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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

This stuff is trivial to detect by the platform. At best the platform could say they don’t search for it, but the only reason not to would be because they don’t want to find it. In essence they’re knowingly outsourcing fraud to sellers.

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All they would have to do to prevent it is make it so if you give a 1 star review, you can't change it to something else later.

What happens if a customer made a hasty negative review but the vendor reached out and genuinely resolved/fixed the issue?

You know, 1 star reviews are ok. It's like people want to do anything to keep from a single undeserved 1 star review from happening. What if the same logic was applied to 5 star reviews?

>What if the same logic was applied to 5 star reviews?

I see plenty of 5 star reviews being edited to 2-3 star reviews afterwards though?

It would be nice to see the entire interaction, from verified purchase on Amazon, to first review, and any subsequent changes or updates to the review, and whether or not a return or replacement of the product in the original verified purchase has occurred on a timeline per review.

If you do let people change it then annotate it with (edited) so people can perform their own heuristics, if 10% of 5 stars were edited then it’s a bit suspect. Or keep the history of the reviews - it doesn’t take much to spot check and if platform users can do this on an individual basis then obviously the platform could do this algorithmically. They’ve just made the conscious decision not to.

Handling the seller appeals would quickly become expensive

I concur, fraud is much cheaper and more profitable

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