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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps, but how?

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.

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If it's an "expensive" product, you ask people to buy your product and have them send it back to you for a reward. If it's cheap, the reviewer can keep the item in exchange for a desirable review. The sample rate is irrelevant.. you just need enough reviews to out rank your competitors.

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.

Obviously sellers would initially only need to inform all 10k customers that if Amazon would ever request a review for them, there is a $20 reward waiting for writing a 5 star review. Obviously sellers would word things differently. This system would also be much cheaper to game because you only need to bribe 1% of all your customers.

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