Almost 40% of U.S. Consumers Trust Online Reviews Less Than They Did 5 Years Ago | Hacker News Reader

Almost 40% of U.S. Consumers Trust Online Reviews Less Than They Did 5 Years Ago

reviews.com

198 pointssharkweek190 comments

As well they should.

This is a game of cat and mouse. Consumers were ahead for a little while, but companies have really gotten a grasp on the internet, and they're winning the information war.

It's no mistake that I've come to rely on brand name again. It's the best heuristic available to me. When all this first started (mid-2000s) I was actively avoiding basing ANY decision on brand name. For a brief window, I had better information, but no more.

I used to trust Amazon for just about anything I needed to buy, but I'd guess maybe in the last 6-8 years I'll mostly only order something if I recognize the brand name selling me the product.

Tried to buy a pair of cheap-ish bluetooth headphones off there a few months ago. Three different pairs and none of them even worked out of the box. Gave up and bought a more expensive pair from a known brand.

You can't trust ANYTHING on Amazon; including name brand. They co-mingle their legit inventory with counterfeit 3rd party inventory. When you order something, even if it's "Sold and Shipped from Amazon", they ship you the closest product. You may very well end up getting the fake 3rd party item.

Also ship damaged, repackaged goods as “new”, e.g. monitor with scratched screen. Solution: Order monitor from Staples, insist employee open box for inspection. Cost an extra $20 over Amazon — bargain!

If it's Amazon brand (e.g. Kindle), I'd be surprised to get a counterfeit.

I also trust less popular brands to not be counterfeit, though I expect that to change in the future.

My experience ordering from Shopify sites over the past or two: the checkout is now faster and easier than Amazon. Overall Amazon's failings are good for everyone else involved in e-commerce. The bottlenecks to purchasing online 20 years ago are far behind us now.

If your business is selling low margin items at massive scale then Amazon probably continues to win (in the US.)

What I noticed about Amazon is they do make it obvious something is a counterfeit, but only after the fact. Up until you buy it it looks legit and they make it hard to tell it's not, but after it's gotten to you they know you know and they want you to think it was your fault for falling for an obviously fake listing. That's when they display the real listing, to make you feel stupid.

> It's no mistake that I've come to rely on brand name again.

Big +1 here. Brand name is a core part of my decision making process at this point. Otherwise, I'm relying on word of mouth. Occasionally, I'll use some of the more "reliable" independent review services.

This has been mentioned before but I’ve done this for a while: searching “[product] reddit” often does the trick when looking for candid reviews. Normal people with nothing to gain except internet points (which just incentivizes them to give the popular consensus or fantastic failure of the product).

Though, I would still go stalk the reviewer a bit and make sure they're a real person. Reddit isn't necessarily any less amenable to astroturfing than amazon.com or bestbuy.com; the only thing that might be protecting it right now is that it's currently not as big a pot of honey.

Sadly, brand names are also caught up in this bullshit. I've had purchases (electronics, household appliances, clothing, food, ...) from long-trusted brands, direct from manufacturer or established retailer, turn to shit. Some have stood behind their products. Others ... have not.

Samsung especially is on my shitlist.

Take Google and Amazon as two other examples.

This is true in the real world again (still?) too. We're currently stocking up on disinfecting wipes to donate to the school when they open next month. We've been told that the teachers only want brand name Clorox wipes, because they don't trust any other brand to actually disinfect safely.

Unfortunately, even this approach isn’t foolproof. Fake brand-name products make it into supply chains all the time, especially on sites like Amazon via third-party sellers. In China for example, “fake alcohol” (where brand-name bottles are refilled with cheaper, sometimes dangerous off-brand liquors) has been a big problem:

https://www.mersolluo.com/china-cracking-down-on-counterfeit...

I can’t imagine that the rubbing alcohol wipe industry is that much more resistant to counterfeiting.

(Edit: It’s not- https://wjla.com/features/7-on-your-side/scammers-promise-cl...)

Yeah that is true. I'm hoping Costco has their supply chain down well enough that it's not an issue, but at least there is a slightly higher chance it's legit if it says Clorox on the side.

Yeah, we've gone back to having to trust the brand name of the distributor - if it says it came from Amazon it is basically assumed to be counterfeit chinese crap; Costco and Home Depot (and even Walmart in store) are a bit more secure there.

Does Walmart (online) co-mingle their inventory with third party inventory like Amazon?

Amazon doesn't co-mingle their inventory with 3Ps, they do co-mingle 3Ps that don't opt to avoid it. This is one of the reasons I look for the "sold and shipped by Amazon" for important purchases.

Unfortunately, I've never seen information about how Walmart handles this. Given their massive shift to 3Ps providing most of their products online...I'd imagine they use a similar strategy (it improves same/next day availability and lowers cost). I follow the same strategy with Walmart (try to only buy directly).

It is a sad time for online purchasing :(

I'd heard that they DO mingle their 1st party inventory, but that you have an easy return when it turns out to be fake; but perhaps the story changes.

absolutely, I've been shifting my purchases to in store, leaning heavily towards Costco because whoever their buyers are have a good eye for quality. Also with their incredibly generous return policy I don't really worry about buying things from Costco and will buy by default because I know I can change my mind later if things don't work out.

Surely buying a brand name disinfectant by the gallon and paper towels and a spray bottle are orders of magnitude cheaper. And probably orders of magnitude better for the environment?

Not to mention it isn't really necessary. It's pretty clear now that surface contact is not a major vector for COVID transmission.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

When dealing with teachers understand that when presented with a career choice they are the folks who self selected into the job with summers off and the easiest course load. They will use the smallest excuse not to have to show up for work.

Covid isn't the only reason to disinfect surfaces. Proper disinfecting surfaces does prevent a large number of diseases. Covid we now know isn't one of them, but the others are still a worry.

Teachers have been using disinfecting wipes for decades, not just for COVID. Kids spread lots of germs.

If you're an engineer, and when you get back to your job you're told that you are now responsible for wiping down your workstation every hour, your first response will probably be, "I'm an engineer that's not my job" and your second response will be, "ok fine but make it as easy as possible".

Teachers are not supposed to be cleaning their classroom or teaching your kids about hygiene, but they have to now because parents don't and there is no budget for staff. There needs to be a tradeoff there. Spend a little more on supplies to save time so you don't have to hire a janitor to come around every hour and wipe down the classroom.

Teachers already might have a flower spray can with soap and a cloth for the board.

One-use prewet papertowelsheets might be overengineering the issue.

And then there are fakes of brand name products which makes it difficult to even know what you're buying. Personally I started buying things that I used to buy at Amazon locally instead whenever and wherever possible. That might mean a trip to the store but better than not knowing what you get.

> It's no mistake that I've come to rely on brand name again.

I've been saying for awhile, this could be the salvation for brick-and-mortar stores. As long as Amazon continues to play fast and loose with counterfeits, the one thing that will get me to drive down to the store and buy something in-person is the store's guarantee that the product came from the vendor whose name is on the box, and that I can return it if I get a lemon.

That and in-person testing of equipment. When (pre-pandemic) I was buying a new set of headphones, I was able to go through different options, test out how they feel, and whether there are any significant sound quality issues. I prefer over-the-ear headphones, but have bigger ears, so it is hard to tell whether a set will be comfortable without trying them on first. To do the same with an online store would require ordering a dozen headsets, then navigating the return policies for all but one of them.

There are also retailers which actually vet brands. For example anything edible that Target or Walmart or Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods (Amazon ownership notwithstanding) sells in their stores, they actually contract a testing company to test it to make sure that it’s safe. For things where safety is important an actual physical national store is going to be much better than Amazon.

That's still relying on brand name, just the brand of the retailer instead of the brand of the manufacturer.

Yes — but one retailer can aggregate hundreds of manufacturers. So if you buy everything at Target, for example, you know they have done a basic-level quality filter for you: the brands are not counterfeit, the food is tested occasionally, the electronics are UL listed.

Oh my, I am at the point I only read the 1 star reviews and maybe 2 star reviews. Worse dealing with Amazon is a royal pain when the company fulfilling the order ships the wrong item.

Brand names are a fine method to follow but not when sellers ship the wrong model/version/etc.

But all the 1 star reviews are from competitors!

Why not look at consumer reports (https://www.consumerreports.org/)? I purchased a subscription and use them quite a bit. The problem here is in willingness to pay. If companies are willing to pay to promote their product, you will need to pay to get objective information. Any attempts at free objective information is going to be vulnerable to pollution by those willing to spend resources.

I find that they engage in many practices they decry in others. It is at best not clear that they are on the good folks side.

I find that their ratings are often not very meaningful, at least for products that I feel informed. They don't seem very objective, and instead feel like a testimonial from a certain kind of person. If you happen to have similar sensibilities, then their ratings may work out quite well for you. I've never had that experience with them, though.

Then you will need to find a group that shares your tastes, but the consumer reports approach (if not their specific tastes) is the long term solution, IMO.

What are your (or others') impressions of the usefulness of CR's ratings from a durability / longevity standpoint?

It's easy to create a product that will score well in a 1-day, or even 1-month trial.

It's harder to make (or assess) one over a multi-year lifespan. I've long felt CR falls flat on this mark, though it's a difficult one to make.

I'm not sure who else even plays in the space. J.D. Power comes to mind.

I invite people to checkout BestBuy's online shop. Just about every single item has a rating from 4.0 to 4.8 out of 5. I have yet to see a single listing under 4 stars. There are of course, unrated items, but can you honestly believe that virutally every product they carry is nearly perfect? Who actually writes a 5 star review for a no-name brand of tape and cable ties?

When everything is perfect, nothing is, and I don't trust BestBuy's review system at all. I can't help but think there is some kind of false advertising law against fake reviews that they're breaking.

and Doordash. how is everything >4? are we really to believe that McDonalds has a rating of 4.6 out of 5?

it makes the system completely useless.

If you order McDonalds, you probably know what McDonalds should taste like. If it meets 100% of your expectations, why would you rate it lower?

Similarly, if I get a meal from Michelin Star rated restaurant and it fails to meet my high expectations, should it get a better rating than McDonald's just because the restaurants meal was still likely much better than McDonald's even if it failed to meet expectations?

In practical terms it dilutes the value of 4 and 5 star reviews for other restaurants. There's some cognitive dissonance involved when McDonald's gets a 4.6/5 and a mom and pop haute-cuisine restaurant gets a 4.6/5 as well. These are two very different dining experiences but they are being judged using the same system and feels inaccurate.

For what McDonalds is they probably deliver a 5 star review the way their customers see it. You probably have to divide restaurants into different categories and compare within them. I beat a lot of people will rate MCDonalds higher than haute cuisine restaurants even in direct comparison. There is no absolute rating for restaurants.

If in direct comparison they rate McDonald's higher, then that's fine... McDonald's is a huge business, they obviously have people who like them.

But it should be a direct comparison, I certainly think KFC is far superior to most haute cuisine fried chicken.

There is no sensible way to compare fine dining to McDonald's.

The rating should be based on how well they deliver what they purport to deliver. If McDonald's delivers the absolute epitome of a fast-food burger and fries then it should get a 5/5, even if tastier food can be found at other restaurants.

Haute cuisine with a mediocre execution should get a 3/5 even if it's tastier than a McDonald's hamburger.

From a utility standpoint, I mean, yeah. You should definitely rate McDonalds lower than a restaurant with food you liked better, if people want to search for "how was the food" divided by "cost of the food" that's obviously a sliding scale that depends on the person. Maybe it should be something you can sort by, but I don't see how you could possibly reconcile ratings from different people if they all give five stars for any restaurant that meets their expectations.

Experience vs. expectations is the only reasonable way to interpret user-based scores even if they are not astroturfed. The problem is that you don't always know what the average user's expectations are and how they compare to your own and there is no basis for comparing scores between different objects.

This I think stems from a different issue. Doordash has a very easy, one second review they ask from everyone. And I think 99.999% of folks think “oh yeah that was fine, 4 stars” or “it was pretty good, five stars.” Do people get what they expected from that McDonald’s? Was it cheap, fast and nostalgic? 5 stars.

The people doing these reviews are not good critics, or critical with any sort of depth.

They are the sort of folks that get doordash to bring them McDonald’s.

This reminds of me leaving reviews on Uber or Lyft. A perfectly fine ride is a 5/5 because anything less than that hurts the driver. In reality I just need a binary "Satisfactory? Y/N" and then maybe an optional extended rating for leaving feedback if anything was out of the ordinary, good or bad.

good points. maybe that makes all the difference between Doordash compared to Google/Yelp, where McDonalds is more along the lines of 1 or 2 out of 5.

it means Doordash ratings are useless for discovery, but if you already know the restaurant, it might have utility in terms of delivery.

There is also unevenly distributed cultural knowledge: anything less than five stars starts causing hassle for the driver. I hate this inflation but I also wanna make sure the person who gave me competent service that I would realistically mark as three stars - not bad, not great, job done exactly as specified and I'm perfectly happy with that - is going to get five.

(hassle varies: offered fewer/worse-paying jobs is a good start)

When I moved to California for a while I once made the mistake of describing my food at a restaurant with "fine, thanks" when the server asked how it was.

Apparently this translates very differently in the culture of the Bay Area where it means something like "I am very upset" whereas in Boston I think this roughly would be read as "I am satisfied, but don't really feel like chatting."

"Good" is a California "fine", and "fine" is a California "pox be upon you".

Randomly reminded me of George Carlin's bit on that.

It’s like “fine.” Another weak word.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

Bullshit! Nobody’s fine. Hair is fine.

“How’s your hair?”

“Fine.”

That makes a lot more sense to me.

There are clever words and/or phrases which do (or did) translate quite differently in British vs. American English. Starting with "clever" and "quite".

Key generally being that on a scale of 1--10, Brits tend to hover in the 5.00000003 to 5.000000031 range. Any deviation from that is an extreme reaction.

I've given up on leaving reviews. For 3 stars to be average, you need to actually give average reviews to some things, thus I rate almost everything as 3 stars which results in the "what went wrong", "Nothing, you were average, just like everyone else". I got sick of that exchange and gave up. Doing better than average is almost impossible in my book because almost everyone is doing their best. Sometimes someone will mess up and get a 1, but not often, and not bad enough that they make enough of a difference as to raise everyone else to 5.

Also, I just don't buy enough of most things to honestly know. Is Brand X thing better than Brand Y - how should I know? I don't have the time to spend a week trying each item to give a fair review. I happened to choose Brand X, and it is fine but it might really be far worse than Brand Y if only I had tried the other in stead.

They can both be 5/5 in terms of delivering the product you expect them to deliver.

Isn't this just the logical consequence of the "less than 5 stars means you want them punished" mentality popularised by Uber?

It was popularized at least as far back as eBay (albeit as a positive/neutral/negative scale). "Seller shipped me an empty box but at least there wasn't dynamite in it. A+++++++ seller."

I do think restaurant and product ratings are a bit different. With Uber, eBay, etc., a lot of people recognize that any less than perfect rating can lead to a personal impact on someone even if a small number of people leave a negative.

That said, many will leave good marks on satisfaction surveys because a middling mark may lead to someone reaching out to find out what the problem was and that can just be more hassle than it's worth.

Arguably the punishment side existed before the web then in US tipping etiquette.

But at least the eBay 'approve' asks you whether the vendor was adequate or not, not to give them the maximum on an entirely artificial multiplier scale unless you think they should face consequences.

>Arguably the punishment side existed before the web then in US tipping etiquette.

True. In general, even if service is bad for whatever reason, most people would say you should leave a tip even if a less generous one than you normally would.

I haven't left a rating on eBay for a long time and don't use it much. But for many situations there's something to be said for thumbs up/down or an up/neutral/down rating when you're not really trying to fine tune.

And I suspect the use of grades in US Highschools where anything that isnt an A is considered a failure is an element why every ones gives a 4 or 5

> are we really to believe that McDonalds has a rating of 4.6 out of 5?

Why shouldn’t it? You know what you are getting with McDonalds. For the price point they sell at, it is pretty good food. They are consistent. And they do a really good job with food safety, probably better than a lot of more highly rated restaurants (when was the last time you heard about an outbreak of a food borne illness at McDonalds)?

I very rarely eat at McDonalds because I don't like them for the most part. But, if I did, and I was promptly served what I ordered, why would I ding them because their burger isn't up to the standards of the (costlier) burger joint down the street or even Shake Shack.

Even if you didn't feel the reviews were gamed--why would BestBuy leave bad reviews on its site--it would basically be admitting they sell bad products. Ideally maybe they are removing products that get continuous bad reviews before you see them, but generally reviews can't come from the same place you buy items and be trustworthy.

> why would BestBuy leave bad reviews on its site

Because any website that doesn't do this I immediately assume is untrustworthy and I will choose to buy nothing from them at all.

How would someone know this when visiting them for an occasional purchase? You might easily assume that the lower rated items rapidly stop being carried, that the items that are carried are curated to have a real bias towards higher ratings, or merely that the lower rated items are on a different page of results.

Which isn't to say I trust Best Buy's customer reviews, I definitely don't. I probably trust Amazon's more simply by sheer quantity combined with fakespot.com to sanity check the reviews.

But I don't think a website having weird average scores is very suspicious, especially when they have small numbers of reviews. If many items are totally unreviewed and others have only a few dozen reviews, the results are essentially noise right? That's why I would trust Best Buy reviews less.

I can understand if a company uses truly bad reviews as an indicator that they should stop carrying the product. That makes sense, and you'd have survivorship bias from that. However, the problem I see with BestBuy's approach is that even average reviews are being diluted by a deluge of 5 star reviews. Decent products should be getting 3 out of 5 stars and only the truly exceptional ones should be getting the perfect 5/5.

I sense the problem is partly due to the shortcomings of the X/5 rating system.

In theory, they could actively remove bad items from the catalog, thus not having any lower than 4.0.

Yeah, I'm aware that is not what is happening there, but you seeing no item lower than 4.0 is not a certain and general sign of fraud.

I think the reality is not just that Best Buy is (maybe) creating fake reviews or removing bad ones, but that most reviewers only rate with 1 star or 5 stars. The majority of reviews I find are in one of those two buckets, and only a handful of nuanced reviews fall in 2-4, effectively making the rating of a non controversial product that does what it’s supposed to - but has lemons - from 4 (meh) to 5 (works as expected).

This is why I would support a law that says if you're selling a product and have reviews you must also report how many you've sold over the last year, and how many returns (or maybe a percentage or something).

That would be a much more useful metric.

It would be gamed anyway, you'd just get sellers saying "we'll give you twenty dollars for not returning the item."

Prosecute this as fraud.

To answer your question about tape and cable ties, BestBuy will offer rewards points for writing reviews and sometimes offers bonus points for certain products.

Im sure they're also doing some review cleaning like Amazon does where if the review is negative they will moderate it more aggressively. After all, badly rated products hurt the entire storefront so it is in their best interest to keep "bad" products off.

But that said I still will trust BestBuy over Amazon. I know items from BestBuy are not being co-mingled with potential knockoffs and returns are pretty easy for items that are terrible.

I spend entirely too much money at Best Buy, and I’ve only written 5 star reviews for products I like. The bad products get immediately returned for a full refund - one of the advantages of buying from a big brick and mortar store. I never think about products I returned, I would prefer not to unless I’m given some incentive to write a bad review. Now, if I were stuck with the item, I’d probably trash it online in their review section.

I guess a useful metric would be if they posted return rates, warranty cases and so on.

This is one of the bonuses of a brick and mortar store if you can get a commissioned associate to tell you.

Ex: I’m not going to say phonefriend makes a bad phone but they have the highest return rate and people will buy a much more expensive Panasonic when they leave for a second time.

Same kind of experience here. On top of that, I'm usually a pretty picky purchaser who does a decent bit of market research ahead of time. So I'm probably more likely to only buy that good electronic item from a shop like Best Buy that I've got a high likelihood of giving a 4-5 star review.

This is a problem with nearly every online rating place. 4.0 means TOTAL GARBAGE and 5.0 means it didn't burn by house down. Totally useless.

I gave an honest review of some $30 bluetooth headphones. I gave it a 3 star, and listed my complaints. The company reached out to me, offered to send me 2 more, for free, of their newer and better model, if I just adjusted my review to all stars. That was when I stopped believing them.

This is so common that I considered creating a browser extension to convert/normalize the the min and max values on a page into a 5-star rating. When the lowest rating of items on the page is 4.2, 4.2 would displayed as 1.

That is actually a really cool idea. Probably a lot more work than it sounds like.

Lots of products have <4 stars on Best Buy's website. If you're not seeing products with < 4 stars, you're just looking at their featured items.

I also agree its hard to trust online reviews, but we don't need to throw out falsehoods about how every product is 4+ stars.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/ge-7-8-cu-ft-10-cycle-electric-...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/whirlpool-7-4-cu-ft-36-cycle-el...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/combo/washer-dryer-bundles/d40c...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hisense-32-class-h55-series-led...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/furrion-49-class-led-outdoor-fu...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/jam-been-there-wireless-on-ear-...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/tcl-mtro-series-mtro200btbl-wir...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sennheiser-ie-80-s-bt-wireless-...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/supersonic-7-tablet-8gb-black/6...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/azpen-10-touch-screen-tablet-an...

To be honest though, if you were a retailer trying to push the idea that almost any product you sell if cool tech, wouldn't you probably remove most SKUs that are genuinely 2-star products?

Almost all online stores seem to be like this. Why would Dell or Lenovo show you products that had anything less than 3.5 stars? There’s a huge conflict of interest in showing reviews of their own products. BestBuy has to sell the inventory they carry, so sure, they will tell you everything is 4-5 stars. Amazon is actually slightly better because they profit no matter which headphones you buy, but then it’s the sellers that are gaming the system. In theory it should be easier to detect.

I recently bought some sheets. Actually sorting through the sheets on Amazon was a hassle because 90% of the reviews would be obviously fake "best sheets I've ever slept on - 5 stars" and the remaining 10% would be 1-3 star reviews that would be photographs of poor fabric or tears in the arriving product.

It is almost impossible to buy quality goods online and I'm afraid that is just going to get worse.

What is also strange is when comparing "different" offerings they sometime turn out to be exactly the same product, just with a slightly different picture/text and a (sometimes substantial) price difference.

For products like iPhone cases it feels like there is one factory in China which produces a few different models, which lead to the 200 offerings you'll see when searching for one at Amazon.

this, it's product representation dilution. When things go sour a new listing is made with a different name, edited photos, and same product. Amazon is so polluted with noise like this we've started to shift our business elsewhere.

Making something in a factory is skill and there are scale factors. You can buy a lawn mower from dozens of different companies, but the vast majority are made in one factory. If you want to sell lawnmowers you just need to order some quantity (I'm guessing 1000) and they will paint their standard mower with your colors and got to word and substitute your name in the manual. Easy enough for them to do and they don't need to worry about marketing at all.

Nearly all store brands are the same way. A lot of other brand name products are also the same. That iPhone case factory will probably make any patter you want.

Don't assume though that store bands are the same quality. There are some choices. They can use thicker metal in lawn mowers for quality. They can use source plastics of different qualities for the iphone cases. However the price isn't that much different and so sometimes the expensive products are the lowest quality.

I had the same exact issue. So I went to target and felt the material i would be sleeping on and have been super happy ever since.

I'm shifting to brick and mortar or online retailers that I feel vet their sellers like Costco.

It's not impossible to buy quality goods online, but it is on Amazon.

Maybe re-phrase the question - I ONLY trust negative reviews now. The key is to see how many people have negative reviews and then scan them.

Let's say I am interested in a BBQ Grill.

10 reviews about an open box/returned box? I'll probably go to a local CampingWorld and pick it up instead of Amazon and pay the extra $50.

4 people say the grill grate is bent but there are 1200 other reviews that don't seem to have a problem? Low chance I'm going to get the bent grill grate.

Things like that.

What if those 1200 other reviews were bought from a Facebook review farm?

https://www.amzfinder.com/blog/top-100-facebook-groups-list-...

There are a ton of Facebook groups out there whose sole purpose is to shove $$$ into paid reviews on Amazon (or Yelp, or other review sites). Could be a bunch of college kids looking to make a quick buck, or maybe some broken-English dude from some 3rd world country who actually made it their full time job. I don't know, but that's not the point.

The point is: you can literally buy Amazon reviews (or Yelp reviews, or ... any kind of review really) from Facebook groups, if you know where to look.

What I look for is bad reviews that indicate to me the problem is PEBKAC - nobody is buying bad reviews, but if the only real complaint is that when someone dropped it on their toes it hurt, then it's probably OK.

But more and more I lean toward "if I have to get it from Amazon it needs to be something I'd be happy with being crap".

> nobody is buying bad reviews

https://usasocialmediaservices.com/services/buy-negative-fac...

Going price of negative reviews (that lean positive to sell the product) is $10 for 5 reviews.

A mix of good, medium, and bad reviews "naturally" sells a product. You can literally buy astroturfing for your products these days on the cheap.

Ah snap they’re on to me. :(

There's also "rival company" reviews. I've heard from some business friends in the Hotel business that rival Hotels are probably leaving bad reviews on Yelp. And there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.

You look at a review, you back-check the date and try to line it up with customer records. You look for complaints, you ask staff if they remember the customer. Etc. etc. Ultimately, its a phantom, clearly a made-up review designed to hurt your company for some reason.

That's more of a thing on Yelp where if you bad-mouth a neighbor with a fake-review, your own business across the street benefits. Less of a thing on Amazon (where a fake negative review won't necessarily lead to customers buying your thing).

----------

Back 20 or 30 years ago, a fake negative review on a newspaper or an advertisement would lead to suing the perpetrator for slander or libel. Today, there's no recourse at all. And more-and-more people are learning about the marvels of the modern internet age where you can pretty much slander your opponents and benefit from customers as a result.

And even more devious, companies paying people to leave obviously fake positive reviews for competitors so they get afoul of what little review verification Amazon does, and banned:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...

This. I look for genuine problems. Works with hotels too - are the negative reviews unreasonable ("Dude, I think you're the problem, not the hotel...") or things that I can see someone like me being upset about occurring ("They say construction is done on the new wing, it's not done and they start at 8 AM...")

are you saying 1-star reviews? Because they are sometimes bonkers reviews from some non-critical-thinking folks.

I would say 3-star reviews are more likely to provide useful information.

> I ONLY trust negative reviews now.

That won't last long, negative reviews will get flooded by glowing reviews with trivial complaints. "This thing is perfect except I don't like green so 1/5"

I've found that instead of looking for positive reviews I'll first search for negative reviews. Can't really trust the professional reviewers because they have an incentive to bend the truth. But you also can't really trust casual reviewers because it's so easy to game the system. Sometimes I'll look at places like Reddit for product reviews but you can't even really trust that anymore because more and more companies have started to understand the value of viral marketing on social media. So it seems like the only thing you can really trust are the negative reviews.

And you can’t really trust those either since companies will review competitor’s products negatively. These days I just ask coworkers and friends and family

Yeah the whole system is gamed. This is my process:

- check out the reviews that actually post pictures

- read the 1-stars to see what happened.

- Do a google search for "best X product" to see if product shows up there. Sift through the many many bullshit sites set up to make money from Amazon affiliate links. Sometimes a result sticks out that I feel like I can easily trust, like if I'm looking for hiking equipment and an REI links shows up. Even the NY Times has a whole product review section and has amazon affiliate links: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/

- Look for YouTube video reviews. I know a lot of those are free products provided to YouTubers so I take any positive reviews by them with a grain of salt. I just want to see the product in use.

- Check out Reddit. Also take these with some scrutiny because Reddit has already been infiltrated by marketing companies willing to pay for fake reviews & upvotes

- Check FakeSpot and ReviewMeta to see what they say

- Analysis paralysis sets in. Are the good reviews fake? Are the bad reviews from competitors? Did the websites reviewing the products actually review it or just searched the top 10?

- Walk away for a day or 2

- Go back to the product, and decide to gamble and buy one of the top results in Amazon.

It's so annoying

> Check out Reddit. Also take these with some scrutiny because Reddit has already been infiltrated by marketing companies willing to pay for fake reviews & upvotes

Yup.

An interesting case study for me was trying to find a reliable modafinil provider.

It's illegal in most western countries but won't actually get you thrown in jail, so you can't use the usual marketplaces, but people still feel comfortable recommending it on reddit.

The end result is that any possible subreddit you can find dedicated to provider recommendations is filled with paid recommendations that people made in exchange for discounts. The only subreddits that have serious non-shill discussions are the ones that ban recommendations.

Every product I order from Amazon from a Chinese brand has an offer for a free 'gift' for leaving a good review.

That and requests to delete my review in exchange for a refund.

Then it's only a matter of time before consumers start gaming the system right back. Write a poor review, await a refund offer, then write the real review.

Well the flip side to this scam too is now I start seeing hints in the reviews.

"Edit: I left this review a month ago, and I have not seen the 'special gift' that the seller promised for my help"

Then find out Amazon wont accept your real review because it 'doesn't meet their community standards'

Yep, can't let the word spread that someone peed in the co-mingling pool. That might cause a panic!

Also: can't let the word spread that "prime" shipments get silently substituted for 30-day slow-steamed-in-a-containers-and-then-USPS shipments. That wouldn't reflect fairly on the product!

Ugh.

I don't even get that courtesy. Amazon deletes legitimate negative reviews all the time without the seller having to make amends.

Just curious. Like what kinds of products?

I hear this a lot, but I've never seen it in the wild.

Reviews and rankings are broken across the industries. For products I usually start my journey at NYT Wirecutter https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/.

I was also recently looking for a place at Apartments.com, as I learned all places get 5 star ranking to start, and it’s of course not clear at all in the UX. I think at the moment google maps does pretty good job with rankings.

I trust them a bit less these days. Seems that at least some of their products are pay to play.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25993512

I'm finding Wirecutter to be less-than-useful, though. There's the question marks around their funding model, but the deeper problem is their "the best X" format. It requires setting up a very specific rubric that tends to favor Cadillac models, and leaves you with very little information to go on if you don't have Cadillac needs.

Concrete example: I recently bought a new office chair. My shopping process involved a lot of reading reviews and a lot of sitting in actual chairs. The chair I ended up with, an Ikea Långfjäll, wasn't even considered by Wirecutter because it lacks a lot of adjustability features. But there are a lot of truly independent reviews (by which I mean, people talking on Web forums or mentioning the chair they use on their personal blogs) with the general consensus being, "This chair is fantastic if it fits your body and you don't need/want all the bells and whistles." A couple people even said they happily switched to it from an Aeron chair or similar. Which describes me well enough, insofar as my office was supplying me with Herman Miller love up until the pandemic hit.

So, all in all, I'm loving this chair. But, if I were constrained to the Wirecutter "The best X" format, I wouldn't include it, either, because its lack of adjustability means it just won't be suitable for lots and lots and lots of people.

The funding model is extremely sus. I used to trust them but your criticisms are right on, and their 'the best x' lists have a curious tendency to prioritize brands that already have high ad spend, rather than surface little known indie choices.

The possible saving grace of their funding model is that, even if the manufacturer itself doesn't have an affiliate program, they can probably still get some sort of affiliate link through Amazon or Wal-Mart.

That said, there's just no amount of "not actually sketchy" that will prevent this sort of revenue model from seeming sketchy. Hard not to wonder if there are small Internet-only companies that only sell direct-to-consumer who are being shut out of independent reviews, or are feeling pressure to give them a cut in order to avoid being cut out.

The other 60% are simply not paying attention.

The other 60% claim that they were already at zero trust in 2016. I think that they are exaggerating their distrust and I reject the idea that there could be a third option.

I mean, when articles point out clear scams with thousands of 5-star reviews, how can a lowly honest person compete?

Similarly, what can you possibly do if someone with deep pockets decides to trash your competing product’s reviews?

Also, in my experience at least, the overwhelming majority of real customers do not submit reviews at all. Thus I am skeptical of any product that has miraculously convinced thousands of people to contribute positive feedback.

At this point, every single review system acts more like a tool to help scam people, instead of helping them to avoid bad products. It pushes bad products to the top of search, whereas unrated products would be forced to scam a handful of people in obscurity.

And the worst part is that I still think twice about any low review, even knowing that in all likelihood the reviews I am reading may not even be real! It really messes with your head.

I use niche (<2M subs) YouTube channels like ProjectFarm[0] to decide between products these days. Huge YouTube channels are no longer trustworthy as I've noticed they will shill for whatever "opportunity" comes knocking (MatPat recently did an interview with Dr. Fauci[1] on his The Game Theorists channel, and while I didn't disagree with the content of the video, it raised some red flags in my mind because it was obviously content that didn't fit into the channel...)

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

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLIkZRmqgjI

+1 for project farm, I've found his recommendations and putting things to the test to be very accurate. Been pleased with the buys I made off his recommendations.

Will Prowse is a real gem too https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoj6RxIAQq8kmJme-5dnN0Q

You can't even search for information about products anymore. All that shows up is affiliate spam pages that read like they were generated from a ML algorithm.

It's infuriating. I've noticed the auto-generated pages especially when searching using patterns of the form "X vs. Y". Half the links will just be auto-generated pages that show the specs side by side along with some ML-tinged paragraphs above to make it seem like the article was written by a human. (but after reading a few sentences it obviously wasn't)

This is what's going to kill the search engine ad market if the algorithm designers aren't careful.

The internet is making everything winner take all. Off the first page of Google? You don’t exist. Not on first page of Amazon for “Bluetooth headphones”? You don’t exist. That’s why companies will pay so much to game whatever system gets them to the top rank, which is only further reinforced when people buy/click that top product/result. This is a hard problem to solve but I think there needs to be a way of segmenting the results you see, perhaps more highly weighting the opinions of others similar (in preferences) to you.

Just had an Amazon vendor offer me the full value of my purchase (in Amazon gift cards) to change my review from 3 stars to four. On one hand, it's great customer service, but on the other the product is still really a three star product.

Well, did you ?

I use the FakeSpot extension for the Brave browser. Works with any Chrome based browser.

Uses AI to analyze reviews as well as the reviewers other reviews. Then it gives a letter grade from A to F that rates the trustworthiness of the reviews.

Maybe not perfect but very cool!

I also don't particularly trust professional reviews anymore. The affiliate link funding model has set up a glaring conflict of interest.

Consumer Reports. That's literally it.

Are they still influential? They're something I associate with my parent's generation and the era of print magazines.

They won't influence you if you don't subscribe, of course.

I used to subscribe, my sense is that they do a good job, but their tastes are geared toward those of more affluent boomers and genxers. If you're someone who can't afford a Lexus, or who'd even consider choosing a Kia over a Lexus even though you can easily afford one, then Consumer Reports may not cater to your tastes.

I subscribe to their web site. Because my father subscribed and liked it, and I find it useful as well - also my former team lead was a lead there for a while. It is $40 a year.

They do surveys of consumers as well as do their own testing. About once a year they survey about vacuum cleaners - I had to buy one recently, and some brands got high grades, other low grades - so I bought a Shark vacuum cleaner. A few years ago I needed to buy an air conditioner and used CR for that as well. I also needed a laptop in a hurry and CR was one source I consulted (although I consulted several sources).

$40 a year is worth it to me to get a decent air conditioner and vacuum cleaner and such at a decent price (and laptop, although CR was just once of the consulted sources). The Shark vacuum cleaner was the last item I bought and it picks up dirt good, is easy to empty, and can vacuum rugs as well as things that need the hose to vacuum.

It was humorous when they started doing computer reviews in the 90's and they clearly didn't have a clue about what they were reviewing.

How so? I mean, I could imagine that they were reviewing computers on practical things that real-world users cared about, but maybe a tech enthusiast would find irrelevant.

I remember they rated the Atari (8 bit) computers a best buy. At the time I was an Atari fan and that how great it was. On hindsight, it was obvious even back then that the Atari was obsolete and the PC was where everyone was going for a reason. (though they could reasonably put mac/St/Amiga in the review, at least they were not obsolete)

That would have been the mid-late 80s, but it set the tone for the time: rate something high because it was cheap not because it was the best for the job.

My method for making >$100 purchases is open up Consumer Reports, look at the top 3 ratings, and often the first will be some I'm sure very good product at $1200, and the second-best will be $500, so I buy the second-best rated of everything.

Like a Peloton is really good, yeah, but there's probably a $1000 treadmill that's pretty good, or Traeger makes great if overpriced pellet grills, but there's definitely some cheaper options that will smoke your meat fine if you don't need wifi and bluetooth for your smoker. And then sometimes the expensive products are really terrible quality with an aura of mystique about then (looking at you, Molekule air purifier) and Consumer Reports is willing to call these snake oil salesmen companies.

I don't trust any other reviews, though.

I recently canceled my Amazon prime subscription after having it for almost a decade. The final straw was Amazon removing the ability to comment on reviews. First, they remove the ability to see the comments using the mobile site, then they remove them all together saying that not as many people were utilizing it. Unfortunately, those comments were a good litmus test to the authenticity of a review - positive or negative - and gave insight to the responsiveness of the seller. Some comments on reviews even had instructions on how to solve the reviewer's problem from experts in the field, it’s all lost now.

I agree completely. Now the only way to "reply" to a review is to leave another review which adds something that shouldn't be a review to the reviews making reviews even more worthless.

I don't understand the need to mistrust online reviews. They are all 100% accurate and only published by people who are completely authoritative in their segment. I find online reviews to be objective and informed, while providing deep insight into the inner workings of that which is being reviewed. They always express an unbiased approach, and in my expert opinion, everyone should trust online reviews. A++++++ would do business again. You can trust me on this!

Yours Truly,

Prince Alyusi Islassis

Nigerian National Petroleum Company

For me, the biggest issue I have is book ratings on Amazon.

Besides companies - and small time authors - paying for good ratings, you have a similar amount of people that genuinely bought the book, giving 1 start ratings because of whatever quality of the book manufacture, be it physical or digital.

One of these two alone would not be difficult to manage, but having to deal the two makes it almost unbearable to find out the proper rating. We should start giving ratings ratings.

In Germany there's Stiftung Warentest [1] which offers reviews without the apparent conflict of interest. They release paid articles with review and comparison all kinds of items. I find their offering a breeze of fresh air compared to the dumpster fire that online reviews have become.

[1] https://www.test.de/unternehmen/ (German)

Can't you literally request for any negative review to be removed in Germany as it 'hurts your business' by law? I live here and that's the explanation I've been given when negative reviews disappear .

As far as I know, businesses have no right in Germany to remove lawful reviews, even if they are negative [1] and I can confirm to see occasional bad reviews on their articles. In any case I'm rather interested in finding trustful positive reviews to guide my purchases and I value having a neutral agency that offers that.

[1] https://www.anwalt.de/rechtstipps/negative-bewertungen-im-in... (German)

Who pays for the articles and who writes them? Is this like Consumer Reports?

This is the description found on their "About Us" in English [1]:

Stiftung Warentest is a foundation. It was established in 1964 by the German federal parliament with the aim of helping consumers by providing impartial and objective information based on the results of comparative investigations of goods and services.

    We buy products – anonymously from retailers, and make covert use of services.
    We carry out tests – in independent labs that use scientific methods and follow our specifications.
    We give verdicts – ranging from „very good“ to „unsatisfactory“, based solely on objective results.
    We publish our findings – totally free of adverts in our magazines „test“ and „Finanztest“, and online at www.test.de.

According to their report [2] they are mostly financed through the sale of their articles.

[1] https://www.test.de/unternehmen/about-us-5017053-0/

[2] https://www.test.de/unternehmen/zahlen-5017275-0/

Would love to see a 'social score' come back a-la Klout, but not Klout.

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

Instead of measuring how powerful or influential you are - it could instead be used to prove your honesty, trustworthiness, identity in some kind of anonymous way, etc...

Variants of this have existed forever. Here's what will happen – I spend years writing great reviews and building up a good score. People trust me, I become famous in the community. Brands start to vie for my attention. A shitty company comes along and offers me $1 million in exchange for a good review. What incentive do I have to turn it down?

A few ideas:

- Reviews should be normalised to a reviewer's mean score. If a person hands out 5/5s like there's no tomorrow, those rate as 2.5/5s.

- The whole notion of collaborative filtering is that some information is (usually) better than none. This is often the case, but in a situation where 100 people are tasked with evaluating a skyscraper, jet airliner, pharmaceutical, or software design, where 1 is a domain expert and 99 are not ... I'd slant my weight in favour of the domain expert, generally. (A jury of experts might be more suitable.) Otherwise, the information is simply noise.

- Massive penalties and downratings for both reviewers and retailers who game the system. Zero those motherlovers out. Put some skin in the game.

Amazon (and every other review site) has a massive reputation problem here, and it will (and is) biting them.

I’ve worked in the mobile game space for awhile and nearly all game reviews are fake or paid for in some way. I worked on 3 games last year that are all sitting at 4.5 stars on android and iOS. You know how I know those reviews are fake? Because I programmed the games and know they’re trash.

Somehow this problem will be solved -- not perfectly, but like how spam went from a serious problem to an annoyance. The question is, how? What's the solution going to look like? You'd think Amazon would've focused more on it by now.

A fun anecdote from my wife: 6 years ago she reviewed a nursing bra on Amazon. Gave it five stars. Fast forward to now and she when pulls up her review history that same review (with the exact text!) now appears on a consumer electronics device.

Yup, it's a very common way to get a product with high sales and ratings. You put up a low cost, high volume, high quality item. Sell it cheap, then after you have enough 5 star reviews, swap all the pictures and text with a new higher margin (maybe lower quality item), completely unrelated item.

Tons of Amazon vendors pay for reviews. Either a direct offer ahead of time (buy this product, give it a 5 star review, we pay you via PayPal), an offer in the box (give us a good review and we'll give you a free product!), or in response to a bad review (delete your review and we'll give you a refund). This is expected behavior now on Amazon. Amazon doesn't ever seem to penalize these vendors as they keep making Amazon money. They will, however, ban customers from leaving reviews once they have engaged in this. And prevent users from posting reviews mentioning things like receiving counterfeit products (had this happen to me).

Checkout Tabelog, a Japanese version of Yelp. Anything over 3.5 is phenomenal. 4.0+? Rare. 4.5 is probably the best sushi place in all of Tokyo. Anything over 2.0 is great. 1.5 is manageable and 1 or below is bad.

We in the west just love so much excess. Everything is amazing or everything just sucks. Bimodal distribution and extreme greed. Most things in nature, society, etc are normally distributed and our review system and the people are broken from the most fundamental ways.

Something to learn about this from Japan.

tabelog's score is not average but very artificial by secret algorithm.

I stopped caring about user "reviews" years ago. A good chunk of them are paid and another good chunk are absurdly emotional/hyperbolic, most of which the buyers don't even know what the use case of a product is. Most people, especially on Amazon, buy a product without even looking at every detail about it.

I partially blame Amazon's product UI which is generally terrible, but also people that don't do any research on a product they buy.

Nowadays I look for reviews on Reddit. If I can't find any that I consider to be legitimate, I won't buy the product if it's more than £10.

I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before that becomes an astroturfing target as well. At least there's account history associated with it, so there is some effort associated with creating or purchasing accounts with believable histories. Long term I think facebook wins this space because they have the most in depth real digital identities tied to people.

Amazon/walmart/google throwaway account people: whats the holdup on fixing fake/fraudulent/spam reviews? Is it a tech problem or do people not care to fix it (perceived small benefit to cost)?

If it's a tech problem, I'd be curious to know the details. Is it more interesting than "too big of a firehose"?

Dealing with fake/fraudulent reviews is hard enough, this is probably harder: manufacturers incentivizes real customers to write good reviews & remove bad reviews. I recently bought a few highly-rated gadgets from Amazon. One of them came with a leaflet saying they would send $50 gift card (the product costs $200) if I review and send them the screenshot. For another product, after I posted a 3-star review, which was not at all negative, I've been receiving a dozen or so emails from different addresses with varying subjects/contents but all asking me to remove that review in exchange for a gift card. I could only imagine how much harder they would go after the 1-star reviews...

I wonder what the % would be if they asked a more general question about just "information they read online." I'd bet it's in the same ballpark. How many major news stories did you read in the last several years that made large sensational claims, which later turned out to be completely false?

I recently ordered delivery from a highly-rated restaurant on Yelp. In the bag was a $10 off coupon for the next order if I left a 5-star review and sent them a screenshot. I reported it to Yelp, but to my knowledge nothing has changed. This is the state of online ratings and reviews today.

Companies like Amazon have no incentives to police gaming of reviews. A purchased item is money to them, regardless of if the purchase was a sponsored purchase. It's why fake products have equal or more reviews than popular products found in stores.

So, at what point does this become a problem for Amazon (for example)? They _seem_ to not care.

AmazonBasics seems like a way to build brand-name recognition in the face of untrusted online reviews.

Clearly Amazon cares. Not enough to fix the problem, but enough to build a new brand of white-label goods. If anything, untrusted reviews is to the benefit of the AmazonBasics brand.

--------

Amazon Reviews are a benefit to the 3rd party marketplace, more so than anything else. Buying non-branded goods from unknown (or nearly unknown) brands. I'm not entirely sure to see how, or why, untrusted Amazon reviews is Amazons' problem.

When it affects their bottom line. Consumers largely _seem_ to not care either, and continue buying from Amazon.

I've stopped using amazon for anything unless either I already know exactly what it will be or if its throwaway and I dont care.

Even books now are often something that looks like it was printed on photocopy paper from a word processor.

I think amazon is converging to its niche (maybe not a niche if there is ~a trillion in annual revenue at stake) as a Walmart replacement. For instances where quality matters, I think they are already off the table for many people.

Or check out amazon first and go direct to alternate sites in the UK there are sites like Book Depository for books or Weyland Games for 40K gear 4 music for sound cards etc.

When they stop growing and decide fixing it is the way to win market share against Costco etc / Direct to Consumer purchasing.

Does Walmart care about low quality products? Or alternatively, what would an online marketplace that avoids fraud, intentionally low quality reproductions, or just low quality products in general look like?

We'd really like to align the incentives of the reviewers with potential buyers. One way to achieve that would be to pay reviewers as judged by the people who buy the product from the service. There are a few problems here, like there not being much incentive to review low volume products, or manufacturers introducing 10k variations that differ by a single letter in a GUID (monitors/tvs), or a change in the quality of the product itself. These sound tractableish.

Outstanding questions: does the math add up such that the incentive of maintaining a high quality platform is larger than the incentive for manufacturers to defect (signal high quality and cheat). Can we pass on that win to reviewers?

Other thoughts: we can't punish manufacturers for cheating because its too easy for their competitors to abuse.

I haven't ordered anything from Amazon in over a year, for various reasons, but the general untrustworthiness is a factor. On the other hand, while the problem is particularly bad for Amazon, it isn't exclusive to them. It has generally become difficult to find reliable information about products. So I tend to stick with stuff I know, and buy direct as much as possible.

Amazon realized long ago that selling cheap Chinese-made products (whether real or fake) isn't the future of the company. Something is only a real problem if it affects their first-party products and services ecosystem (Echo, Alexa, Fire, Kindle, Audible, Ring, Prime, Video, Whole Foods, Fresh).

There was a time when I read Amazon reviews. At best now, I only look at the 1 star reviews to see if there are glaring problems. Any review with 4 or more stars causes "ad blindness" for me. I don't even see them.

I basically always go to Reddit now for reviews... even if companies are astroturfing their as well, there's usually more honesty in the reviews than whatever is on the vendor's site.

If you are going to Reddit then they are going to Reddit.

If they're going to Reddit, they'll have to put in a lot more effort than just using bots to post fake reviews.

For some subreddits like r/BuyItForLife, it's not about the number of upvotes. Some people just gravitates toward old fashion goods.

Yes but one Reddit comment has a lot more weight right now because of the ease of astroturfing, so it doesn’t need to be a Bot. Someone posts a Swiss Army knife and someone else might say, “I love my Swiss Army Knife that my grandfather left me. Oddly enough my aunt thought it was lost and bought me a knockoff from Amazon and it actually works better than my grandfather’s knife.”

Then someone replies saying “what was the brand?”

Then the person replies with a picture of the knife with the lettering in tatters saying “QUINIPO” or one of those Chinese brand names.

Boom

with Reddit tho you can look through a users post history to see how likely they are a bot.

I'm not saying its perfect by any stretch.

And there is a market for buying up old Reddit accounts for that. People cultivate karma on Reddit accounts posting about cats and memes and then sell them to brands looking to appear authentic.

In other news 60% of people don't pay attention to anything other than what is parroted to them by other "people"

An absolute ton of Amazon sellers give you gift cards for positive reviews.

I just hope that the 44% didn't trust them 5 years ago either!

Maybe there should be a "return rate"% per product? :-)

That would give competitors an incentive to buy&return said product to drive up the return rate

Companies undermining consumer reviews undermines the justification for consumer capitalism. The idea is supposed to be that a merchant sells a product that solves some problem real or imagined at a given quality level. The consumer is supposed to be able to make a fair evaluation of the quality and fitness of the product and compare it with their budget and the item's price and make a decision.

If companies systematically and intentionally destroy the consumer's ability to do this, then why should their state charters even be valid?

This is great news!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com