doglet

tl;dr it got worse!

A possible connection between fake profile invitations from developers "from Ukraine" and Russia.

I've been getting these suspicious posts from people claiming to be from Ukraine. They always use the same template. Seems suspicious; any idea what's going on?

Extreme deception in advertising, if you ask me, from a major insurer.

It was good, then got plagued by bad incentives, to sum it up

Release Highlights https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/release_highli...

As a non-expert, I need a name brand as my gold standard for comparison in normal usage scenario.

> If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?

The Which magazine sounds like Consumer Reports, who purports to have no interest outside of the consumer's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Editorial_ind... I wonder if the HN community has had positive / negative experiences with CR relating to this topic

I too share your logic behind placing more trust in sites that go in-depth and review across all the brands, as opposed to focusing extra attention in only one or a couple.

Regarding SEO blogs, I have seen a lot of "review rewrite" jobs posted on a freelancing site, indicating there is a market for this kind of devaluing behavior (worse than not adding value, this actually is a net-negative on society, where costs are externalized)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-income-makes-you-middle-...

I expected better from BI

I think at the root of the problem is statistical ignorance, combined with confused morale judgment, along the lines of "but if we think X is effective, it would be wrong to withhold providing X for everyone equally!"

similar to a lot of apartments incentivizing positive reviews from their tenants

In other words, repetition of the same mistakes implies higher probability of copying

Interestingly, Amazon might have a secondary payoff here: they actually get some good ground truth (honest review data) since these reviews - at least the positive ones - aren't tainted by the same incentives.

Nothing like the good old trusted hobby store. And yes, this repetition of phrase or structure should be a clear signal.

Maybe there's a market for verified customer reviews of popular items - even ones that aren't big ticket. Consumer Reports might grow to cover additional items and perhaps develop a browser extension for subscribers who gain access to trusted reviews.

We should still be able to ask them to make a reasonable effort, which keeps the fake review economy at bay

One problem is getting "ground truth." I think Amazon has a pretty good idea of a lot of near-certain true positives.

Should we conclude that Amazon does not have sufficient incentive to remove these fake reviews? Surely they could, when third-party sites easily detect them...

As a hockey player, I never understood why referees would point to each goal, calling out each goalie's existence before the game. This helps explain it.