Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.
Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem.
You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity.
It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products.
I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false.
I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society.
/rant
This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews.
You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect.
Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.
The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.
>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.
a) with 100% accuracy, and b) without involving humans at all
but I noticed the trend of fake Amazon reviews some time ago, and some patterns were very evident. I'd click on the profile of a five-star reviewer, more often than not every review they left was five stars. And every product I'd click through on also had a deluge of suspicious five star reviews. I even started scraping data into a graph database but then discovered that Amazon tries very hard to resist scraping attempts and gave up.
I think it would be very possible to set up some kind of basic pattern analysis along these lines. Clearly, merchants are buying positive reviews in bulk, so detecting sudden spikes in positive reviews and working out correlations with other product review dumps wouldn't be difficult. Once you've got a sense of it, you hand the data over to human investigators who take it the rest of the way. But despite its insane wealth, Amazon is clearly not interested in spending the money required to do that.
I mean seriously, in the past several years we've learned that "at scale" is actually a public hazard.
Its not the best example but even our country/state/local level justice system has cases where it fails. In addition to judges actually making incorrect verdicts, there are many ills that cause this - eg. Police not following procedures, poor people not having the money to right wrongs by appealing decisions, being bullied or scared into pleas etc.
That does not mean we should not have a justice system at all. Just like us, the systems we build are not perfect. That does not mean they should not exist. There is immense value in the valley between non existent and perfect.
If Amazon sells 10,000 Acme Widgets and sends an email to just 1% of those customers asking for a review. How is Acme going to game that? Pay all 10,000 purchasers of their product so that the 1% that get the Golden Ticket to write a review give them 5 stars?
The problem seems to me to be that the reviewer gets to decide to post a review. Turn it around and have Amazon select reviewers at random and you've made it much harder to game.
I'm not in the industry but I'm willing to bet there are flourishing communities that participate in this type of trade. And it's as sophisticated as it needs to be to get around Amazons countermeasures.
How else are we seeing so many corrupt reviews? Not like Amazon is just passively watching this happen. This is a huge issue for them since it's a bad user experience and Jeff Bezos is obsessed with satisfying customers.
You might only show 80% of all user reviews - but if 10% of your reviews are fake - then you're only hiding 10% of real reviews.
Who cares? Amazon definitely doesn't have a problem of not having enough reviews. It does have a problem of having too many products with almost entirely fake reviews.
However, why doesn't Amazon only allow those who have purchased to leave reviews?
And to ban any company offering monetary or equivalent incentives to leave reviews?
I suggest they are not even trying to tackle the problem.
Its personally been instrumental for me. Coming from a solidly lower middle class background in a developing country - Google was the only reason I could get better at my work and eventually do well financially. It gave me access to information that I could not afford otherwise, books were too expensive for my families income.
Even now I see how much services like search and Youtube help people learn. Youtube created a vibrant community of content in a local language that has helped many of my friends learn things. I recently spoke to a teenager who learnt to repair household electronics by watching tutorials on Youtube - in our local language.
Google has a lot of problems. I mean a lot. But its certainly a net positive in my opinion. While its fun to participate in (legitimate) first world discussions on web standards being killed by Google, it has undoubtedly improved the lives of millions of people from my home country.
Just like people, companies have the ability to do good and bad at the same time. For me the scale for Google is pretty heavily towards good.
But if you look at e.g. seller forums at Amazon, there are a lot of large threads about the opposite problem - Amazon taking out lots of reviews the sellers consider legitimate.
So clearly they are doing something, and it might even be that only a small minority of fake reviews get through, but due to Amazon's scale there are still a lot of them.
Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page...
Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related.
With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites.
Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).
I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around.
It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.
If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product.
I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date.
I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.
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It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.
What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part.
* Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more.
* Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory).
* Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better
* Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way.
* Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked.
I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy.
Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.