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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then

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It's not super difficult to only show reviews you are highly confident AREN'T completely fake.

Instead they prioritize having as many reviews as possible - when possibly a majority of them are fake.

And the cost is - the reviews are completely meaningless.

All they care about is engagement - and if users have to dig through reviews manually trying to sort out signal from noise - that's engagement to them, not an awful product.

Amazon adds "verified purchaser" if the reviewer bought the book. Which means my glowing review (if I wrote one) of

https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp...

might look fake, since I borrowed it from the library.

Verified purchaser is not a good signal, and they know it.

It's a way to force the fraudsters to buy from Amazon.

Don't fix the problem - make more money from it. That's what companies do.

Not all they care about is engagement. They also care about keeping costs down.

If costs were no object they could simply hire well-paid, trustworthy, professional reviewers to review every product and listing. These high quality reviews could establish their site as the gold standard, strengthening the brand (think Apple levels of brand value) and drawing even more users. But all of this could be so expensive they’d actually lose money for doing it. So they don’t.

Meet Kirkus Reviews. They will actually read it and write a (I guess) well-reasoned review of it.

But you, the author, have to pay them. When I checked, it was $450.

If you're an author, you also get a deluge of offers to write a review. I didn't follow up on any of these, but you'd assume that they couldn't get any repeat business if they panned your book.

Fined by who, and for what? What a strange comment. Why would the government police such matters?

The FTC, I would imagine—this is definitely within the purview of regulating trade and advertising.

Maybe the Bureau of Consumer Protection, and for fraudulent and deceptive practices? There’s plenty of precedent, and Amazon’s failure to do anything about fake products and fake reviews, if not active encouragement of fraudulent behavior, is a real economic problem where we the consumers pay the costs.

https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-consume...

Shouldn't they start by fining the reviewers? Have they tried sending a subpoena to Amazon for all the reviewers' IPs and purchase histories? Did Amazon block it or something?

Reviews are, by their nature, personal opinions. I don't see how you can put a framework of fraud protection around that. Maybe in extreme marginal cases, but for the central idea of reviews, it just doesn't work.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. This isn’t about policing valid opinions, it’s about identifying what is currently a massive and obvious trend of actual fraud. Requiring authentication for reviews and products is the first step, and isn’t that hard, we know how to do it already. Amazon is choosing to allow reviews and products by people they know are bad actors. They look the other way and allow fruadsters to be anonymous because there are no consequences yet. They’re not imposing consequences on fraudulent sellers or reviewers, even though they could.

I don’t believe the main problem is that they don’t know how to identify fraud, I think the main problem is they don’t have any real incentive to.

Look: the FTC is already sending notice that enforcement is coming: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/...

> Why would the government police such matters?

Because at the end of the day this is fraud?

Wish they'd just go the Steam route and only allow reviews from people who've purchased the product.

Amazon has a Verified Purchase label, but still too much noise.

For goodreads they'd need a different system (reputation based? helpfulness?)

It's difficult for books where there's a strong culture of lending, both directly to individuals and from public libraries.

This won't stop people from lending things. It just means borrowers can't leave reviews.

I'd rather have a much smaller set of verified reviews than a bunch of fake ones. Decreasing the quantity in this case often means improving the quality and signal to noise ratio.

In this case, someone who borrowed the book is more likely to be trustworthy (IMO) than someone who verifiably purchased it from the site hosting the reviews (particularly if reviews were limited to the latter).

It would be thought of as an advertising expense to buy books from the platform in order to qualify to write some of the first reviews.

As a hypothetical, sure, I can see how that makes sense. However, verified purchaser reviews have been a helpful reality for the better part of a decade or so, across different media and vendors: games, physical goods, Amazon books, electronics, etc.

Even though it's an imperfect barrier to review quality, at least it is a barrier versus none, and time and time again retailers who've experimented with it have found it a useful signal.

Yes, you'll lose out on the borrowers who fell in love with a title, but they can always spend the $20 to buy that book to review it if they really want to (I've done that for things I loved, just to leave a review). But even if they don't, it's still usually a net win: you lose not just the honest reviewers but the 100x spam that outnumber them.

When shopping for low-cost products these days, it's not the individual review that matters anymore, just the aggregate ratings. So it doesn't really matter if a few borrowers don't get to leave their rating, it's still more useful for buyers to cut out the spam.

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Maybe a simple compromise is to just allow filtering (and adjust the rating) by "verified purchasers only", so you can see both the unfiltered and filtered scores. I'd just leave out the unverified ones altogether, myself, but others could see the raw scores and reviews if they wanted to.

There are lots of people who will be receiving books on Christmas. With your scheme, they won’t be able to review them. Or people who buy from other bookstores. Or other countries.

There is a difference between reviews on Amazon, where limiting to purchaser makes sense, and Goodreads that is open to everyone.

Yes, this will absolutely decrease the number of eligible reviewers. That's a given. But the argument is that it would also help combat spam and fake reviews, so while the number of reviews goes down, the signal to noise ratio goes up. People who read the book without buying it wouldn't be able to review it, yes, and that is an unfortunate side effect. However, it still leads to more useful reviews than if those borrowers are also lumped together with spammers and bots, which make the reviews useless for everyone. It's not a perfect solution, just an improvement over the existing mess (on Amazon).

And yes, agreed that Goodreads needs a different system. I was responding to a post about Amazon, and even there mentioned that goodreads would need something different, maybe reputation based or whatever.

If you do that, malicious writers will have bots buy their books, get the precious "verified review" badge (and bumping the book's ranking at the same time), and give the book raving reviews. At that point, it just becomes an expense, probably more efficient than buying an ad. In the meantime, legitimate readers whos didn't buy the book by themselves won't be able to comment on it.

Not sure it would really improve the signal to noise ratio.

But then that means goodreads wouldn't be a platform for readers anymore. It would be a platform for Amazon customers only. We already have amazon.com for that. What would be goodread's added value?

How do you define "fake"? Review bombing is generally real people with real opinions. It takes advantage of the fact that a) it's mostly impossible to verify someone has read a book, and b) most people don't read, and c) most people who read don't leave a review, so anyone motivated to review gets an outsized voice.

Yes, and then Goodreads reviews vecomes the most trusted review source on the internet. Thus making it critical to have good reviews on the site. Thus causing the cheaters to try even harder to post on the site. It's probably not a winnabl3 battle.

Books are not expensive so you'll get the same money backed reviews you always did, like the ones obviously written by a professional writer.

Amazon would solve it by removing reviews. No big loss these days, IMO.

It’s the biggest loss I could imagine. I would stop using Amazon or use a third party review site.

Reviews on Amazon are heavily gamed and you should not trust them at all. I get little business cards offering gift cards for 5 star reviews regularly. Product listings get swapped for entirely different products while the review stay.

What works for me is, the reviews should fall off like a neat stair case, 5s the most, then 4s, 3s, 2s and 1s. If the 1s are bigger than the 2s by a lot, it's usually the classic "Sell 500 good quality ones, get the reviews, switch to the knock offs".

It’s very easy to look through and figure out which products have mostly bullshit reviews and it’s definitely not the vast majority of them.

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