You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review.
You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE.
Then an expensive option I was suprised happened - I bought a Dyson clone vacuum cleaner off of Amazon. A few weeks later, the company emailed me and said 'We have a new model. Buy that one, leave a review, we'll refund the purchase'. So I did it. This happened about 10 more times in 2024. My outdoor shed is entirely stick vacuums.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
I think Fakespot would have difficulty with all 3 of these scenarios.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
I have an entire category of items I will never buy from Amazon. They don’t look out for customers ahead of time, only on the backend when you complain.
Some Amazon seller included some US postage stamps as a gift, along with a glossy full-color printed offer to pay me cash or more stamps for a positive review.
So I took the stamps to a post office, some kind of manager looked at them, said they'd almost guarantee that the stamps were counterfeit. So I left the stamps and the glossy offer (with the sellers's contact info) with them, to refer higher up to some kind of investigation.
I'd guess probably it will only lead back to some overseas seller who is untraceable, and who just pops back up under 10 new different names. But maybe someday Amazon will be under some kind of KYC-like obligation, to only permit sellers and other supply chain that can be held accountable for illegal/counterfeit/dangerous/stolen/etc. products.
It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.
The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.
This guy took bribes to leave fake reviews. He obviously sucks. /s
Why would you want 12 vacuums? What are you going to do with them? Isn't that a senseless amount of redundant objects to horde? Don't you want room for other things in your shed?
To be fair, it's vacuum so it doesn't occupy space.
All it takes to lose civilisation is for everyone to think as selfishly as this.
There's never been a magical golden age where people were any different than they are.
Thank you for the laugh.
But why keep them all? Why not give some away to friends or neighbours, or even sell them?
This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there are avid vacuum collectors.
I had a tool manufacturer read a bad review on one of the big box home improvement stores in the US, they contacted me within a day (the store must have gave them my email address?) and offered to send me my choice of replacement tool, for free, in exchange for taking my review down.
Helps me learn which companies not to trust.
It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.
I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.
Uh, this is how it's supposed to work? Make a good product, get good reviews for free.
"Make a crappy / mediocre product and pay people to write good reviews" is completely different.
Does the job. I'm no vacuum connoisseur (Which you think I'd be after all of these) but none were scammy products.
anyway, I can imagine some small territory in time where fakespot can accurately deal with the flood. But then..
I had to leave a video review component (No face). I wonder if any shoppers ever wondered why the same monotone man was constantly buying and reviewing vaccuum cleaners if he's always leaving positive reviews?!
I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.
I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?
I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.
It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.
Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.
And also, apparently, selling your data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612, and particularly move-on's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213945.
I'm sure there will be a replacement though, and I'm sure they will go hard with referral links.
I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
Just relying on consumer judgement has certainly proven to be inadequate in combating fake reviews, and without incentive, we're not going to get many legitimate reviews.
TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.
SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for
Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs
There are a few others on AlternativeTo that weren't there the last time I checked. https://alternativeto.net/software/fakespot/
On Reddit, some people were mentioning alternatives, including asking ChatGPT about the product and it might have some kinda helpful advice, but nothing like Fakespot offered. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ktm4g4/now_that_f...
If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.
I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
IMHO judging these random Chinese products with the nonsense capital letter brands by actual reviews is a lost cause.
I wouldn't even do that, unless you can't find it anywhere else. Amazon commingles their returns form 3rd party sellers and Amazon direct. So you might order an item, find out it was actually a broken returned item, and then have Amazon call you a liar.
If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.
This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.
https://johnnydecimal.com/20-29-communication/22-blog/22.00....
So you know what we do now? Ignore the overall rating: it's worthless. Instead, go directly to the 1*. They're the only true indicator of a product/place/service.
I'm not saying take them all at face value. You still have to put in some work. But all the data is in the one-stars.
(62 points, 27 days ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184974
“Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).”
This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read.
As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those reviews.
The only way to know about a product is to read about it elsewhere like New York Times which is not selling the product themselves.
I take a Wirecutter top pick as meaning something very different from Bobby123's glowing review. Wirecutter may have been influenced by ad money a bit. Bobby123 may not even exist or may be entirely driven by seller compensation. And I'll never see Bobby123 again.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.
The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
I also got offered some money over telegram to review a hotel from a large chain and leave a positive review.
I've seen ads selling fake clothes, real clothes but with a fake store, money exchange scams, and a few others.
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.They are good at objectively evaluating consumer products, they simply buy all the main models of a thing and review them all. I trust them (which is very important in this space). I happily pay for this service.
Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable. Also can combine this with marketplace reviews considering reliability.
If there is no review than have to trust the brand and if there is no brand then it is a gamble
Although at least the platform can know if the reviewer actually purchased the product(?)
> Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable
Unless they use affiliate links, which is a great big red flag that the incentives are already stacked against you.