause various entities to reach a similar logical conclusion, or that an outsourced background check agency checks for various public posts that might be relevant to the rental agencies.

It looks like there is a law against companies writing contract clauses barring you or penalizing you for writing a negative review, but I don't know if there is a law that bars companies from deleting truthful, non-libelous reviews. Seems like a basic loophole to me that should have been covered in the Consumer Review Fairness Act.

> Whether your summer plans include replacing your air conditioning, installing new flooring, or riding the range, you will probably read customer reviews to learn what people say about their experiences with a business or product. Shoppers benefit from knowing what others have to say, and the Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA) protects people’s ability to share their truthful experiences and opinions.

> The FTC enforces the CRFA and recently sued three businesses (and two of their owners) for violating that law. According to the FTC, the companies used form contracts that barred customers from sharing negative comments and that imposed financial penalties against customers who did so. Under proposed agreements with the FTC, the businesses — including an HVAC and electrical contractor, a flooring seller, and a company that takes people on horseback rides — will stop using, and will not enforce, those contract provisions. They will also inform people who signed the contracts that the provisions can't be enforced.

> The CRFA protects your ability to share your honest opinions about a business’s products, services, or conduct in any forum, including social media. You can publish your honest review even if you say something negative about a business or the services it performed for you. If you have a signed form contract that restricts you from sharing reviews or penalizes you for doing that, the business may not be able to enforce those restrictions. If a business tries to enforce a restriction or penalty, let the business know about the CRFA, and please report it to the FTC or your state consumer protection agency. [0]

[0] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2019/05/your-right-post-ho...

That seems more applicable to situations where the person leaving the review is doing so elsewhere, that is, posting it somewhere that the entity being reviewed is not connected to the hosting of it and therefore cannot trivially get it deleted/prevented; in such situations the entity being reviewed might try to compel the reviewer or the third party host to delete/prevent it, and the CRFA makes it illegal to do so. I haven't read it enough to say for sure, though.

There’s plenty of exceptions like the DMCA forcing a host to restore access to something if a counterclaim is filed. Or being required to communicate the surgeons general warning on tobacco products.

DMCA counter claims do not force a restore, it just permits the host to restore without personal liability for infringement (as the uploader takes on the full legal liability for the material, and often need to identify themselves in the process).

No. The original claim also removes liability for taking down the material. But if a counter notice is filed the material must be restored after no less than 10 and no more than 14 days or liability resumes.

https://www.itproportal.com/2013/04/09/youtube-does-not-rest...

> There’s plenty of exceptions like the DMCA forcing a host to restore access to something if a counterclaim is filed.

The DMCA doesn't do that.

The DMCA allows a host to do that without liability for infringement, and continues to provide the host immunity to liability for any claims the user would otherwise have for the original takedown so long as they do that (the second half is the closest thing to force, but it usually is immaterial because hosts usually structure their contracts with users so that they would have no liability to them to immunize against, which is also why hosts are much more likely to provide reliable notice-takedown than counternotice-restorartion.)

That’s just false:

No liability for taking down generally

[...]unless[...]

C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice [...]

USC 512.g.2.c

I was thinking more along the lines of what counts as advertising vs. user feedback. Not a lawyer, so maybe it doesn't even matter. Still, I'd argue that if you are selectively removing negative reviews in order to give a better impression of a product, while giving the customer the impression that the reviews are representative of people who bought the product, you're no longer just publishing reviews. You are now engaged in promoting the product, and you're doing so through dishonest means.

Now is that illegal? I sure don't know. Is it provable? That could be tough, too. But if someone asked me if it's legal to doctor reviews of products, I'd tell them to consult a very good lawyer or two.

Tons of advertising includes only glowing reviews/testimonials and it has been going on with newspapers, television, etc. forever. I can't imagine similar selectivity being illegal on websites merely because it's presented in a way that implies (but does not explicitly say) that they're faithfully reproducing everything that has been submitted in good faith.

My argument here is that product reviews become more like advertising once they start being edited or selected for marketing purposes. So e.g. Amazon's reviews do not appear to be advertising, which would make it misleading to bias them in some way. And the rules for what's acceptable in advertising might be different from what's acceptable in providing a neutral forum for customer reviews.

While they probably can't be forced to publish negative reviews, I think it could be viable to use false advertising laws against misrepresenting the product / service through manipulating reviews.

> I don't think a law can compel anyone to publish anything.

Laws in the US can, and often do, require disclosure of certain factual information when publishing other information; this is particularly common in the context of commercial (and political) advertising.

I'm thinking about possible approaches from time to time. There's the ethical aspect, but also removal messes up threaded comment systems. A common workaround seems to be to leave the removed comment in place, but make its contents blank.

I think a good solution would be setting aside all owner-removed comments, concealed but available for review if someone clicks on them:

  + (124 comments removed by the author)

That the content uploader/business owner would be able to hide genuinely disruptive and spammy messages. Abusing the power would be pretty easy to expose. Just expand the list of removed comments and see if they're really trash or merely criticizing the author/owner/uploader.

The flip side of this is that a single negative review offsets hundreds of positive ones.

I've literally had to stop using my airbnb account that had dozens of possitive reviews after a single bad review left in bad faith (owner privetly asked for money to remove it) meant that each new owner was hesitant about me and asking me specifically about that single comment.

I contacted airbnb support with proof of this and they said it can't be removed. Ive stopped using the service since then.

I would personally probably have talked to the police rather than AirBnB support about that, because it seems like a clear case of extortion.

Same here, also SEE. Upon renewal of the lease, I noticed they put in the contract a clause that says you are not allowed to leave negative reviews online (I guess a lot of people left negative reviews due to poor service). How can that even be legal to put something like that in the contract?

> Upon renewal of the lease, I noticed they put in the contract a clause that says you are not allowed to leave negative reviews online (I guess a lot of people left negative reviews due to poor service). How can that even be legal to put something like that in the contract?

Are you really asking how non-disparagement clauses can be legal?

Why wouldn't they be legal?

Because the law is always above an agreement. You can't put into a contract "if we kill you, we don't go to prison". I don't know how what the law is in the consumer rights area, but surely there is a degree of regulation there, hence me asking what it is if there is anything.

> Because the law is always above an agreement.

Sure, if there was a law against them, they'd be illegal. But why would there be a law against them?

> You can't put into a contract "if we kill you, we don't go to prison".

You could, but it would have no legal effect unless you represented the government that would be responsible for prosecuting that crime and had the authority to grant immunity for future crimes, but that's not so much a “law is above contract” thing as “contracts don't bind people, including the State, who aren't parties to the. contract” thing.

While I think you mostly played this right I also greatly dislike people leaving totally binary reviews. 1 star because they had sleazy review tactics? This is part of the problem. We need unbiased reviews now more than ever. So many people aren't going to share your principles so trying for force the issue by giving a misleading rating is not a good approach. I think it would have been much better to just review it based on the product you're purchasing and if you feel so inclined put a big "DISCLAIMER" at the top that people will read first that goes into your feelings on the matter.

You're implying the review is about the product. If the review is about the company (e.g. a restaurant), then a 1-star review is warranted, if you feel that a company which games reviews is a 1-star company.

I certainly do.

This is why I do like the reviews on food delivery apps. You separately rate the food and the courier so that one doesn’t affect the other’s score too dramatically.

Which food delivery apps do you have in mind? In my experience they are heavily engineered towards leaving only positive reviews, and as a result the range of scores is 4.0-5.0 rather than 1-5. Ubereats says things like "this review will be public with your name", and the timing of the review prompt and wording of the question all feels like it's trying to optimize the chance of a positive review.

Create a system in which people almost always defer to the highest score and then blame the little guy for trying to game it. I don't blame them at all. Nearly everyone else is doing it, so not doing it means it's harder to feed your kids.

BTW, we're the ones who created these systems.

Reviews about the company or service rather than the product are a pet peeve of mine for food. I want to know if it is good food first and foremost. I could care less if the waitress gave you a dirty look when you asked that your steak be cooked well done.

What if you watched the server sneeze on the food, but it tasted delicious?

You can't separate the service part of the job from a company that offers services.

Some review systems offer breakdowns to separate these two components.

Service is part of the experience when dining out, so I think it makes sense to include that as a factor for restaurant reviews. Of course, the platform should separate out food from service

That's not really the point. Having companies remove paying customer reviews because they [3rd parties] don't like low start reviews just feels shady and a terrible format for any kind of ecosystem.

I usually only ever read the 3 out of 5 stars reviews. Unless there is a ton of it, 1 star reviews are often outliers having had a bad experience, people who clearly haven’t read the product description or having some gripe otherwise. The 5 stars often have the feel (fake or not) that they would give that rating no matter the quality of the product. Whereas 3 star reviews often point out shortcomings of the product that might or might not affect me, so it is the most useful.

If the top end is already a binary choice. Why not have the low end also be. We have heard how companies like Uber penalise anything but 5-star review. Even if a average ride should be 3-stars without any questions. So why not just go to the other binary end of scale when you have sub average experience?

Unfortunately, that food truck operator is a victim too. They live and die by reviews, and if everyone else does it, they have to too to survive. The whole thing is jacked up.

Asking for a review is OK. Asking for a five-star review is not

I imagine that food truck operator would do a lot better by simply asking "Like or hate our food? Leave an honest review on <site> for a discount"

If their food and service is good, they'll get the positive reviews they need

I'd take that bet. There are so many people that will leave a 5 star review for a discount without thinking twice.

You're responding to someone that agrees with you. But also states that everyone else is review-farming and that if they don't do it they will be left behind.

I.e. your plan is doomed to fail.

I'm just stating that there's an alternative to asking for only 5-star reviews that will likely work better. Just asking for honest reviews (and offering a discount for them) is more ethical, and the honesty will be appreciated by customers.

And I agree with you that it's the right thing to do. But saying it will work better is probably not true.

Except maybe if you include a line like: "were not going to ask you for a 5 star review like others do, but reviews really make it break us and we're trying to be honest. Thanks for the support"

I think even that is way over the line. Having to show the review means it's likely to drive the reviews up. I'd probably add a star or two because I'm afraid of conflict. And if the reviews give a discount, you encourage first time buyers to give a (made up) review before buying.

The only acceptable way to do it is "Please give us a review at [site]". No discounts or promotions.

True, having to show it definitely adds some social pressure to make it a good review. But it's still a little more ethical than explicitly asking for 5-star reviews

If the food and service is good what incentive is there to write a review at all? It's additional work and time for nothing. I never write positive reviews for that reason. For negative reviews it's completely opposite. So completely "honest" unedited review system would always skew very negative, because only negative reviewers have any incentive to write a review.

I was suggesting it as an alternative to offering a discount for 5-star reviews, just to offer a discount for honest reviews as it would likely generate the same result and the business would seem less shady to customers

There should be incentives in place to write a review.

It didn't occur to you that someone might review the food truck and return to it a second time, aka "recurring customers"?

Almost every single item on Amazon and everywhere else is 4.5 stars. No matter how terrible. I can see one star after one star helpful review but it will still be 4.5 stars for items that just fall apart and are obviously defective. The sellers just game the reviews until they get to that magic 4.5.

Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Luckily Amazon will take back anything and they are eating massive return costs from me for not having working, non-gamed reviews.

They are mostly just passing all the return costs off to the 3rd party sellers that sell most of their products these days. So it's no sweat off their back as long as they can be good enough to keep you coming back.

The most frustrating thing now is seeing a product >4.5 stars, but going to the reviews and all the most recent ones are 1/2.

Often I'll find that all the five star reviews describe a completely different product.

That's the trick where the seller replaces a good product's name, description and picture, which effectively transfers all existing(positive) reviews to a different product. Which only shows how many people don't look at a single review if the score is good enough.

The other trick that Amazon doesn't give a damn about is using the mechanism meant for different product colors and sizes to combine multiple products into a shared entry, which mixes all the reviews together and makes it basically impossible for the customer to see the score for each individual item.

As far as I can tell Amazon's only reaction was to start banning customers who returned too many products. I wonder why.

Steam has done something smart here by displaying both the total score and a recent trend score, so you can see if recent changes has made the game better or worse.

Returns are paid by third party sellers not by Amazon (unless it's one of the ~20% of products actually sold directly by Amazon.

The people actually gaming the reviews? Fantastic!

The problem is that a lot of people don't bother sending back stuff because it's too much of a hazzle, and it's unlikely that any of the other products on Amazon are any better. You already know that you aren't really going to get some high quality product for 19.99€. You still check the reviews to try to get the best quality product, but in reality you already know the product is going to be crap.

I deal with this by explicitly seeking sub-5 reviews. I read them to see if criticisms mentioned bother me. I used to think I was a little paranoid, but now I'm going to double down on this.

Unironically good advice I got a few years ago was to only ever read the 3-star reviews, because they're the most informative and balanced.

It's true. Often reviews are split between excited and outraged people. Those who write 'yellow' (as opposed to green or red) reviews on Metacritic are often those who can see nuance, weigh pros and cons.

Not my experience with books at least which is about all I buy on Amazon. I've come across plenty of negative reviews. A book's probably worth buying if it appears to meet the buyer's expectations culled from something like half a dozen reviews or more from disparate sources.

Funny I just submitted a thread about how stars are no substitute for regulation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25463251

What is a star, really? I believe the concept comes from hotels, where there would absolutely be a star system with integrity where every score was possible. Now it's just theater to pretend your service allows consumer choice.

I think the second thing falls into grey area. Users are often unkind and leave 1-star reviews on apps when it's often their fault.

That usually means that the advertising is not attracting the right kind of customer.

Nope. It often means users are too reflexive to not figure out something in one second and leave one star review. And it's about survival in the app stores where everyone else has 4+ rating and few of them are certainly bots.

App stores are a form of advertising which attracts these "reflexive" customers.

Do people read the Google reviews of a food truck before they buy from it?

I vividly remember these articles about two-stage review growth hacking for all store being on front page of HN about 8 years ago. So, it's not like there are some other people doing this. It's us.

Users mostly rate apps when they don't work for them, so app creators are highly motivated to encourage happy users to vote. I know of one app where this was drove a 1-star difference in rating.

From there it can become quite tempting to further affect review scores.

Any review system eventually kills all below 5-star businesses. So it is a matter of survival to game the system - because everyone else does.

Yes the food truck’s request sucked, but without it they’d be out of business.

Nobody gets exactly 100% positive reviews. And it's about highest reviews, not about clearing some bar. Cheaters must be punished.

I pointed out such promotions in reviews and never had a rejection. Other than your review I also wrote some sentences about the product. Maybe that makes a difference?

In any case it's import that people point out such bad practices. (One time I would have received a gift certificate for 30 $ for a product which costs 25 $. Crazy!)

I purchased the same webcam for my high school sophomore in September 2020, as school restarted (all online for him). The box contained a $20 "gift card" if I emailed proof of my 5-star review. It looks identical to the one I received (including the email address). Only the reward is different.

I didn't try to write a review, I notified customer service in an attempt to report the seller.

I documented everything including photos, my exchange with Amazon customer service, and the confirmation from the seller that they would pay me $20 for a 5-star review. I did not take the money offered ... I was appalled at the situation and more than a little angry that I had been tricked by bogus reviews.

Here's what happened when I reported the seller:

Me: Hi. The box for this product contained a card that says “Amazon $20 gift card” and looks like a gift card, but the back says I have to give a 5 star review and send my order information to an outlook email address. Is this legitimate? Is it really a $20 Amazon gift card?

Amazon: Thank you so much for your information on this, I will certainly pass it along here so that we can check this promotion or offer directly with the seller. Because I am not seeing that advertised on the item at all And would not be capable of confirming if that is a legit Amazon gift card because, I do not see that offer on the item

Me: So what should I do?

Amazon: My best suggestion would be to contact the seller directly for this through this link [redacted] So that you can confirm directly with them if this is legit or not Certainly giving away gift cards for good reviews is not professional And I have to report the seller for that

Me: I thought this type of offer was forbidden by Amazon’s own policies for sellers. But I will contact them using the link you sent to ask them if that’s what you recommend.

Even though the CSR reported the seller, and I confirmed with the seller through Amazon's own communication system that they were paying $20 per 5 star review, nothing happened to the seller. The item (a webcam) is still for sale on Amazon, with thousands of additional 5-star reviews - more than 12,000 now, compared to 3,266 when I let Amazon know how they were gaming the reviews in September.

Once again, the good guys (in the case, customers and honest sellers) lose out while the bad guys win, with no repercussions.

This is really common, although it's not often a straight up Amazon gift card. I've seen offers for Steam bucks for a favorable review for example.

Or they got penalized, and have stopped doing it. There is now way as outsiders we can tell what's going on.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect that a single reported case is going to result in visible action. (competitors/griefers can easily abuse this).

> I don't think it's reasonable to expect that a single reported case is going to result in visible action. (competitors/griefers can easily abuse this).

In this case it's quite reasonable to expect prompt, visible action. The grefier problem is easily solved with a modicum of due diligence by Amazon. All it has to do is conduct an investigation to confirm the complaint, which is as easy as ordering the item in question and confirming it contains the offer reported by a single customer.

If it's too onerous for Amazon to spend $20 our of its billions to conduct and investigation, it could even write in terms to its contracts saying it reserves the right to inspect any seller inventory for compliance.

You're not saying Amazon needs to spend $20. You're saying Amazon needs to buy one of every product on Amazon that gets a complaint.

> You're not saying Amazon needs to spend $20. You're saying Amazon needs to buy one of every product on Amazon that gets a complaint.

Amazon, being one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, can afford to do that and then some. Yeah, it won't be exactly $20, but it will still be a tiny amount for a company that size.

I mean, "inspecting the products you sell for compliance" shouldn't be an optional thing, but a basic function of a retail business.

And we're back around to the quote "It's very difficult to make someone understand something, when their salary depends on their not understanding it."

Unless Amazon loses because of these misrepresentations, they're not going to care. Cash flow and sales volume up, and they'll let anything go unless it somehow causes lost sales at scale.

Always, always, buyer beware.

Even if Amazon orders one of every product, it's easy to beat that system.

I make two fake companies selling the same product. Each of them asks buyers to write a fake review 50% of the time. One of the companies should pass the Amazon inspection.

Well, then you say Amazon can place more than one order for each product. I just keep tweaking the numbers. I'll have 2% of customers for each of my fake companies get asked to write a review. One of them will not get flagged and the fake reviews will help them rise to the top.

> Even if Amazon orders one of every product, it's easy to beat that system.

I wasn't talking about proactively ordering one of everything, but ordering something in response to a specific complaint about a specific practice. So, while we're making up numbers, they might actually end up ordering 10 copies of 0.01% of their items. Make the penalties for getting caught onerous enough, and they might deter the practice completely.

Sure, some vendor might then only put a solicitation in 1 in 20 items, but they'll still have a significant chance of getting caught, and it's not like Amazon should be so transparent about the process so a vendor can game it.

But to my original point: it's totally practical for Amazon to take visible action in response to a single complaint, without opening the door up to griefing.

The reason for this is that they don't need to rely 100% on crowdsourced feedback for compliance enforcement (and to think they would shows a really blinkered webtech-centric viewpoint). The complaint -> investigation -> substantiation -> enforcement process is tried and true technology that's even older than UNIX.

The cheapest solution would just be to add a thing to the T&C that says that Amazon reserves the right to place a reasonable number of undercover orders, which the vendor must accept as a refund (other than the shipping fees). Then Amazon is only on the hook for the shipping for one of every product they get a complaint on. That seems like a pretty reasonable amount for them, especially given that there is 0 shipping fee for anything from Amazon's fulfillment. Unless merchants are hiding these things inside the actual product box, instead of inside the shipping box. In that case, they should just ban the manufacturer's goods from Amazon entirely.

>All it has to do is conduct an investigation to confirm the complaint, which is as easy as ordering the item in question and confirming it contains the offer reported by a single customer.

The number of humans available to perform daily investigations versus the total number of products sold makes this most decidedly not "easy".

The easiest thing to do here would be to simply return the item because the seller crossed your personal ethical line, and state that as the reason. A large number of returns on an item will definitely get the sellers and Amazon's attention.

> The number of humans available to perform daily investigations versus the total number of products sold makes this most decidedly not "easy".

Only if you're taking the blinkered tech mindset that employing people to do anything is hard. Amazon employs 1.2 million people [1], and has people employed that literally touch every single physical items it ships at least once. Every time you contact them you talk to one of their thousands of customer service agents. It's totally easy for an organization like that to staff a compliance department to investigate policy violation complaint.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/now/amazon-projects-strong-holiday-sal...

That is completely absurd. I too can "touch" tens of thousands of packages a day. That doesn't mean I can perform compliance on tens of thousands of customer complaints per day. You are simply asserting it is easy without providing actual evidence of how they would achieve this. Sorry, I don't see anything remotely logical in your comment that I can respond to.

how was the webcam?

I also have gotten fake "Amazon Gift Card (if you submit a good review)" promos with items and gagged. I wonder though if you "innocently" took a photo of the contents of the package, showing the phony giftcard, if then the review would remain up, unless Amazon has non-automated systems (aka humans) who would notice it.

Better still, innocently take a photo of the package, leave a five star review with the photo including the gift card pledge saying you really enjoyed the product's innovative approach to marketing and claim your $20 gift card

Just make an unboxing video and feign surprise/confusion when you get to the gift card bribery part.

What I would do is write the 5 star review, get the gift card, and then edit the review.

Interesting take, and who would the seller complain to about the modified review? Amazon? "Yes Amazon, we paid this customer $20 for a five star review against your policy, and they changed the review to be more honest after they got our money!"

The only problem might be if Amazon decided you were affiliated with the scammy seller and penalized your account or blocked you from buying.

Well the complaint is that one-star reviews get deleted.

...with a picture of the bribe offer

Leave a 5-star review, get your $20. Resell the item on Amazon for $10 less than what the original seller was selling for. Earn $10 dollars profit. Repeat for other such products. Earn more profit. Make a blog about your antics; earn more profit, and help others profit the same way. Exploit the system until Amazon has to fix it.

EDIT: I guess at no point is Amazon actually harmed by this scheme. However, the companies trying to buy 5-star reviews are themselves exploited to the extent that people do this.

The cost to the original company is a lost sale, a lost product, and $20 [lost] in exchange for a legitimate looking 5-star review (from someone who is not a bot). That may well be worth it for the company, so I'm not sure this scheme would actually stop dishonest reviews, only make it worse.

Write an ebook on how to make money on Amazon, sell it for $297, and post a Show HN about it.

... and give away $20 gift cards to people who leave 5-star reviews!

There is something about how the human brain works that makes us hate this. It happens in games a lot; the community will complain that a certain character is broken and that they hate playing against it... but won't actually go play the character themselves to exploit the brokenness for their own gain. Seems silly to me.

(Buying reviews might actually be illegal though, so that's a strong argument to not do it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

If you've never read it before, I highly recommend reading David Sirlin's Playing to Win.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/

Specifically the chapter "Introducing... the Scrub" discusses exactly this sentiment.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub

> In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely.

If you are applying this to computer games, I see your point. If you are applying it to 5-star reviews for $20, then I disagree.

(Luigi Barzini mentions an Italian book on card-playing--written, I think, by a clergyman--that begins "Always try to see your opponents' cards." He was trying to point out the light value to that Italians assign to official rules.)

But this is life, and there's not really a difference between "arbitrary rule system designed for a game" and "arbitrary rule system designed for 5-star reviews". They're both just "arbitrary rules", and some people are going to Play to Win. So what are you going to do about them?

I think you and the parent comment are both missing the point of the example with the videogame (not in the least part, because the analogy was not really applicable at all).

Having that "arbitrary" throw mechanic in the game was done intentionally to make the game more balanced and enjoyable for the customer. The only people complaining about it are very very early beginners, who don't realize that removing that mechanic would completely break the game balance and make it unplayable. It is an advertised feature, not a bug, in this specific scenario.

I don't think that we can say the same about paid reviews on Amazon. It isn't a rule (i.e., Amazon doesn't require every seller to offer gift cards in exchange for 5-star reviews), and it doesn't exist to increase the value that Amazon marketplace provides to their customers, it does the opposite.

P.S. I actually agree with what you said completely. It just that the comment that brought up the videogame analogy didn't realize how completely different the situation there was, so it ended up derailing the further chain of arguments.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

If you have two actors within a system that are at odds, using the term "purpose" to refer to the system is either mostly incoherent, or (in most cases) trying to import the connotation of "purpose" into a conversation.

A charitable view would be that Amazon is trying to create a system that rewards fair sellers and provides unbiased reviews to consumers, while unscrupulous actors attempt to defeat that by engaging in new forms of grift. If the unscrupulous actors are 10% less effective because of Amazon's efforts, does that mean the "purpose" of the system has shifted 10% away from honest dealing? If Amazon all but eliminates dishonesty, does that mean the "purpose" of the system is to have an ever present, tiny baseline of fraud? At that point, better to use a different word.

It's because of strategic equivocation between the "actor" being implied in the "purpose." The implication is that Amazon creates the system and this is their purpose, but the cybernetician's definition of purpose is more like "the role this system plays in the overall society in light of all the infinite restrictions on everyone's behavior."

> A charitable view would be that Amazon is trying to create a system that rewards fair sellers and provides unbiased reviews to consumers, while unscrupulous actors attempt to defeat that by engaging in new forms of grift.

I would agree with that until something like this happens, where Amazon prevents people from letting other people know that the reviews are paid.

> If the unscrupulous actors are 10% less effective because of Amazon's efforts, does that mean the "purpose" of the system has shifted 10% away from honest dealing? If Amazon all but eliminates dishonesty, does that mean the "purpose" of the system is to have an ever present, tiny baseline of fraud? At that point, better to use a different word.

I'll think on your point. I'm not sure how to quantify purposefulness.

> It's because of strategic equivocation between the "actor" being implied in the "purpose." The implication is that Amazon creates the system and this is their purpose, but the cybernetician's definition of purpose is more like "the role this system plays in the overall society in light of all the infinite restrictions on everyone's behavior."

Point taken.

> If you have two actors within a system that are at odds, using the term "purpose" to refer to the system is either mostly incoherent, or (in most cases) trying to import the connotation of "purpose" into a conversation.

I think that one can still imagine that the point of a competitive endeavor is separate from the purpose of the competitors involved in the system.

Thanks for the reply, I'll consider your ideas.

I think we're mostly in agreement. The only thing I disagree with is that, based on the article, we are de facto in a system where paying $20 for a 5 star review is one of the rules. I base this on the fact that it's happening.

Since most of the players are going to be early beginners, it is a problem.

It's very hard to balance a game to be fun both for most players and for the e-sports players.

Note also that the "average" player, the one that is average in the sense of being randomly picked among the players playing at any specific time, is likely to spend a lot of time in the game, and therefore is also likely to be exceptionally good - for instance the "most played" games have a median gameplay time of only ~30 hours!

>If you are applying this to computer games, I see your point. If you are applying it to 5-star reviews for $20, then I disagree.

I am with you on this one. Not in the least part, because I don't think that the analogy the parent comment brought up is valid here at all (and I am saying that as someone who actually read that book they mentioned).

In the example the parent comment brought up, it even says "[...]throwing is an integral part of the design - it's meant to be there[...]". That throwing mechanic was an intentional addition to the game, to counter-balance people who constantly block. The only people complaining about it are those who don't understand the game well or early beginners (we are talking someone who never played any fighting games before at all). Every single person playing competitively understands that without throws, the balance would be completely off, and the game would become unplayable competitively. In fact, it would become a completely different kind of game altogether. And throws aren't some hidden feature, it is featured prominently in tutorials and all.

While with gift cards in exchange for amazon reviews, it isn't an intentional mechanic advertised as a feature of the service. Amazon doesn't come out and say "this is one of our core features, without it our service would go down the drain and become unusable." It is still against the rules, and I cannot think of any logical reason it is helpful for buyers in terms of making Amazon.com a better marketplace (aside from the cash gain to the customer writing the paid review, but that's just a personal gain and doesn't make the marketplace better).

In different terms, that is a passage that could be taken directly out of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals

Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking of.

And this is more akin to a situation where someone finds a glitch that allows them to throw someone from across the screen, never having to actually get close and risk attack. At that point, there's two options from the game designers.

They can patch the glitch to restore what people considered the normal, designed, and balanced gameplay, or they can state that's just how the system works now and people need to choose whether to accept that or not and play something else.

Amazon can fix (or attempt to at least) the problem and make it harder for sellers to get 5 star reviews and lower reviews averages for some big selling items, or they can choose to do nothing, and some people will decide to leave and shop elsewhere because they can't trust the site and reviews.

Actually, there's a third option, which is that they can say they are doing everything they can to fix the problem while not doing much, therefore maximizing both reviews/profit as well as customer satisfaction in the short term. If they actually start fixing the problem before too long, it might be the maximal solution for them, but if they take too long their reputation will suffer even more (and it may give competitors a toe-hold). I suspect Amazon is doing this. I have no idea if they can go longer, are at the point they need to change, or are too late, but as a customer it sucks right now.

I'm afraid you've deeply misunderstood Playing to Win. This is quite common. Sirlin assumed a sort of community knowledge as to the context that people who came across the series later tend to lack.

Playing To Win is about people who refuse to learn the rules of a game. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that people who understand the rules very well are pointing out that they have holes in them.

Scrub statement: "throws are cheap". Informed statement: "the way SF2 tick throw setups work biases the gameplay too far in favor of the player with offensive agency." You'll note that the latter makes no mistake about the purpose of the rules and makes no judgments about players using the tools provided. Instead it focuses on system interactions and their net result. You'll note that almost every big fighting game in the 20 years since the end of the SF2 series has reduced the power of tick throws by means of frame data or broader system changes. Players generally decided that getting the first knockdown should not have that much influence over a match.

Scrub statement: "I hate people who get upset at review purchasing." Informed statement: "Review purchasing makes the buying process worse for everyone by creating incentives to deceive buyers, increasing costs for sellers that purchase reviews and reducing sales to sellers who do not. It shifts the Nash equilibrium towards paying more for lower-quality products." Again, the latter examines the system interactions and emergent behavior rather than making moral judgments about the participants.

First, I find it hard to believe that you inferred that I deeply misunderstood an entire book due to posting a single quote with almost no other context given within my response. Please be more charitable in the future.

Second, I have the same disagreement with you as I do with the other chains. Which is that, de facto paying for reviews is currently a rule in the system. I can tell it's a rule because it's happening, and there's no rules or punishment appearing stop it. In video games, the rules are explicitly coded and nothing beyond that code is permitted. This is why bugs vs intended behaviour becomes a conversation of intent, because the code is obviously allowing it and the code is the ruleset.

But that's not true in real life. And that's the part that all responses like yours are missing. There's a game being played at Amazon, where boosting your review stats correlated with boosting your sales stats. Except the permitted ruleset is everything not explicitly prohibited and punished by Amazon. Complaining about people buying reviews is just being a scrub not understanding the rules. The correct conversation to be having is the same as when an apparent bug is found in a game: Is this intended behaviour from Amazon's perspective, and if not what active action are they going to do about it?

This has nothing to do with unwillingness to exploit. If you would get a 1 million dollar coupon by leaving a 5 star review, almost everyone would do it (except perhaps billionaires). The thing is: Everybody has a price, but what that price is, is always different.

The less money I have, the more incentive I have to take advantage of these schemes. For me, the effort of earning 20$ this way would make this a few hundred dollars net loss (compared to working my job instead). So yeah, give me a 1000$ coupon and I am game!

For the same reason, I rarely return items I buy if they are in the under 50$ category, or write negative reviews for products that suck. It's just a waste of time, considering time is the most precious resource, and it is also money. I often write positive reviews for products that amaze me (doesn't happen too often), but here the product gave me so much value that I am willing to spend my time for this.

You post on HN, so obviously you have plenty of free time that could be given to help your fellow shoppers and quality merchants.

The point of a game isn't to win, its to have fun. A certain character may disrupt the mechanics of the game that are the most fun to a subgroup of players. To take it to an extreme, let's say a character is introduced to a fighting game and this character will win as soon as the "A" button is pressed. Now whatever fun people were doing to win in the game before is gone. In order to win, you just have to pick this super-character and hit the A button. Doesn't sound very fun to me.

At a deeper level, that people won't "exploit the brokenness for their own gain" is key to a functioning society. Just as the promise of laying out rules in detail (expert systems) failed to capture the complexity required to get high-functioning AI, societies can not function by formal rules (laws and regulations) alone. There are sorts of complexities about norms, mores, and moral codes that are important to keep societies and organizations running. What is expected behavior when everyone is queued up to buy tickets at an event, but there is no formal sign saying "please queue here"? I mean you could audiciously walk up, stand next to the person in front of the line, and then walk up to the windows when they say "next please" and not be breaking any written rule, but everyone sure would be angry, and if everyone did it you'd have near total anarachy where the pushiest or strongest always got to the front of the line first.

One of the biggest problems with internet scale is that its pretty easy to start running into individuals who ARE ok with exploiting the rules, or just ignoring them. This can be because they are from societies with different norms than the one they are encountering online, or just because they are in the small minority of people who just don't care. This effect is aided and abetted by the relative anonymity online. If you cut in line, people who you can see and here are going to yell at you right now. Break the social norm (or actual policy) of not paying for reviews and you'll most likely just get a strongly worded letter and possible ban on selling (which is easy enough to get around).

In short though, not exploiting a broken rule or system just because its broken isn't silly. Its the a huge part of having a functioning society.

Well, with game you have to be careful to distinguish between behavior unintended by developers and intentional design. The Street Fighter series has had any number of opportunities to "fix" behavior that some players consider "cheap" or an exploit. Developers have kept them in. If using those moves deprives another player of fun, that doesn't mean it shod be removed. There is always a winner and a loser, and someone who loses repeatedly to the same technique isn't any more entitled to the fun of winning. Winning is not meant to be a resource evenly divided among all players. Winning is predicated on skill, which is also not evenly divided among all players. Given effective counters, which always exist, calling other players cheap for having developed a novel play style amounts to a sense of winning as entitlement rather than earned.

Again, the above presupposes intentional design, or judgement that emergent behavior nonetheless keeps gameplay in balance..

That why it's not fun to play a game using a third party's rules. Fun games have rules approved by the players.

I'm confused-- It's not a 3rd party when it's the creator of the game. Unless you're saying no games created by someone else are fun? I don't think you're saying that-- it's just the implication I'm getting because I'm not sure what you mean. Because any game you don't create has rules established by someone else.

Of course the original creator sets the baseline, but there absolutely can be rules created past the original creation of the game. For example, my friends and I generally disallowed playing as Oddjob in Goldeneye back in the day. Totally valid within the context of the game programming, totally disallowed by social convention.

Ah yes, Oddjob. I take that as an example of accidental imbalance though, not deliberate game design. I seem to recall the developers even saying something like "yeah, we realized it was broken, but thought it was funny" (not a direct quote.

I guess my viewpoint assumes that gameplay is legitimately & deliberately balanced. I suppose this is much harder in videogames with game characters having different skill sets. It's much harder to evaluate whether or not there is balance between them than, say, Monopoly: Everyone starts the same there-- the dog isn't any better off than the thimble. (Though I usually play as the dog, and pretend the thimble is a fire hydrant as I pass it by & do what dogs do... I may not be very mature for my age. It makes my kids laugh though)

I think you are taking an overly rigid view of what a game can be. Games exist in an environment and social context. Competitively playing street fighter online is one context, and the way you are suggesting play should happen is probably correct given the established norms of that community. Playing Smash Bros with my kids though? A complaint that I'm simply "winning too much" is absolutely valid. If my kids never beat me, they won't want to play anymore. They can go ahead and change rules to make it easier to win.

What's more, changing a rule can make a game fundamentally different experience that appeals to a new audience. Simple rules (no sniper in counter strike for example) lead to a different game that a subset of the addressable audience finds more enjoyable.

I'll finish with taking a quibble with the statement that "winning is not meant to be equally divided among players." That is true to a degree, but it also should not be overly concentrated among just a few. It is not fun to be consistently dominated and a game where a feeling of success or enjoyment is only accessible to a select few is unlikely to attract much of an audience.

The most bitter arguments happen when people disagree about what the unwritten rules are; this naturally happens a lot when people from different cultures have to interact with each other.

> At a deeper level, that people won't "exploit the brokenness for their own gain" is key to a functioning society.

In the long term, someone will exploit that brokenness. The key to a functioning society is repairing those broken places imo.

Yes, this is called “not being a jerk”.

Doing something which is technically legal, benefits you, but causes other players to “hate playing” is not a good long term strategy. This normally ends with either the person being rejected, or, if the rest of people are nice, the group itself disbanding.

Nothing silly about this.

I’ve been party to this scheme incidentally and the antenna I bought mentioned that they would only honour one purchase for a discount.

But how many products/companies are doing this? If there's 500 different products/companies offering $20 gift cards for 5-star reviews you can milk that for awhile and spread the word to others who are also in on the scheme.

Unfortunately they don't seem to advertise the gift card.

Maybe there should be a site with current gift card offers - call it something like reviewbribes.com?

And do we use that site to avoid dodgy products/companies, or to 'side hustle' (god I hate that) reviewing and returning?!

Both. Those in on the hustle will do the work to keep the site updated (making money in the process). Everyone else just uses it to spot fake reviews.

A review review site, then.

And the arms race continues...

btw. in germany there was a video that 3rd party sellers are sending inventory to specific people, because its cheaper to gift it to somebody instead of destroying/trashing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT4IJYzbMi0

I don't know German but there is also "brushing" where the products are bought and sent to an unrelated party so that the seller can leave verified reviews (as opposed to as a method of disposing of unwanted inventory).

Someone I know made easier money by listing Amazon-available products on eBay and selling them there for higher prices. They didn't even need inventory, they just got them with Prime shipping after a purchase on eBay. People are stupid.

On eBay before buying stuff I always ask the seller if they can beat the Amazon price - 5% cashback that I get on Amazon, or deduct CA sales tax in their price if the product is available on B&H. If they can't beat that I buy on Amazon / B&H.

People do this with Walmart and Amazon -- they list products at higher prices on Amazon and when people order it, they drop ship it from Walmart.

And Home Depot / Lowes. Every small tool I look for is cheaper there than on Amazon. Often by 1/3 or more. Same brand or better in most cases. And also with free shipping.

Eww. Meanwhile someone is out there saying "I refuse to support Amazon, I buy stuff on ebay even if it costs a little more."

Isn't it great when somebody's ethics are seen as an arbitrage opportunity by somebody else? It's almost like that whole "voting with your wallet" idea is incorrect.

Not incorrect, just not universally effective.

Or could just be impulse buyers on eBay.

I bought a book on ebay because it was backordered on Amazon. I was pissed when it arrived two months later in an Amazon box.

I feel really bad about how much I'm laughing at this. My sympathies!

> The cost to the original company is a lost sale, a lost product, and $20 [lost] in exchange for a 5-star review. That may well be worth it for the company, so I'm not sure this scheme would actually stop dishonest reviews, only make it worse.

Sometimes when I see a product being sold FBA I will do a search on Alibaba (they’re always on Alibaba) to find the wholesale price. I’ve found that the markup on most products is high enough that if a seller were to give every buyer $20, they’d still be making money.

You won't get 2 days delivery but you can probably buy two dozens for the same price.

Then you'd be a seller. They buy bulk on Alibaba, store it in near warehouses (FBA) and parcel out single sales at a higher price.

Alter your review after the reward has been issued.

guess at no point is Amazon actually harmed by this scheme

Maybe not in the short term, but in the long term it could. There are already things I haven't purchased because the review contents just didn't seem right, lots of 5 star and 1 star, practically no 3 or 4 star.

I can't be the only one, and the situation is only getting worse.

So? You not buying a product that you wouldn't have bought anyway if the reviews were honest, doesn't hurt the merchant.

What might hurt amazon ia if people who buy junk get mad and reduce overall Amazon shopping even for good products.

I'll say that this is less an issue with amazon and more an issue with the overall culture. Anecdotally, I've noticed a move from score based metrics to binary like/dislike based metrics. Thus, reviews also take a binary 5 star: I loved it. or 1 star: I didn't approach.

So, once you start doing this in bulk the seller is going to stop honoring their agreement to send you gift cards. What happens when you report the seller for that? Does Amazon remove the seller? Remove you for admitting to leaving fake reviews?

You might be intested to learn how sellers on Amazon utilize this type of review fraud to perpetuate further frauds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038734

Throwaway because of my suspect behaviour.

I have actually emailed the people on these cards out of curiosity. The range of rewards has been refunds, steep discounts and free products.

I am now on some lists and I can get regular free stuff. Sometimes I just write the review and give the product away to friends and family. Sometimes they ask you to mark certain reviews as helpful.

While unethical, the few types of things I’ve done this for have been ... kinda good actually. Even if I paid for them. So I don’t feel so bad recommending the product.

Amazon doesn't really care about customers like the rest of FAANG. It's all about money, data and power. Everything else is just PR and advertising.

> care about customers like the rest of FAANG

I think of the five FAANG companies only Apple and Netflix have even a remote semblance of caring about the customer.

Google and Facebook certainly don't and that was known since before the announced antitrust lawsuits.

I don’t know about Facebook, but Google is reasonably customer friendly, at least with big accounts. I worked at a large firm, Google assigned a very competent and dedicated account executive to look after us.

Unless you’re talking about end-users? In which case that’s like asking if McDonalds look after their cows well :)

On this fine day I did not expect an internet stranger to call me a cow.

Google has the worst customer service by far of any of the tech majors unless you're a big cloud customer.

I bought a Pixel 4a and a case direct from Google a couple months ago. For some strange reason, they shipped the case immediately, then the phone a few weeks later.

When I got the phone, I realized that the case had never arrived. Google refused to do anything, citing a 2-week limit on disputes. They told me to take it up with the shipper, but provided no guidance on how to do so and never responded when I asked.

Given that the cases are clearly high margin items, I was blown away by how terrible their customer service was.

I think those companies care about their customers it’s just that regular users are not their customers. Facebook cares if people stop putting ads on Facebook, not if some random person has a problem with their service.

"Companies who spend $$$ to buy ads" are the customer in FB and Google's case...

Normal users of the service are not their customers in most cases.

> Apple [...] caring about the customer

I think that's the first time I've seen those two in the same sentence. They do a ton of things they thing is "better" and it turns out to be a bad situation for the customer.

It's a strange transition because early on one of the things that made Amazon amazing was their extreme focus on making customers happy. Maybe they've just discovered that fake reviews and counterfeit items don't actually result in unhappy customers.

I have to assume you meant the Amazon product with the url suffix "dp/B087NN41JH/". This seems to be the highest reviewed result for search term "webcam", at least on my page.

Here on HN, we have a savvy audience that understands the problem on Amazon with counterfeits, fakes, and low-quality items. I don't usually have this problem myself, because I go out of my way to buy things from sellers that I recognize, such as Logitech for instance, which owns the top results for "webcam" even though they have fewer reviews and higher prices.

In your case, I think there are warning signs for the product in question. An unknown seller hawking a cheap knock-off looking webcam with a fake sale price... I really do not enjoy being the devil's advocate but, come on.

Amazon might reprimand the seller. They might even ban them. But if so, they will just pop back up over night with a new name. Their cheapo products are unlabelled, unbranded and modestly packaged for exactly this benefit.

They won't pop back up with 12k 5 star reviews immediately?

I'm honestly shocked by this comment - warning sides aside, paying for reviews should cause a ban.

I am as unconvinced by this argument about "popping back" as I am by people who say that raising taxes is useless because people will just hide their money.

> They won't pop back up with 12k 5 star reviews immediately?

No, they will pay for those and have them soon enough. Even the OP says the product was sitting at >4,000 reviews at time of purchase and now is over 12,000. The reviews are easy to come by, of course.

I am not pointing out that the seller here is right by any means. I fully agree that paying for 5-star reviews is reprehensible and unethical, and it's similarly unethical for ANY marketplace to feature items that have paid for positive reviews. But now we've arrived at a part that is beyond Amazon itself, haven't we? The concept of "paid positive reviews" is not confined to Amazon, naturally.

This is why it's important to be a "literate consumer". That is to say, keen and discerning and aware. Like I said in my post, the buyer (in this case, OP) absolutely CHOSE a product that was visually an unbranded "knock off" of a webcam that Amazon actually featured HIGHER in their own search results. You can see which camera I am talking about being the "knockoff" and which is the "original", I hope.

A person with high "consumer literacy" will not just pick the cheap option with a bunch of 5-star reviews. Not in 2020, and not on Amazon.com -- these plain facts mean nothing about the seller's reputation or the product's quality. Every "literate consumer" should already know this! It doesn't mean it's OK for the seller to do what they do, but it's important that we all know the reality is that they DO do it.

Amazon shows the reviews, it should be accountable for them. These are not comments from users, this is used to promote sales.

> Every "literate consumer" should already know this!

So, it is my fault that Amazon promotes false advertising? Should I be punished for not seeing thru the lies that Amazon shows in their website? I don't think so. Don't blame the victim, blame the scammer.

> So, it is my fault that Amazon promotes false advertising? Should I be punished for not seeing thru the lies that Amazon shows in their website? I don't think so. Don't blame the victim, blame the scammer.

Who was the victim here? The OP was a repeat buyer, implying he already had the item and was satisfied enough to buy it again. Hardly sounds like a victim.

Look, I'll rewrite what I wrote earlier but more simply: Paying for good reviews = bad. Posting a good review to get paid for it = bad. There are approximately 12,000 bad people in the scenario this thread is about.

But there are platitudes and there is real advice. The platitude is "scammers are bad". Very good, I agree with that. The advice is to be cautious where you spend your money, and be aware of who you're giving it to. That is the consumer's choice. You can choose to give it to the no-name company you've never heard of who just-so-happens to have more reviews than any other item for the search term "webcam", or, you can choose to buy the Logitech for a little more.

Your notion of "consumer literacy" is a treadmill.

Hoping individuals will solve this won't work, because the malignant vendor has a much stronger incentive to find new ways to cheat than individual consumers do to figure out those cheats and take countermeasures.

The proper level to solve this at is higher up. Platforms and regulators in specific.

> I'm honestly shocked by this comment - warning sides aside, paying for reviews should cause a ban.

The likely result of that policy would be that scammers would order the product of their competitors, take a picture of it with fake gift cards, report it to Amazon, and drive out the non-scummy vendors.

They might pop back up with a lot of positive reviews: I just came across a product (random cheap drone) That had lots of great reviews... Only before a certain point, they were for a different product (some type of art kit) even with reviewer pictures of that older product.

So sellers are doing a sort of "money laundering" of product listings, placing new items, descriptions, and photos over an existing item.

Well, he does have a point. I just checked amazon.de for "webcam". Holy crap, the first page is just no-name webcams that all look the same, probably built in the same 2-3 factories in the same city in China with different names on them. If you buy some JellyTech Webcam or a Webcams Webcam for Eu 20-30, what do you expect. The funny thing is, all of these have 1k+ ratings and 4,5 to 5 star reviews, while more expensive webcams from Microsoft are at 3,5-4 stars and 150 to 300 reviews.

A lot of products have extreme monoculture.

For another example, most ice machines for consumer use all use the exact same flawed mechanical mechanism.

Someone cut a few cents of the BOM by dropping detection of when the water tray had fully rotated, and instead the mechanism will eventually break due to repeated stress as they just run the motor a few seconds too long. For occasional use it works. For frequent use and you'll easily cause them to break in the exact same manner each time after about a year.

Models keep disappearing, presumably because too many break within the warranty period, but then new ones with slightly different exteriors and the exact same broken interior mechanism appears. This has gone on for many years.

When I last bought one it took ages to find one that used another design, hampered by lack of pictures showing the tray. Finally did find one and never buying another brand again if I can avoid it.

> paying for reviews should cause a ban

Morally it should, but business-wise, for Amazon, it shouldn't. Amazon already has the monopoly and drove a lot of smaller retailers out of business; the counterfeit problem is not (yet?) causing people to shop elsewhere, probably because for a lot of goods there either isn't an elsewhere or the elsewhere is still a worse experience (longer delivery, etc).

Our regulatory environment also doesn't hold Amazon liable for selling counterfeit and/or dangerous goods (bad batteries which catch fire, etc), so there is yet again no pressure on Amazon to do anything.

Amazon doesn't really care whether you get a bad/counterfeit item, they get their money regardless. Until this changes there's no reason for Amazon to act.

> But if so, they will just pop back up over night with a new name.

And that's fine. But if so they'll pop up again with zero reviews and have to work at rebuilding the scam.

This is a pretty shocking comment. Amazon suggests that Amazon reviews are worth at least something. If they are not then they should all be removed and we can go back following your strategy of "buying from companies that I know the name of, because they will be best". Now excuse me while I go and buy an IBM laptop.

> Amazon suggests that Amazon reviews are worth at least something.

More and more it is proven that reviews themselves don't mean much. You should consider your own personal relationship with the brand, or from people you trust. Of course we don't all have the luxury of those things and sometimes you need to read a few reviews. After all, without GOOD and HONEST reviews we probably would not have a company like Anker, which I love dearly and who did it all right... but like with all things, you have to be critical of what you see and read and hear. Reviewers are not always honest, people are not always honest. Particularly when there is money at stake, particularly when you're online.

I'll have you know that the movie "Wolfman's Got Nards" is currently sitting at 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Does that mean you should go watch "Wolfman's Got Nards"?

'personal relationship with the brand'

Personal relationships with a social construct indicate the need for proffesional help. Amd imaginary friends.

"Amd imaginary friends." Freudian slip? Need something to replace your intel laptop? :-P

But yes, the whole point of brand marketing is to invoke a relationship in the mind of the [potential] buyer. And when you have people who devote their life to it there has to be someone out there who is good at it using whatever pysch tricks they can.

So no wonder some people fall for it. It's almost inevitable.

"Personal relationship with the brand" may not have been the best wordsmithing, but I think the OP meant something along the lines of "your history with buying and using other products made by the same company." Presumably if they had the manufacturing and QA processes in place to sell you high-quality goods before, those same processes should help make sure that what you're buying from them now is also reasonably high-quality. It's not foolproof, and of course there are exceptions (especially if the company has changed ownership), but it's a decent signal.

So basically "Don't use Amazon, you can't trust them - just shop from your favoured brand's online store."

That's fine - I'm not sure it's what Amazon are gooing for though.

Sidenote: I couldn't find this by reverse image searching, but if you search the same description you can find it on AliExpress for ~30% less. If I had access to Taobao, it's probably less again there.

I buy a lot of stuff from AliExpress - I'd love to be able to go one up the chain and find the factories that are building this stuff.

The factories will want to sell you pallets of the stuff.

What you want is the export agent, he will likely send a sample if you can produce a valid company profile

You will even pay reduced taxes for a sample, but make sure they have already a business relationship in your general area because they will have already done the legwork to certify the product and it'll clear custom straight away

So what does the average Amazon seller need to do to get set up? I'm assuming they're not paying the Alibaba price.

I wrote a negative review for glass that broke by itself in the fridge 5 times (out of 6 pieces). Amazon removed it. I asked why and was sent a link by a bot-like sender.

Some months back I gave a so so review on AirBNB and had it removed. I asked why, I was sent a link and cut and pasted guidelines. Responding using Reason led to being completely ignored.

Then I discovered a reddit subgroup where hosts tell each other tips to easily get reviews removed.

The whole review system has become corrupted. The complaint is that only motivated people put positive or negative reviews, which is only partially true. It's actually gaslighting by marketing people.

Not surprised by Amazon. Fakespot helps somewhat it seems... as does not ordering from Amazon where possible. I just ordered a jacket with a 20 pct coupon from a sporting goods store that sells the same item on Amazon.. without the 20 pct discount.

The trick is to remove negative reviews that violate guidelines, but for positive reviews that violate common sense and ethics, nyet.

> Then I discovered a reddit subgroup where hosts tell each other tips to easily get reviews removed.

What subreddit is that?

AirBNB! Do a search for Review and along those lines.

The best place to find reviews it seems is through subscription paid independent reviewers.

Consumer reports is one that comes to mind (they are also non-profit), as well as rtings. If you are looking for reviews for more niche products though, your pretty much on your own when it comes to finding out if its good or not.

"non-profit" just means there are no investors. It doesn't mean management isn't taking home money for running the operation.

It also means their finances are public so you can see exactly how much management is taking home.

A decent free option for reviews is Wirecutter from the New York Times. I've yet to buy anything that they recommended that was outright bad, and they have a surprising breadth of categories that they review.

They make money through affiliate links, but they claim that the writers/reviewers have no knowledge of which companies have affiliate relationships with the Wirecutter so it doesn't bias their picks.

I've bought USB cables on their recommendation only to find their top pick had quality issues. The most frustrating part was the way they ignored feedback in the review's comment section. My critical (but calm and reasoned) comment was even deleted. I do look at their reviews, but they are not decisive for me.

I do not trust their reviews for a second. I'm sure sometimes they do recommend the best thing. But can you find a single recommendation that isn't part of a major affiliate program? And just monitor any major rec page for a while and you'll see plenty of comments that are critical just vanish.

Yep and it seems rtings is finding that out too. It’s very expensive to buy retail products so you end up funneling people into amazon links, and of course there’s some bias to push the more expensive yet “reasonable” option.

That said rtings at least standardizes their tests so you can ignore the editorialized part of the review.

I used to think Wirecutter was useful, until I saw their recommendation for "the best bike rack" (for carrying bikes on the back of a car). They insisted that the best kind of bike rack is the type that is attached to the trunk lid using nylon straps and hooks. That's the cheapest kind, but also the worst by far, from my own experience and also just common sense. If $100 bike racks that scratch your car and have the bikes wobbling back and forth are really the best kind, why would anyone spend $500-$700 for high quality hitch-mounted and roof-mounted racks (that are easy to use and don't risk scratching your car or your bike) ?

It convinced me that the people writing these "reviews" have no idea what they're talking about and cannot be trusted. When the recommendations are for categories that I'm not an expert in, they can recommend whatever they want and I can't dispute it. When it's for a category that I know something about, and the recommendation is for the very worst kind of cheap junk product, it does raise a lot of doubt in my mind.

FWIW, I have a nylon strap-mounted rack (name withheld to avoid accusations of ninja advertising!) which hooks onto the trunk seam. 6 hooks and it's brilliant. Much cheaper than a hitch mounted version, much more compact so I've been able to hang it in a little storage closet in the last few apartments I've lived in and goes on a wide variety of cars without any damage. Rock solid with 3 chunky mtbs on it too. I've even had people come up to me in car parks asking me for details!

Not wanting to derail the discussion but if it was that that put you of the review site you mention, it could be worth reconsidering..

Interesting perspective. I'm glad to hear that some of the trunk-mounted racks are good.

I just checked and it looks like they now recommend hitch-mounted ones as their top picks. And they have a whole section about the pros and cons of different types of racks. So it looks like they revisited the category and improved their reviews.

Consumer Reports is notorious for just bad reviews - checking the wrong things, etc. They’re big on standardizing the test but not great on testing useful aspects.

https://terrylove.com/forums/index.php?threads/consumer-repo... is an example.

You used to be able to find forums and similar for almost anything; now you’re left with Reddit threads and half-remembered comments. Anything under $50 is just a crapshoot.

> You used to be able to find forums and similar for almost anything;

When google removed the option to search discussion boards I knew the internet was changing and the changes were going to be bad. Google discussion search was the most powerful tool to find real world information. You could put in the model number of some product you knew nothing about (e.g. a camera or boat motor) and discussion search results would reveal many different forum threads where professionals and aficionados had discussed the product in detail; those same forums were already hard to find and a search for "boat motor forum" wouldn't necessarily bring you to the same forums and even if so, requires many extra steps to arrive at the same thread.

I have a very few left (like the one linked above) that I consider very precious to me. The biggest loss has been car forums for me - they still exist but the posting volume is way down

And all the Photobucket images that are now gone, because the person hosting the forum was too cheap to self-host. RIP amazing, archived, sorted, searchable information.

Unfortunately all of these become trash, in time. Too many lawyers and $s.

Does Amazon notify you when they remove one of your reviews?

I've done numerous reviews over the years and have never got such a notication, but your comment has me wondering if my reviews are still there!

No, and they'll remove your ability to leave reviews at all if they keep getting taken down.

They do. It’s always a catch all “violation of our policies” and very rarely a real reason.

That's the other nefarious thing. I would never had known the Airbnb review was removed if I didn't go back and check. And I started to doubt my own memory!

Amazon did notify me my review got yanked.

I wonder if there is a way to fund and scale a service that uses a browser addon and separate database for reviews. People already use Honey for discounts, Keepa for historic pricing, and fakespot for fake reviews.

Having written several browser extensions, I have been thinking on building another one for people to comment on any website. Which ends up being useful for reviews.

And, while I like the idea, there are two main details preventing me from pursuing it:

- Moderating content provided by users is exhausting/costly. - I see no other way than ads to fund it, while it can potentially work as a paid app, it won't work until there is enough content (the chicken-egg problem).

I think a similar add-on went to court and was deemed illegal. Sorry, can't cite my source. I think it's a pretty common idea but falls flat quickly once you realize there isn't a reliable way to mass vet reviews

We really need a source on that. Why is it illegal for software on my computer to show me information I want? I happen to want comments related to the site I'm viewing to be shown in a side pane.

That doesn't make any sense, why would you be responsible for comments left by other people - unless you had editorial control?

Sounds like the next one needs to be built on top of censorship resistant platforms like IPFS and/or Dat.

There was a similar add-on called Dissenter written by people associated with the American right-wing social network Gab, and it was banned from the Mozilla and Chrome add-on stores, citing policy violations.[1]

1. https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to...

> When asked for more clarity on which policies Dissenter did not comply with, Mozilla said that they received abuse reports for this extension. It further added that the platform is being used for promoting violence, hate speech, and discrimination, but they failed to show any examples to add any credibility to their claims.

Wow, thanks for sharing the post.

But then people can still install that plugin, can't they?

I think the scope of that is too large to work well (based on seeing previous attempts at similar extensions).

Limiting the scope to just product reviews could make the idea a lot more feasible. Since you would be putting yourself directly in the purchasing path it might be easier to monetize the extension too.

How would you prevent review fraud?

> The trick is to remove negative reviews that violate guidelines, but for positive reviews that violate common sense and ethics, nyet.

I've heard it described as "malicious compliance."

> Fakespot helps somewhat it seems...

Which is unfortunately still Chrome-only...

Sometimes, I semi-seriously wonder if it isn't better to just buy things from aliexpress.com. The products themselves mostly come from China anyways and many classes of items consistently seem to be marked up on amazon.

And now we are left to wonder if the price deltas are helping middlemen retailers fund these review manipulation shenanigans, so why not just cut out the amazon exploit portion out of the equation?

Many of the sellers on Aliexpress are the same sellers on Amazon. The FBA model makes it easy to cut out the middleman.

The delivery takes longer but if I don't mind that then I just buy straight from Ali express.

Careful with battery and always connected devices, local market items and export market items are likely to run trough different lines with different markup targets and fault tolerances

I've seen this take place with all sorts of things. Restaurants where you get free dessert by leaving an online review. Hotels where you get some type of upgrade. Stores where you leave a review and get a chance to win a gift card.

I even had a guided tour in Vietnam including a cybercafé stop to leave a review! (I didn't mind, the tour was very good)

I wrote a negative review for a projector recently. The projector was so bad and had such good reviews I questioned this directly in my review. I later got a direct email (not an amazon message) from the seller asking if I would take down the review if they refunded me and let me keep the projector.

How did you proceed?

I would have been very tempted to take the refund and then put up another bad review, adding on about the bribe.

Here in the UK I had this happen once, but with much cheaper items: light bulbs. I ordered bright LED bulbs (I forget the purported lumens figure), but they where clearly nowhere near as bright as advertised. I gave a balanced 3-star review and was contacted the seller saying they'd refund me and let me keep the bulbs if I removed my review. I obviously declined, as I had no use for the bulbs in any case!

The same thing happened to me a few years back. I got a product that came with an invitation to a secret Facebook group, with promises of further discounts. I joined the group, and it turned out to be a system where they would send you Amazon gift cards to buy specific products in exchange for five-star reviews. Apparently a large number of ordinary customers were involved, given the size of the group in question (all people using what appeared to be their real Facebook accounts).

I reported it to Amazon customer service, and they gave me a $5 account credit for making the report. Not sure if any action was taken against the seller.

Believe me, this webcam is awesome.

Unbelievable quality.

Low price.

Light years ahead of the competition.

Seriously the best webcam in its class.

Help yourself out and buy one today.

I would give this SIX stars if I could.

Trust me.

Can you please post the link of the webcam here with the paid reviews.

Wait until you learn that people frequently extort the sellers by threatening bad reviews for perfectly good products unless they receive a significant refund of the purchase price.

Stop shopping on Amazon

So if a seller does something sketchy they ask customer to ask the seller if this is true? Wow.

Makes me feel like a chump for actually following Amazon's rules when soliciting reviews for my novel (no payment or discount of any kind is allowed in return for completing a review for most products; for books only you may provide the book itself in advance as long as there is no actual obligation to complete the review and no attempt to influence it)

I had a very similar experience last month. I ordered this toaster[1]. When I received it I noticed that in their user manual they were offering a "gift" in return for an Amazon review. Although to be fair they didn't explicitly demand that the review had to be positive. I submitted this 4-star review [2] to Amazon:

I received the toaster not too long ago. It looks just like in the advertised pictures and works fine. But the language on the last page of the user manual (see picture) makes it clear that LOFTER is offering customers a "gift" in return for leaving a review. Perhaps they're within their right to do that but it makes me not trust the rest of the reviews on this product.

A few days later I got an email from Amazon identical to the one in the submitted blog post[3]. I've stopped trusting positive reviews on Amazon. These days I only look at the negative reviews to see if there's a consistent complaint about the product.

[1] www.amazon.com/dp/B07S3TXD9H/ [2] https://cutt.ly/lhLZQ5o [3] https://cutt.ly/JhLZTjZ

The thing you have to know about Amazon is that they combine all the reviews for all sellers of the same product (to the extent that Amazon thinks it is the same product). As such, reviews aren't an appropriate place to leave feedback about a seller, and leaving your review up would have been misleading. The reviews are only supposed to be about the product.

You can leave feedback for sellers by clicking on their name in the listing.

This has pros and cons. It does allow you to see more reviews about the product you are purchasing, making it easier to find the gem reviews that are most helpful. On the other hand I think Amazon is too aggressive about combining reviews for similar but different products - different translations of the same book, different DVD sets of the same movie, etc. And seller ratings are deliberately not shown on the listing page, so few people click through to check the seller rating before buying on Amazon, let alone provide seller feedback.

I think the bigger problem is that the employees that rightfully deleted these reviews aren't required to instead migrate them to seller feedback, and forward them to folks that enforce seller policies.

If the thing about reviews-for-vouchers was in the user manual though then it really is related to the product, not the seller...

Honestly, the product page is the appropriate place for a review of this nature. You are informing other consumers to discount the weight of the reviews to a greater extent than they might otherwise.

I've been burned by this previously and had the review removed. My review was even about how the product was subpar and I suspect it was the highest rated in category because of the offer.

>The thing you have to know about Amazon is that they combine all the reviews for all sellers of the same product (to the extent that Amazon thinks it is the same product).

Yeah and that's fucking terrible. They've gone from a store to a knockoff of eBay.

The thing you need to know about users is that they have no idea these seller reviews exist because they are outside of the product page for the product they are buying. Furthermore, most visitors to Amazon have no idea that their products are being fulfilled by different people and not by Amazon. They think that Amazon has a warehouse for 100% of the products they sell on their site, and these other sellers are non-obvious to the vast majority of users. When they see things related to "sellers" on a product page, they just think that means the manufacturer. They don't get that any scammer can "open a store" on Amazon because Amazon goes to great lengths to make the experience seem like it's all 1 big store. Sure there are weasel words all over the site that point out that Amazon is only an intermediary, but almost no non-technical user understands this. Thus, leaving bad seller feedback anywhere other than the product page allows Amazon to keep scamming users through these 3rd party sellers.

I agree. I (usually) find it less than helpful if the review talks about shipping problems or other non-product stuff. (most products can be sold by multiple vendors)

That said, there was one review I found helpful because the review said it (something physically large) was damaged in shipment even though they returned it twice.

Maybe there should be a workflow for "You are purchasing from <company x> 81% positive - would you like to see their reviews as a seller?"

Now I remember ...

The previous review practice that outraged me was when someone here at HN was producing very detailed analysis of LED bulbs (spectral analysis, etc.) and proving that lots of bulbs on Amazon had CRI and color temperature ratings that were way off.

He then described how he posted that in some reviews and they were all taken down. Which is to say, crummy LED bulb on Amazon with an inflated CRI cannot have a review describing the inflated CRI.

China Export [1] are the only two words anyone should ever need to know about Amazon when it comes to safety and quality.

1. https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H...

This has nothing to do with reviews.

Fake urban legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#China_Export

Thanks for the link. I feel dumb for falling for that :-(

It's an urban legend. The reality is more boring than what people believe - it's simply that the manufacturers who falsely declare CE compliance don't even bother to get the correct drawing of the CE symbol (which is the maximum possible level of non-compliance, not even the logo!). Yes, the logo is a forgery, and the nickname "China Export" is a humorous way to describe it, but it must be emphasized that there's no "China Export" symbol - it simply doesn't exist, not defined by any government agency or trade association in China.

Yes, Amazon is a mess. I recently was fed up with the price of a beverage at the local overpriced Albertson's, $3 per tiny can. Decided to order a case on big A instead, to save some money.

Guess what, same price per can plus exorbitant shipping cost on Amzn. Came out to ~$5 a can and I had to buy 4 or 12 at a time. It just didn't make sense. I left a polite review that said as much, and it was rejected. :D

Was the listing mislabeled? Because otherwise I'm not sure what your complaint is. You bought in bulk, without a bulk discount, and got a larger quantity of an item at a worse unit price. If your review was politely informing people that the price was bad, then you're not really reviewing the item, because you like the item.

I didn't buy it, there was no point. Buying items by the case online should be significantly cheaper than a single purchase at convenience retail.

The truth hurts I suppose. They should be interested in the information however, because it cost them and continues to cost them sales among the clueful.

"I didn't buy this because..." is _also_ not a product review. I can't even fault them, they had good reasons for not allowing your post.

Not what I wrote.

Amazon doesn't give a shit. Amazon only wants to sell more stuff, so of course it's going to take down objective negative reviews and whistle-blowing accounts of review payola.

This is a regulatory problem. If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.

But thanks to the magic power of Internet leverage and the fact that only giant trading blocs like the EU have any power over multinational malfeasance, Amazon continues to do this shit - and will continue to do it, probably even after it's broken up.

You're thinking like a politician, whose law is a hammer and who sees every issue as a nail. Before regulating, let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself. And indeed it can, it's called competition.

Amazon itself claims to be "customer centric" because customer trust ensures sales go up in the long term much better than short gain of abusing the customer relationship. Look at this very thread for more evidence.

Maybe if you didn't need an army of lawyers fighting bureaucracy to found the tiniest company a competitor would already have beaten them. Maybe that's why Amazon feels it can afford this kind of business practices. Your intentions are good but your solutions are not.

>Before regulating, let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself.

Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people on the planet and Amazon is gigantic. When exactly is this "free market" solution supposed to start working?

> let's see if the free market can't work it out

or, it could in fact be a result of "free-market competition", e.g amazon being afraid of loosing sellers to competitors and they are afraid of punishing them *

* i have (not at amazon) witnessed this first-hand, so its not outside the realm of possibility at all

> let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself

How long are you willing to let the free market try and solve it? It seems like the free market has been solving this for, what, a couple decades in Amazon's case?

It seems like the free market is the problem here, and just continuing what's already been tried is going to give us more of the same results.

>This is a regulatory problem. If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.

If this were a corner hardware store nobody would shop there and they would be out of business.

I second what the downvoted comment said. Not everything is a nail to be hammered with more laws. I find it very hard to believe that existing laws regulating advertising cannot be used to solve this problem.

> This is a regulatory problem

This is a consumer problem - "you get what you pay for."

If you want to buy something from a retailer that gives a shit about their wholesalers, shop at a local superstore for whatever items your looking for and eat the difference in cost.

> If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.

If Amazon was a corner hardware store and not a marketplace, they would have been run out of business by all the customers returning garbage and counterfeits they bought from them. But that's not what Amazon is, they're ostensibly connecting buyers to sellers and providing logistics - not behaving as a retailer that selects their wholesalers and manages their supply chain besides getting shit from point A to point B.

What Amazon shouldn't do is have it both ways, either they're an Ebay-esque digital flea market where everything is buyer-beware, or they're a retailer who is responsible for the garbage on their shelves. They don't want to be either, and if there's regulation to be had, it should focus on that difference (as well as regarding their own products - you don't see flea markets driving their merchants out of business by stealing their products and undercutting their prices, while stores can stock generics alongside their curated shelves).

>This is a consumer problem - "you get what you pay for."

It's pretty clearly not the case here. I've paid full price for what I thought were legit items on Amazon and received fakes.

That's the whole point, the whole "free market" thing only works if the consumer has access to all the relevant info about the product they're buying. On Amazon more and more there's a distortion between what the consumer thinks they're buying and when they actually receive.

>What Amazon shouldn't do is have it both ways, either they're an Ebay-esque digital flea market where everything is buyer-beware, or they're a retailer who is responsible for the garbage on their shelves.

I completely agree with you here and I hope that it'll bite them in the ass in the long run. I'm definitely a lot more cautious of the stuff I buy on Amazon now that I was 10 years ago.

I bought a 3D printer that was missing a guide rod and couldn't be assembled. The package the rods were wrapped in had been opened apparently at the factory given that the rest of the contents were pristine and sealed. I posted a negative review that was never put on the product page. It wasn't worth my time returning it since I could order a replacement off eBay for less than RMA shipping.

> I've chatted with an Amazon rep on the issue, and to their credit they seemed to take it seriously and "noted the report violation against the seller"

I was deliberately scammed by a seller, and the wave of bad reviews they received after I purchased made me think I was not the only one with whom they dealt dishonestly. I contacted Amazon and received a similar reaction the author of the article received, except they were even more explicit in telling me they were going to shut the seller down over it. They seemed to take it very seriously, but I was still skeptical anything would come of it.

That was months ago, the seller is still around, and is still getting terrible reviews.

Amazon has come a long way on a lot of fronts, but in terms of being customer-focused they are so much worse than they used to be.

Edit: I also ordered something that died during the warranty period. Manufacturer/seller (one in the same) was utterly worthless. Wouldn't respond to a single inquiry. They released a revised version, emailed their customer list, and I responded saying I'd buy it if they hadn't already demonstrated that they were so dishonest.

They asked me to place a paid order on the new model, email them the receipt and the link to my 5-star review, and insisted they would directly PayPal me my purchase price afterwards. (Of the new, less expensive version. Not the original I paid ~2x for.) They also refused to honor their warranty and send me another one, or even just mail me the cheaper replacement model as a compromise. They just had to get a 5-star review out of the whole deal.

I put all this into a review and it was promptly deleted by Amazon.

At this point, I consider 4-star reviews the new 1-star.

I have a few more stories like this from the last year or so. I used to be a very vocal supporter of them, but I'm increasingly developing a visceral hatred for them.

> Amazon has come a long way on a lot of fronts

You mean, the various fronts in the struggle for world domination? :-(

Sure, but to be entirely fair, they do execute pretty well on some things where others either didn't, or still don't.

I'm happy to give credit where due, but as a zero-hassle way of ordering things, between their fakes, their absurd experimentation with insufficient packaging, their sub-par regional delivery networks, their broken review system, their clamping down on independent sellers across many categories, and about two dozen other things I could probably come up with, their star has fallen as far for me as their share price has increased.

They're entering their hydra phase and abandoning so much of what made them good to deal with before.

Yes, they do execute pretty well on a lot of things, granted.

However, I've had no trouble ordering things from many on-line stores/distributors which aren't Amazon and don't use Amazon. So that isn't an Amazon thing per se.

Yeah, I think as time goes on the situation only improves. Apple's doing same-day delivering now, and Instacart is making that an option for more retailers.

But when Prime first came around, it was utterly amazing, as were the moves to next-day and same-day in some areas. There still isn't a one-stop place where I can buy baby wipes and coil packs on the same account, under the same membership plan, for free rapid delivery. That will take a while for someone to match.

There is a basic problem that if you see an obvious problem with a product listing on AMZN but you didn't buy the product they could care less.

Sometimes the listing is obviously a scam, sometimes it is is just something that could be better: somebody is selling a box of assorted TTL ICs for $30 which were ill chosen for any use than testing your logic tester. (e.g. with $30 of quad-NANDs you can build a lot)

In the early 2000's I would avoid Staples to avoid crap brands like VTech and go online to seek out Plantronics instead. AMZN got a reputation as a fair dealer for things like HDMI cables compared to a place like Best Buy which might only stock a $99 monster cable.

Slowly AMZN got worse and I have less trust in the marketplace products than I did before,

I've totally given up on amazon, it is now impossible to know if what you are getting is of any quality - I wanted a good kitchen knife - but wading through the reviews and search was so painful. In the end I went to John Lewis and bought by price - hoping that gave me a good idea of quality and so far I am damn happy, which is far more than I can say for my last 20 or so amazon purchases.

I'm in a similar situation for the most part. If I remotely care about the quality of the item, I'm not buying it from Amazon. Otherwise, if pretty much any brand will suffice (such as dog waste bags), I might still pick it up on Amazon, but I have already chosen not to renew my Prime subscription based on the major drop in quality of sellers.

For a while I did that (my wife still does) but for any low value stuff it is nearly always cheaper on ebay or Aliexpress - there is literally no benefit to me buying from amazon any more.

My wife still buy a huge amount from there though, but returns a fair amount.

Amazon is still ok, but you have to know exactly what you're after. For example, if you want "kitchen knife" that's a no go. if you want "robert welch kitchen knife" there's a chance that it's cheaper on Amazon, but not by much, if at all. In other words, as a search platform to find items it doesn't work anymore, as a place to buy, sometimes. That's just my experience lately.

Even the last prime day was full of crap listings. I stopped spending much and moved to greener pastures (eg brick+mortar shopping, or used professional stuff on classified ads and even fixing stuff instead of rebuying...). Started to learn brazing and so on during lockdown for example.

When you find a good brand you stick to it. And if its a public company you can buy shares, and then tell everyone how good the products are and watch your investment go up, and earn money when they sell the goodwill.

The thing that absolutely blows my mind is the way other retailers want to be like Amazon, so they've all added 3rd party sellers to their websites. It's impossible to find anything because search results are dominated by absolute garbage on every retailer's site. They've taken the worst part of Amazon and latched onto it like it's the magic sauce that's going to make them relevant again.

The other thing that I find super frustrating is that I'm willing to pay a bit extra to get something better quality. I don't care about $10 vs $30 when I'm buying a case for a $1000 iPad. However, on the Amazon market place that seems to translate into "Hey! This dumbass is willing to give us $30, so lets sell him the same $2 piece of plastic garbage with different branding." It's soooooo frustrating.

Wal-mart opened up their marketplace to 3PS, but it's really gated. They want to know your financials, DUNS number, and IIRC supply chain details.

But another trend that's pretty bad - dropshippers of garbage. Not all dropshippers do this, but a lot do. Formula boils down to slick Shopify theme + Alibaba + social media = profit

What is more frustrating is the search stinks. Pick something that most places have.... say a DVD. Top 3-5 results will NOT be what you are looking for (sponsored links) or links to amazons 'prime selection' where they charge for a digital copy (if I wanted digital I would buy that). Then maybe the middle 3-5 items might be what you are looking for and the bottom 3-5 items will be 'sponsored links'. Finding things has become a pain. You have to play a game of get the title exactly right or it will not show you the thing. I have had items I marked down to look at later (not using the wishlist). Come back 3-4 days later and it will not even pop on the search at all. Find the exact title and ta-da there it is. Amazon has really gone downhill fast.

> What is more frustrating is the search stinks.

German electronics retailer Conrad is so guilty on this one. I'm searching for a 1/8 inch outer diameter seal, 180 °C temp resistance with a specific interior diameter and 2.5mm thickness - but even going on the product category for seals, it's impossible to filter.

To make it worse: unlike in ye olde times, employees in the physical store also only have access to the website - they can't help you either.

And forget about Amazon, their listings are full of crap.

I'm with you here. I've often tried to update my minimum price to something that cuts out the crap, and half the results are the exact same thing under a slightly different listing.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to shop for things is to check out suggestions on Reddit (which are starting to feel more astroturf-y) and then search for that exact item.

I agree, I try to use Target or Walmart's websites to buy direct from them (and their supply chain) when I don't trust Amazon's risk of getting a counterfeit. I'm not looking for 3rd party sellers.

Amazon seems to have the best shipping/logistics (with Prime membership) and it's not even close for any other retailer. Walmart is OK, but Target has some really confusing triple selection that is really off putting (choosing between In Store, Same Day, and Shipping).

> Target has some really confusing triple selection that is really off putting (choosing between In Store, Same Day, and Shipping).

Oh man, this is so aggravating. They can tell me that something is in-store by me and I can pick it up in 1 hour. Unfortunately, I'm not able to go to the store. But "delivery" means someone else will go to the store for me and drop it off at my house for an extra $10. OK, fine, let's do that. But some items, even ones that it says are in-stock at the store nearest me, can only be shipped from across the country, or picked up in-person at the store. WTF? If I can pick it up myself, why can't my delivery person also pick it up for me?

I buy my electronics on B&H. Other photography stores are probably as good.

Professional photographers buy from them, even if there's a premium, because they trust B&H. That's B&H competitive advantage; trust. If they screw that up they'll wither away.

I used to buy on Newegg, but when I bought my most recent computer build I realized most of it was from third party resellers. They screwed the order up, and it was a mess to get my return. Newegg used to be so good!

My wife recently bought something from Macy's, again, 3rd party without realizing it. They screwed up royally. They sold her something they don't have in stock, but sent her a "Package Delivered" message. Days later the item is still for sale, even though the person on the phone said that the item will not be available until Jan.

Well my wife has already bought a replacement and she wants her money back. The Macy's rep said that it's not Macy's problem since she purchased from a third party. My wife snapped back that she bought an item from Macy's on the Macy's website.

Man I hate modern shopping.

Your wife should file a chargeback. It's not a difficult process and it somewhat favors the cardholder.

Unfortunately we've had a very bad experience with our credit card lately (Capital One).

Last year for Christmas my wife bought me MotoGP tickets for us to enjoy in Austin during the spring of '20. The race got cancelled due to COVID and they refused to give us a refund. Eventually we asked for a charge back and the credit card refused saying the "organizer claims they settled it". Indeed, by promising us future tickets that are worthless to us (VR46 is retiring, we have kids and need to organize, etc). This was in the summer.

MotoGP just refunded us the tickets, a year after we purchased them. My wife probably spend over ten hours on the phone total and countless scanning documents, etc for the credit card.

I once reported multiple listings of problematic N-95 masks (some weren't N95, and one listing was using a certification that had been revoked). Last time I checked the listings were all still up with the fraudulent descriptions

Amazon is sealing its own fate here. I don't want the AliExpress experience, which is what Amazon offers now. I know where to find cheap products and bad information and I don't need Amazon for that.

I find it odd that Amazon clings to bad vendors over long standing customers. They are no longer the most customer focused company, if they ever were. What does it say about your company when your company abandons its goals?

or the range of customers has simply broadened and includes way more casual shoppers now who like to buy from third party vendors rather than wanting a sort of premium experiences, after all AliExpress is pretty damn popular.

I personally for example have always ordered mostly cheap stuff from Amazon without high expectations and for convenience, and when I want to buy something where I want to be 100% sure I go to their actual store (either digital or physical).

Thats cool, Amazon does not have to want me as a customer. Its opening opportunities for competition. Customers like me made Amazon into what it is today, I've had an account since at least 1999. Amazon set my expectations and then failed to live up to them over time.

Amazon is truly the AliExpress of the west and they are running the quality down faster and faster. A dead giveaway is the fact that there are tons of rebrands of the same product whenever you look for something. If I want the China product I go directly to AliExpress and get the unbranded version and don't need to pay the 100-300% premium on Amazon.

It is likely the seller flagged your review as off topic as it doesn't actually cover the product. Any minor reference to the delivery (package arrived damaged) is reason for rejection. I had to rewrite a few negative reviews as they got initially rejected based on such technicalities. For one of the negative reviews I rewrote, the vendor contacted me and offered a refund for removing the negative review. Another vendor, who never delivered the package to my parents, tried to emotionally blackmail me suggesting their business would go bust and they would lose their house if I didn't remove my negative review. I forwarded this to Amazon, but apparently this was all within the guidelines as no action was taken.

The world has become excessively oPtImIzEd for screwing people over after money has been exchanged, and minimizing the ways the prey can warn each other.

If you want to read more about how shady sellers abuse the system, and why it's so hard to deal with it, I recommend this well written medium article:

https://medium.com/swlh/unaccountable-chinese-retailers-thre...

Why does Amazon even allow FBA sellers to be registered in another country like this? Forget about counterfeiting and taxes, what about basic issues of safety and liability?

A family member of mine recently bought a wearable electronic device from Amazon.com. I got a phone call from them asking what charger to use because it came with a USB cable and a note saying to use only a 1A charger. (Hang on, that’s not how USB charging is supposed to work!)

I looked up the “company” selling this product; their web site is a Shopify site with no address, no phone number, masked whois. Their “returns” page is lorem ipsum. Amazon’s public seller record says the company is actually just a random dude in Ukraine, but I was unable to verify that the registered address is even real. The product itself is the first result on Alibaba when doing a search for this kind of wearable.

When the battery in this cheap crap explodes because it has clearly shoddy power management, who’s going to be liable? Good luck collecting damages from someone halfway around the world. There’s currently zero incentive for anyone in this supply chain to ensure the products are even minimally safe. Most consumers are completely unaware of the distinction between a product sold by Amazon and a product that is being sold using FBA.

I think I'm actually paying MORE for chargers and cables now than before Amazon existed because the market is so flooded with garbage that it's hard to find a brand that isn't there just to mug you.

It's hilarious (or terribly sad) how we used to laugh at the the garbage house brands at stores like BestBuy, but now those are the "good quality" products on the market.

> because it came with a USB cable and a note saying to use only a 1A charger.

I might not understand, but current-limited power supplies are a real thing. In America/UL speak its called LPS (limited power supply, the limit being current/amperage).

I’m not a hardware engineer, but my understanding is that a USB device isn’t supposed to draw that much current without performing either negotiation or sensing. Including a note that the user must use a 1A charger suggests that the device is violating the USB spec and will try to pull 1A no matter what. It then makes me worry about what other power safety systems are absent, since it’s a device with a lithium battery that gets strapped directly to a body part.

What is the specific unsafe condition are you worried about? I don’t know everything but I did evaluate consumer tech for Underwriters Laboratories to IEC 60950 and 62358. I think your caution is commendable but nothing you’ve described is inherently wrong. USB is just a connector. When the product said it needs 5w (I assume you mean 1A @ 4.8-5.1Vdc) by itself means nothing without more information.

One really obvious point, did the instructions say it’s a) dangerous with a power supply that can’t provide 1A or b) not/less functional without the 1a supply? If they were not specific, I’m happy to easy your mind - it was the latter.

The specific unsafe condition I am worried about is that the power management electronics lack any sort of fault protection, and this ends up causing a shock, burn, or fire.

I have a hard time imagining a situation where a wearable with a USB charging port is designed so cheaply that it only works with specific USB chargers, but still includes over-temp, over-volt, over-current, etc. protection.

Needless to say, there is not even a suggestion of this thing being either UL or USB-IF certified.

> did the instructions say it’s a) dangerous with a power supply that can’t provide 1A or b) not/less functional without the 1a supply?

To me, the real red flag is: what happens when you plug it into an 3 A USB charger? Being a constant voltage supply, the load should only draw as much current as needed, and it should work with no problems (which is the usual expectation of 90% of consumer electronics with a USB port). The warning of "only use 1 A charger" notice is suspicious because it may suggest that the product doesn't include any internal overcurrent protection by itself (like a $0.1 polyfuse), and solely depends on the current limiting of the USB charger for its safety. While it's possible that it's not inherently wrong, but it's certainly a bad design practice.

There's a second chapter to this story that the OP didn't get to see! If you leave a bad review on a genuinely-bad experience (for example the 3rd-party Apple stylus that I tried) - you'll find that after a few days you get a drip-drab of offers of giftcards to take the review down, promising that the item's been fixed.

The offers escalated each time, and went up to US$50.00. I still occasionally get an email about it. Each time it's from a different email address, and each time it's a different sad story.

I told Amazon, a helpful CSR offered me an email, I fwd'd it, and they took the item down. Of course it was re-posted a bit later from a "different seller."

This is an entirely reasonable stance. A given product could have n(bignum) sellers. A review telling me that a seller is doing shady things tells me nothing about the product. Amazon told him to go review the seller in the appropriate section. What's the problem?

Right now there are only two sellers

When I've encountered this before the shady seller was also the manufacturer.

Because the bad seller is also tainting the product reviews. Is (in the case of OP) the camera really a five star product? Or is it a five star product because one seller basically bought x percent of the positive reviews?

The problem is that product reviews are right up front on the product page. Seller reviews are 2 more clicks past that, effectively hidden.

They'll remove product ratings for a particular seller if enough people complain.

So? That doesn't address the issue I pointed out.

So seller reviews are useful even if buyers can't read them at all.

What kind of twisted logic leads you to believe this? The whole point of reviews is that you can read them and use them to influence your purchasing decision.

Because they'll remove product ratings for a particular seller if enough people complain. That's a secondary use.

That's not relevant. You were talking about seller reviews, not product reviews before. Why are you trying to avoid the question? Do you think choosing a reputable seller is a "secondary" concern after choosing a product? If so, why?

> Why are you trying to avoid the question?

I wasn't trying to avoid a question. Sorry if I missed one.

> You were talking about seller reviews, not product reviews before.

I was actually talking about both types of reviews. Amazon will remove illegitimate product reviews if their existence is made known through seller feedback mechanisms, and seller reviews are one such mechanism.

> Do you think choosing a reputable seller is a "secondary" concern after choosing a product? If so, why?

Usually I'd pick the product first, then find a reputable seller. If there's no reputable seller, I may choose a different product, or choose a disreputable seller if I think their reputation is undeserved, or if I'm willing to take a risk to get the particular product. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by "secondary concern", but I wouldn't call it that. They're both considerations.

I don't think most people consider having a reputable seller a secondary consideration. Take a look at Prime, for instance. There's literally no reason to have a Prime membership other than getting free shipping from a reputable seller.

> A given product could have n(bignum) sellers.

Most likely a seller paying for reviews like this has an exclusive on the product, it's likely a product sold directly by the maker.

> A review telling me that a seller is doing shady things tells me nothing about the product

It's not telling you anything about the product, but it also making you aware that those other review you thought were telling you something about the product, actually are not.

In essence you are saying that it is a reasonable stance to remove off-topic bad reviews, but keep off-topic good reviews.

Wait I don't see how this is inconsistent.

- "Seller was great and delivered on time!"

- "Seller is doing shady things and posting fake reviews"

It seems like both of these would be removed.

I think the concern is -- seller A (or manufacturer) has created lots of gamed reviews for product A. Putting a negative review on seller A is much less visible, and leaves the fake reviews in place, so that when successor-scammy-seller-B sells the product everyone is still deceived.

The review tells you that the _product's_ rating is compromised by paid reviews. From that perspective it doesn't really matter which seller is the one at fault. Buying from that shady seller won't get you a worse product, or even necessarily worse service. It's just that the product overall is likely of worse quality than what the other reviews might indicate, regardless of which seller you buy it from.

Almost half the things I buy on amazon come with a little postcard thing that tells me I'll get anywhere between $10-$30 back as cash if I leave a 5 star review. If I wasn't in a slightly comfortable place financially, and not so lazy, I would absolutely do this. None of those products deserved a 5 star review, and perhaps 1/3rd were returned by me for poor quality. This is absolutely a real problem. The few review sections where people point this out means I won't buy and I probably saved myself a ton of returns by doing that, but now that is no longer an option.

Amazon is cultivating a lot of bad will with this. I imagine their sellers will claim they don't do this (even when they do), then Amazon feels obligated to pull those reviews to please the sellers and in a conflict between sellers and customers, Amazon will tend to pick sellers in fear of them just moving to Aliexpress and hurting Amazon.

and as others have said, these are OEM's, this is their product and no one else sells it. Amazon is pretty much a sales portal for Chinese manufacturers, some of whom are shady like this, to get into the states with minimum overhead, hassle, and oversight.

The problem is that the card specifically asks the customer to give the "product a positive review with 5 stars."

If the card was asking for a seller review, that would be reasonable. But the money is being paid for a product review, hence skewing those reviews.

I dont buy much from amazon anymore but arent very clear if the review is for the product or the seller...

Exactly. It would have only been justified if the manufacturer and seller were the same entity. He should have given a honest review based on the product itself and then it would have been appropriate to point out that some of the reviews might be paid. Or better yet: report the seller to Amazon. But the way he wrote the review makes it sound like he rated the item with 1 star solely based on the malpractice of a seller. Companies like Logitech are usually not involved in shady business like that (they hire professional reviewers through third parties, not entice regular customers with 10 bucks, jk :D).

Seems similar to how hackernews doesn't allow calling people "paid shills". The review doesn't have any evidence or proof attached. Perhaps reporting the seller to Amazon is a better approach.

My review included the picture of the card, they just didn't reattach it to my rejection email

I got the same kind of card ordering a laptop charger earlier this year. Tried to report it to Amazon. Got back a canned response telling me to report individual reviews. Amazon doesn't care.

Worse, there's no such thing as 'free' money. If they can pay us $20 per item to write reviews, they are over-charging us $20 per item. So whoever doesn't do this is over-paying $20. If you buy 100 items like this a year, you're burning $2,000. That's non-trivial money for most people.

Solution: don't shop on Amazon.

Sorta true,

You were still willing to pay the listed price. The fact that you were subsidizing their reward program doesn't diminish the fact that it was cheap enough for you to buy.

Also they maybe doing this promotion as a loss-leader to build marketshare/brand recognition and are willing to work with lower net profit.

It doesn't follow that if they can pay you $20, they can pay everyone $20. They have an expected uptake, and they have a model for how the reviews translate to more sales. I agree that it's likely that at least some of this marketing is priced into the price and there's some inflation, but I suspect the overall uptake of stuff like this is <20% and it generates non-zero additional sales, so I would guess the margin is more like $2-4 or so.

Once you start looking at the actual numbers it becomes pretty clear that most of these arbitrage sellers could give every customer $20 and still make money.

For example, the top search result for “webcam” on Amazon.com right now usually sells for $35[0]. Its wholesale price on Alibaba for 5k units is $3.84[1] + $2.04 shipping per unit. Plug those numbers into Amazon’s FBA profitability calculator[2] and you’ll find that the seller only needs to sell 67 units per month to break even, after giving every buyer $20, because the seller’s net margin at this volume is nearly 60%.

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B087NN41JH

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-Factory-Wholesa...

[2] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/hz/fba/profitabilitycalcula...

Hacker News is also not in the business of selling products. A marketplace operator has different duties than a link aggregator - and calling someone names is different than posting evidence.

It would be interesting to see a review site that is also part forum (a la HN or old reddit), and maybe part blog, as well.

The basic idea being that you share a handle between all 3 places, so it's easier to determine the trustworthiness of the reviewer -- both in terms of identifying fake/paid reviews and figuring out whether the reviewer's standards match your own.

A home appliance was getting 1 star reviews in Amazon because they didn’t include customary “starter” kit of baking dishes. Nothing against the product . The reviews are also worthless. Think from the perspective of sellers. If a number generated by an algorithm that is influenced by bitter people who were pissed off by someone that day is deciding your product placement and fate. You will do whatever is required to make it right.

Just last night, I was looking to buy some kind of less-expensive version of Apple AirPods, but for each item I checked on reviewmeta.com, they were filtering out 70%+ of the reviews as suspicious. I decided I'd had enough of the appearance of sketchiness for now, and instead bought the cheap (supposedly genuine) Apple wired earbuds as an interim measure.

Product reviews are only for reviewing the product, not the shipping, or the seller's practices. There are other ways to report this to Amazon, and you can report it to the FTC

It seems like it should be reasonable to have a review warning people reading them that many of the 5 star reviews are suspect as the reviewer was compensated by the seller.

No, because amazon is a marketplace, for example, a product can have more than one seller. because that the review is about the product and not about the seller. The right thing to do is complain about the seller on feedback and amazon delete all reviews from this specific seller buyers.

Wouldn't this kind of thing generally be coming straight from the manufacturer, or at least a fairly dominant seller for the product? Since they're paying for 5-star reviews of the product.

Could be, heh. I'm using amazon brazil, and here amazon isn't tooooo strong like USA. here in Brazil amazon works with other sellers in order to expand, but in a near future I really believe amazon will works like in USA.

Each state's Attorney General's office usually has a department of consumer protection that will hear these complaints. I've reported Amazon to my AG more than once.

What sorts of outcomes have you seen from your reports?

I was contacted about one of my reports, and gave them more information about what happened. I haven't gotten a follow up to that call, but I didn't expect to.

You can also report them to /dev/null, it will have the same effect.

> You can also report them to /dev/null, it will have the same effect.

Seems to be the same effect as reporting them to jeff@amazon.com, then.

> Product reviews are only for reviewing the product, not the shipping, or the seller's practices. There are other ways to report this to Amazon, and you can report it to the FTC

The card soliciting the reviews was included as part of the product, so maybe just include the photo and focus the text of your review on the card (e.g. "It'd definitely a webcam, but this card that came with it totally ruined my experience. Definitely do not recommend."

Paid reviews have been a weapon on Amazon for a long time. False accusations of paying for reviews would also be weaponized.

What would stop a dishonest seller from smearing a competitor, by paying people to write reviews on the competitor's product page which falsely accuse the competitor of paying for reviews?

Nothing would stop them from trying it, but I think it would ultimately be a lot less effective. I think your average consumer would write a 5 star review for $20 back. I don't think your average consumer would write a 1 star review for a competitor for $20 back. Some would, but I think it would be far fewer.

Amazon just opens the package to see if the claims are true.

Wasn't all this supposed to be solved in the 90s with "web of trust"? Rather than trusting every review, you only trust those from your personal circle of friends, and then from their friends but with less weight, etc.

Amazon exists to increase shareholder profits. The reviews are not exempt from that. They exist to encourage customers to buy things and to increase sales volume. When Amazon was up and coming against a lot of other competitors it was relatively more important that reviews provide a good signal for customers. Now that they are more hegemonic, that is less important relative to facilitating increased sale volume, and there is also more incentive for sellers to fake them.

Everyone's incentives are cleanly aligned for the short-medium term, except for those of consumers and workers.

I don´t know why you are being downvoted. Amazon could very easily invest in decreasing fake reviews and fake items but they don't. They don't care because it doesn't give them any more profit, instead it will give them unhappy sellers.

Rule number one of reviews: never trust them if they are on the site selling you something.

It's pretty simple. If you want a toaster, then google "Toaster X review". If all you can find is reviews on sales sites, ignore them. If you can find an in-depth review on toaster-aficionado.com with full disclosure of sponsorships etc - great.

People are just lazy to expect to see a set of stars on a product page informing them on whether a product has good quality or not. Just give up that expectation.

> For example I feel quite helped when a review for chocolate mentions that the chocolate arrived melted -- this is not a review about the product intrinsically, but is still very helpful for deciding whether or not to buy the item

So this could go either way. First there are often multiple sellers for one item on Amazon, to have reviews reflect the shipment or seller experience would kind of invalidate the feedback about the item. To ask Amazon to revamp their entire feedback system is quite an ask and clearly not what first comes to mind from reading the title of this post.

Secondly if some users are being encouraged to leave a positive review for money that's a morally offensive act by them as well, which no one here seems to be pointing out so far. It's not too dissimilar to lying about something and then asserting that someone pays others when they lie and it's really their fault. Lying is bad in itself.

Amazon sellers keep complaining, that more and more users only bother to write reviews when something is wrong with the product, but not when everything is OK.

Well, I wrote three 5 star reviews during the last year, and I put a real effort into them, giving others tips how to avoid common mistakes when using the product, and correcting common misconceptions. I could do this, because I know this class of devices well.

The outcome was in every case, that I got a message back, that Amazon has to check and approve the reviews, which never happened. It's obvious, that they either don't want thorough reviews, even if they are 5 star, or are just not able to understand them.

After that, I understandably stopped to write reviews. In fact, I deleted my Amazon account, because I had some cases of defective products and dubious dealers, in which Amazon wasn't helpful at all, and that seems to become more and more common recently.

You should post the review on your own web page. There are several specialed review sites making a million or more per year on ads alone, so it could be a nice side gig.

I wonder if anyone has done any analysis on marketplace diversity for a given product. One of the absolute sore points of buying anything on Amazon is when you run into the issue where the product clearly looks the exact same yet there are seemingly dozens and dozens of brands all with hundreds of 4-5 star reviews.

Isn’t that just a common, white-labeling manufacturer?

That would certainly make sense. I'd like to see if there was any "illusion of choice" type graphic that looked at all the white labeling brands and even Amazon's own private label brands for products into a graphic or visual.

I've shifted quite a lot of shopping to eBay after Amazon shifted their focus to being a marketplace.

Be aware that eBay now censors low star reviews. I've had my 1-star review of fake products removed twice from eBay.

Good to know, thank you for pointing that out.

Amazon appears to be determined to make itself an untrustworthy place to buy stuff. It's like it's actively trying to get itself lumped in with eBay as a "tat-bazaa" as The Register likes to call it.

I've become increasingly wary of buying things on Amazon for this very reason. I recently bought several pieces of electrical/elecronic gear, and didn't buy either from Amazon. I don't trust that the named brand stuff will be genuine, and I don't trust that the unknown-brand stuff will be any good, irrespective of the reviews. I've had too many cards with my orders promising freebies for positive reviews to trust anything I read there now.

I now pretty much only buy low-risk stuff on amazon.

Yeah, this is a problem for a long time on Amazon, especially with a lot of the cheap Chinese stuff posted on there. When some cheap looking product has a dozen reviews all like "very good super high quality!!!!!" you know it's just astroturfing.

It goes far deeper than that. The last time I trusted amazon, I ended up getting a counterfeit book and having to fight tooth and nail to get a refund. This set me down a path of trying to find out how the reviews lied to me and how widespread the issue is. I would see items that had been listed for years suddenly balloon to thousands of 5-star reviews, then disappear. I would see old reviews of a product that were reviewing a completely different product. There is no oversight. Amazon is the house in a a casino where the only rule is that the house always wins.

The solution: stop using amazon.

Under some legislations this could be considered a form of hidden advertising, that is not allowed. E.g. youtubers are getting in trouble in the Netherlands for not properly disclosing their sponsorships. You could argue this is the same in principle.

The practice of buying positive reviews is misleading. Stuff like this would be a lot less attractive if it would have to come with a disclaimer from the seller. Better still, since AWS makes money from the transaction, they could be liable here as well. Right now AWS just looks the other way because it's not their problem and their revenue depends on people getting tricked into spending their cash so they won't go out of their way trying to stop that.

Amazon should pay you if you report offers of false reviews (at least 2x what you were being offered). This money should come out the seller's pocket.

After a certain thresh-hold the seller should lose increasing amounts of money until it's no longer profitable.

Seller will just rise prices accordingly to offset 1000 items sold with 1 bad feedback. So, like 10 cents per item?

I've been trying my best to avoid having reviews on sites like amazon decide what I buy.

For bigger ticket items like power tools, I'll use videos from youtubers like project farm [1] who actually try to test the products. Youtubers can be bought and/or influenced [2] but it is still better than just looking at the number of stars or picking the "amazon choice" product.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2rzsm1Qi6N1X-wuOg_p0Ng

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GyaSfOi6fs

There is a general principle, that a metric which is used to determine [important decisions, e.g. pay, promotion, sales, etc.] will soon cease to be a reliable metric. If your neighbor tells you that a product is good, they probably really think that, because not enough people go to your neighbor to ask their opinion, to be worth spending $$ to change your neighbor's opinion.

Amazon ratings, quite a long time ago, became way to influential to be a reliable metric, because the incentives to game it or outright pay for a better rating are too high. Oddly, by aggregating many opinions just like your neighbor, it becomes LESS reliable than if it were just a single data point.

I've made it a principle to leave accurate, detailed, and positive reviews on Amazon for products I really like. I think I've mostly given up, I don't think they can move the smallest needle if the environ is so deeply poisoned. The only honest and constructive feedback commerce site I still use and participate in is King Arthur Flour, probably because the stake is so small. I mean, how many reviews for a $18 bread pan can one flog? It reminds me of Goodreads, before Amazon. The larger question though, is whether or not high-trust systems can ever scale, or even be extended to cover an adjacent domain.

"Amazon does not accept product reviews based on anything except the product" would be a more accurate title. There is another way to review sellers - perhaps this would be a better place for reviewing a seller.

And yet half the reviews seem to be about shipping or something

Hm, they may be rule lawyering, then... preferring certain sellers over others, and applying the rules in an inconsistent way to benefit favorites while squishing people they have something else against. All this is speculation on my part, of course, but wouldn't surprise me if accurate.

TIL Amazon comment regulation is apparently run by reddit mods.

It's possible they rejected it simply because it didn't review the product.

A review that expresses an opinion about the product and also mentions that other reviewers are being paid might be accepted.

Thought so too. The mistake was to not write an honest review about the product and to mention, that a $10 refund was offered for doing so. That would have been the smart thing to do. Just claiming that other reviews are bought was probably the reason for not accepting the review.

If this were the case I wish Amazon would be more vigilant about these kinds of reviews in general.

"1 Star! Mailman delivered the package to my neighbor and it got soaked in the rain! The product wasn't harmed but the box was totally gross to touch!"

Yeah, it seems like a reasonable policy, IMO.

The sellers can change even if the product doesn't, so don't pollute the reviews with that information. Report it to Amazon and let them deal with it.

They also disallow pointing out fraudulent products. I got something that was clearly fake, said so in the review and they rejected the review on the basis of being against their community standards.

For certain types of products Amazon is degenerating into a virtual big-box warehouse store, one of those places where you basically have this giant pile of crap to sift through.

Hundreds of which are actually the same one or two re-badged items at hugely varying prices or quantities, burying any real results which might exist.

Also known as Aliexpress.com

I have pointed out both paid and bait and switch reviews (where the seller uses a cheap product to be able to use a farm for fake “verified purchase” reviews then changes the product). Never been rejected, but maybe that’s because I review product too. Amazon seems to bump up positive reviews though so I suspect not many people see mine unless you’re like me and explicitly focus on reading negative reviews first.

They also remove reviews if you point out fake SD cards. It might be up for a few days but the seller will have it removed under the reason “you didn’t purchase this item”.

I’m really close to buying, and leaving reviews all while doing a return.

Sad part is amazon knows about this. They just don’t care because they’re making money and most people won’t blame the card for being fake they’ll just assume their camera or whatever corrupted the clips.

Considering 90% ( thats what it feels like) of amazon shops are dropshippers who resell alibaba products but for 10x the cost, with no extra value, it is no wonder it starts to bug more and more people every day. US needs to figure it's sh*t out. How a teenager buy a publicly avaiable chinese toy for 69 cblents and sell it in US for an obscene amount (14$) is beyond me. The system is broken.

isn't this information arbitrage ?

During the first phase of COVID I wanted to report sellers selling single toilet paper rolls at outrageous prices. Think I found a link to do that?

Reviews from randoms cannot be trusted. Word of mouth is king. Second is the word of professional reviewers too well-paid to be bought, like Siskel & Ebert. When a top-tier reviewer on YouTube endorses a product, it sells out instantly.

Amazon reviews are good for getting the actual details and pictures of a product that the seller couldn't be bothered to include in the description.

I do not agree with the article. Reviews are for the product, not the seller or the tactics.

I once bought some snow chains off Amazon, and the ones their system recommended didn't in fact fit my car. SImilar to the OP, I also did a low review and got it removed. But then yes, my review was not of the product, it was of the algorithm so I understood.

Archive link (site won't load): https://web.archive.org/web/20201217194447/http://blog.kevmo...

It seems many categories on Amazon are overwhelmed by low quality products and unreliable reviews. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't done more to counter this, as it affects the trust people have in the site. For example, Amazon could check some actual packages to make sure the products are not paying for reviews.

I got a similar paid review offer but I'm allowed to give any review rating I wish. Given that Amazon hasn't forced me to give 5 start to a product, it is a step in the right direction: If a product has few reviews, you give an incentive for buyers to post a review about a product they actually bought.

Amazon removed my feedback on selling opened video card boxes and replacing the cards with a different models (sourced by Amazon, not a 3rd party). This prompted me to start providing feedback on sites that Amazon does not control. Not as many people will see it, but Amazon can't censor it.

Amazon lets sellers leave review for products that are not launched yet. For instance, every Garmin product is "coming soon" but still have at least 2 to 5 5-star reviews by default mostly saying "previous generation was good!".

Amazon is scummy and I am slowly moving to other marketplaces.

It doesn't really matter, you're still going to shop there anyway. They're making hand over fist in cash, the absolutely insignificant amount of people who even care don't really matter and are offset by new happy customers every single day, why change anything at all?

I think amazon does this because they want to commoditize sellers and make them barely noticeable on their page. A bunch of reviews about one bad seller that they remove will reduce sales for an otherwise ok product. Maybe make 'seller' reviews upfront? Hard to say.

I never understand why this is done. All it does is completely undermine the entire ecosystem that took years and billions to make. What a shortsighted move. Even more confusing, Amazon LPs say they want to be customer and user focused. Are the end users not the real users here?

it doesn't undermine it if there is no alternative.

This happens all the time with Amazon products from smaller brands/sellers. Amazon has also blocked reviews pointing out when a product is counterfeit, which I have experienced firsthand. I'm helping a friend try to return fake Bose headphones purchased on Amazon now.

If the only acceptable response is a 5 star review, or nothing, it's not a scale: its a binary measure.

If the review response is mandatory, its not a review.

Hoardes of people tell me to stick to 2 and 4 star reviews for honest assessment of the good and bad in things. I think they may be on to something.

I tend to ignore Amazon reviews and if the item is worth more than a few bucks I typically search for commentary on Reddit.

Alternatively if I’m after something from a specific category, I’ll check out Choice.com.au (to which I’m a subscriber), and let that be my guide for brand and model.

Sellers are catching on. I searched on reddit for range hoods comments. I found "reviews" that were written in a style I found suspicious (too elaborate, detailed and "business-like"). Clicking on these two users revealed other comments that made it clear this was actually astroturfing.

Eh, I got an insert in a product I purchased offering me a set of magnetized screwdrivers if I sent their social media a screenshot of my positive review. Not exactly paid but it incentivized me to take a picture of my already positive review and send it to the company.

It's entirely reasonable.

If Amazon allowed to submit reviews claiming that seller X is providing gifts for reviews, then inevitably sellers Y and Z would do fake reviews with bogus — yet convincing — evidence to ruin the reputation of seller X or a competing product.

I downloaded an iOS App from the Apple App Store. The modal "rate this App" screen would not go away unless I gave the App at least 3 stars. I have reported this to Apple - be interesting to see if they take any action.

I bought a lot of amazon basics AAA batteries, they all leaked in the package after just a year or two. I posted a review with pictures and amazon killed it saying it didnt meet their community guidelines.

I hate it when people give 1 star reviews for something other than the product quality. I'm glad the review was rejected.

It sounds like the review should have been 3 or 4 stars ("fine but not amazing").

This and the runaway counterfeiting problem is why I stopped buying anything electric from Amazon and order from reputable companies like B&H Photo, KC Tool Co etc.

I've repeatedly been offered a free product in exchange for removing a non perfect review.

Meanwhile the cards that offer rewards for a 5 star review remain pretty common....

This exact same thing happened to me, except the seller sent me two postcards separate from my order offering money for good reviews.

Isn't this an opportunity to create an external review site? Imagine if we had actual number on how bad this is.

That seller is going to have a very bad day, week and potentially quarter because of the contact with the rep.

Hopefully consumers catch on and expect that all reviews are fake or manipulated. Honest reviews are hard to come by.

The review system is basically broken on the internet. Paid reviews and fake reviews (positive and also negative) are everywhere.

A good solution could be if shops would simply allow only reviews, but without a grade. Just some text. This would reduce the incentive of trying to game the grading system of reviews, but still give consumers some information about the pros and cons of a product.

Amazon is right here. If such a review were allowed, the first people to exploit that would be the the scummy vendors themselves. They would post fake one-star reviews against competing products, claiming that all the good reviews of those products are from bribes.

Always consider the secondary effects, like back-scatter from replying to a spam e-mail to give them a piece of your mind!

So lobby for Amazon's policy to not allow stars, but just report fakes/fraud. Every item is taken down when flagged, until manually reviewed by Amazon staff. If a flagged item is restored, those that flagged it are banned, proportional to the number of false flags they get hit for.

First round, Amazon's listings drop by 95 percent as bad actors go hog wild blocking competitors.

Second round, Amazon is forced to triage item restorations in order to put best sellers back up first.

Third round, the bad flag bans help flush out the jackasses, and minimize the incentive to come back and try again.

It'll never happen, but it's possible it could restore Amazon's reputation re caring about delivering good quality and a clean platform.

Where's the stick? None of us are going to stop buying from there, so why should they change?

A five star review on Amazon is also a review in part of purchasing on Amazon. Amazon have an incentive to bump those scores up. They'll agressively remove any bad reviews on little pretext and ignore utterly bogus 5 star reviews.

This way, potential customers of Amazon are decieived into believing many more people are having excellent purchasing experiences using Amazon than is really the case.

It's systemic. It's a deliberate false and misleading practise. I don't know what the law states or which ones might apply but on any ethical basis a pursued policy of deception like that to get sales is fraud. It's one of the many ugly things Amazon do with their resources rather than paying tax and acting decently. But they do use computers so nobody involved in public policy, law and enforcement can think about it at all.

"I just mug them at the bus stop. It's legal because it's with a computer."

Then of course we get the overreaction the other way from policy makers, that also gets captured by the big players like amazon, so it makes it even harder for smaller businesses, who pay workers and pay tax to compete.

Libertarains and socialists have a lot in common to explore.

Because of this I mostly read negative reviews to see what kind of problems I may face.

Amazon banned me for something similar for pointing out how bad a product was.

Why doesn't Amazon hire an independent third-party company to review and compare products and then highlight those in the review section? At least it would make it seem like they care about increasing the trustworthiness of reviews and restore some confidence in the system.

Doesn't the FTC require disclosing paid reviews?

Not seeing anyone here complain about censorship; is this any different than YouTube taking down conspiracy theories about US presidential election?

Nope! Yet this thread is silent on the matter.

I'm frustrated that most of the really well-paying positions in my area of specialization are with companies like this.

TL;DR

Sometimes Amazon, Facebook, or Microsoft posts a job opening with very special skill requirements, which I probably satisfy. And sometimes I'm actually tempted to apply. But (fortunately) I always get a reality check regarding what kinds of business practices I'd be working to facilitate. Suddenly the grass on my side of the fence looks a lot greener.

Delight the customer, eh Bezos?

Every metric will be gamed

The reviews are Rigged.

Amazon is out for the sale. SELL SELL SELL.

I went on there a week ago and front page they were advertising me $18 face masks...

TL;DR stick to Costco

When purchasing anything on AMZN, never trust the reviews.

Buy only name brand but shop around, they have become expensive. Try to give others your business at the same time. I intentionally buy from companies like NEWEGG or RockAuto even if AMZN has the same price and 1-2 day shipping. I also try to buy directly from companies (ex: thorne) if possible even if I have to wait, why give your all your business to AMZN and make these companies pay them a fee.

AMZN has enough business, we need to support everyone else.

   1. Buy a Product
   2. Give 5 star rating as Verified Buyer
   3. Return the Product

Amazon doesn't remove my review;

Too little data for such a bold claim...

I wonder if the review would have been allowed if it was focused on the actual product and then mentioned that the company pays for reviews. What if the product is great and people are giving it 5 star reviews because it's great, and not just the $10?

The product review is for the product, not the seller. Seller reviews are for the seller, not the product. Not rocket science.

The post title seems needlessly inflammatory and definitive. The content of the blog really is a whinge about an isolated incident, not any real assertions convincing me that Amazon is silencing anything on purpose in the reviews section.

No doubt Amazon has much to answer for, but not this. When half the reviews are something like "I don't know what this is" because of Amazon's confusing email language, it seems to me that properly enforcing the use of a review section would be ideal, no?

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