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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

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

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 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 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!

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 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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

how was the webcam?

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.

Stop shopping on Amazon

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