Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericwooley | Hacker News Reader

I've been using https://reviewmeta.com/ for a while now.

It removes reviews from most products, and shows you what it thinks the most trustworthy, and least trust worthy reviews are.

It's pretty inexcusable that Amazon hasn't implemented a similar approach. They certainly have enough resources.

View on HN

I've used ReviewMeta as well, however I find the issue is that almost every product has suspicious reviews. If the average rating was 4.8 on Amazon, RM might lower it to 4.3 but they would also do the same for competing products.

I guess maybe I'm lucky in that I've never considered a product with blatantly fake reviews, however I also recognize that in order to compete even legitimate companies need to "play the game".

Yes. A great many product categories are so filled with scammers that if you reject the ones with bad scores on Fakespot or ReviewMeta you'll end up with nothing. Which could be an argument for shopping somewhere other than Amazon, except that you might only find one or two stores that have The Thing and then you'll have no information on how good it really is. It might even be the very same thing you looked at on Amazon, or you might fail to find it elsewhere at all. I've ended up buying some real clunkers IRL too, and found some unexpectedly good stuff on Amazon.

"Caveat emptor" was a saying long before the internet, after all. No matter where you buy, you're taking a bit of a risk and should try to manage it however you can. I still use ReviewMeta, and often follow where it leads if there's a distinction, but I also think we have a lot of work to do applying what we already know about gaming-resistant filtering in domains like this.

Spot-testing ReviewMeta just now, I see it accepts this, from #2 of the Amazon top 10,000, as valid:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R17NDQEUZQESUX/re...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com