Fakespot will shut down on July 1 | Hacker News Reader

Fakespot will shut down on July 1

fakespot.com

62 pointsyasp15 comments

Bummed about this. I know some people didn't like it but it never hurts to have extra signals about the quality of the product even if it falls short. My typical research path was looking for legit amazon reviews, fakespot highlights, and reddit comments. Using vetted.ai to replace fakespot but it's pretty mid in what I've seen so far.

I used it all the time as well. I used to keep up with them on Twitter prior to Mozilla buying them. Shame I never caught the original owners name. I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to create a Fakespot clone using the Amazon API. They scanned the pages repeatedly for deleted reviews and that would give it an idea whether or not there was any type of deception going on.

MetaReview was started by the people who ran the site supplementreviews.com, but the owner of Fakespot would always mention they were very out of date. I don't know if they were just throwing shade at them or legitimately knew more about it. I thought their interface was much better and had way more information.

The thing about running a service like Fakespot is it would be difficult to make money. As far as I can tell, they primarily made income by including affiliate links to other products in their reviews. But who's going to click on a link for a similar product if they already have one picked out? It almost would need to be a subscription service to be profitable.

Is there a post somewhere explaining why they are shutting down? Did they just run out of money? Was it being run by a single guy who is tired of maintaining it?

There is. Previously on HN:

Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-whats-next/

Thanks. The banner on the linked website offered no hints whatsoever.

After digging through a couple blog posts:

> While the idea resonated, it didn’t fit a model we could sustain.

They ran out of money.

Funny. I loathed pocket and how they felt it needed to be enabled by default and required going to about config to fully deintegrate.

Never heard about fakespot and it sounds like a great tool; especially if it ran locally so it didn't need a monthly fee..

A lot of people liked it but I thought it was "thoroughly pizzled" [1] and I was resentful about yet another unwanted product shoved down my throat. I guess I'm used to it when Microsoft is doing it but it just seemed Firefox should have done better.

[1] https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...

A little bit more than two years of lifespan under Mozilla : https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/fakespot-join...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662 (2025-05-22)

Really sad to hear. Anyone know of alternatives to this app?

Good riddance. Their privacy policy / licence allowed collection of passwords and whatnot. We should not be sad about it. Copied my older comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38204923

Fakespot has one of the worst privacy policies. https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

Look at Section 2B

  B. Personal Information Collected Automatically
  We may collect personal information automatically when you use our Services.

  Automatic Collection of Personal Information.

  We may collect the following information automatically when you use our Services:
  Contact Information:
  Your email address
  Identifiers:
  User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. This information could be provided via your Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation codes.

  Device ID: Your device information which includes, but is not limited to, information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device.

  Usage Data:
  Product Interaction: How you interact with our Services and what features you use within the Services, including Fakespot’s sort bar, highlights, review grade, seller ratings, alternative sellers, settings and popups.

  Other Usage Data: Individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Service, and other information about how you interact with the Service.

  Browser Information: Information your internet browser provides when you access and use our Services.

  Application Search History: Information you provide when you perform searches in our Services.

  Purchase Information: Your purchase history or purchase tendencies which we may use to recommend better products and sellers.

  Location Information. We may collect your location information, such as geolocation based on your IP address in connection with your use of our Services.

  Publicly Available Information. In providing our Services we may collect data (including personal information such as profile names of reviewers) that is made publicly available via the internet on the websites analyzed and crawled by our Services.

If you're looking for a replacement, I've been using https://reviewmeta.com for years.

ReviewMeta worked great while it did, but I've had a ton of problems using it in the last 1-2 years. IIRC the site creator was going to shut it down then but didn't. It very often seems overloaded or has problems finding the product at the URL it's given. I don't think I've been able to get any results at all from it in the past few months.

> Thanks for supporting our journey.

Probably just traditional "our incredible journey" exit language, but reminds me to mention a mindset misalignment that we see frequently in startups:

Providing a solution isn't about our journey (together?). It's about the solution.

I think many of us often have good alignment at some point, and really want to solve the problem.

But as it becomes a business, we also have to be thinking about the business.

That's OK, but remember that we're also still purporting to solve a problem.

The people for whom the problem is being solved don't much care about our journey -- they care about the problem being solved.

If the solution effort is ending, and we're framing it to those people as our "journey", that sounds like we missed the point of the "support".

Aren't nearly all online reviews fake? Why do we need a website to tell us that.

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