The harder we police against fake positive reviews, the more we incentivize this sort of anticompetitive sabotage.
Accounts need to verify themselves somehow.
Accounts should be old enough before contributing reviews.
Accounts should only be able to review X amount of titles an hour/day/etc.
Moderators should have tools to identify influx of reviews and decide mitigation strategies.
Moderators should be able to put up a banner on a title that may be review bombed so the community can report suspicious reviews.
Etc.
These aren't honestly policing much. Just general common sense for these platforms. Also heavily needed on many other platforms that get spam in similar ways.
Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should stop banning listings for that and focus on policing the reviews themselves. But that actually turns out to be a very difficult problem in itself! Sellers of crappy products will often include notes that induce/bribe the customers into leaving fake reviews. A seller of cheap products can rack up thousands of verified purchaser fake reviews this way.
They can also do things like hire a botnet to purchase the product in bulk using thousands of hacked PCs all over the world and get those PCs to review the product, generating more fake verified purchaser reviews.
In the end, if you don’t ban sellers for fake positive reviews then you run into these tactics and it’s very hard to police individual reviews. If you do decide to ban sellers then you have the opposite problem of dealing with sabotage.
As for detecting “influxes”, that problem is far from trivial. If a review bomber is using a botnet of thousands of PCs then it’s quite trivial to stagger the timing of the fake reviews over a period of weeks. It’s not like they’re forced to push a button and have them all hit the review page at the same time.
You could still record unverified reviews, but hide them and their ratings by default until the user explicitly wants to see them.
I think it is if the product itself is cheap enough. A $10 product where you get a free $10 gift certificate is essentially free. I think lots of people would be willing to leave a quick 5 star review in exchange for getting the thing they just bought for free, even if the product is kinda crappy. As long as it’s not totally broken and useless!
I doubt it would cost a lot of money from Amazons perspective.
But yeah I agree Amazons incentives are not the same as their customers. They obviously have a lot of insight into what drives and lowers sales.
Maybe, although I seriously doubt it, at some point they will see enough reduction in sales to take action against poor quality products and their mispresentative reviews.
I’m sure many reviewers will enjoy having a special badge against their name. Not all, sure. We don’t need everyone’s reviews in this situation.
Proof of purchase would require some modest effort on the part of publishers to create a workable and shared system, but it should otherwise be trivial to get going. Publishers have a strong motivation to opt-in since fake reviews are probably more detrimental than not to their bottom line.
That person could no longer write verified reviews. Maybe it’s a permanent ban, maybe it’s a 1-5 year ban. They wouldn’t be able to verify another account with their identity until the ban is listed.
Yeah Steam is good, but mostly because it is a very closed loop system as they own the entire transaction-review-lifecycle. Not soo easy with other things like books.
As for the individual reviewers, there are tens of thousands or millions of these, and review bombers can trivially cycle these in and out, so no individual reviewer is a “serial fake reviewer.”
This is really just a special case of the wider issue of fraud. And I'm fairly convinced of the argument that the optimal amount is nonzero [1]. A further wrinkle to this problem is that fraud tends to only get more sophisticated over time, so the costs of fighting it always go up. At some point we may reach a scenario where fraud is so rampant that entire business models become non-viable.
Although really the current concept of "review" is terrible. Few reviews are detailed and specific enough and multi-dimensional enough. They cannot be searched well enough (Although we might be nearly there with LLMs - asking them to critique a book from our point of view and preferences.) It's hard to follow reviewers that you have learned to trust (hard enough to notice them in the first place). Star ratings are not useful in the intended way and only a few sites ask for multi-dimensional star ratings (generally asking to rate irrelevant things :-) Bleh!