Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Half the time the fakes are so ludicrously easy to spot that I really wonder why they bother. Fifty glowing reviews of a book within a day of publication all raising the same 4 esoteric points in the review. No doubt 4 points suggested by the author/publisher when asking for the astroturfing.

Completely disregard all Amazon Vine reviews.

Now weight heavily in favour of reviews that have had update edits - "it failed after 2 months. The replacement failed 3 months after that" (common on all makes of $200 LED gaming keyboards) or "after a year it's still in perfect condition". Photos on the reviews are often a good sign too - but only when there's just a few - photos on reviews are rare. So lots with similar framing would be an instant strike.

Try finding a CAT6a cable on Amazon - seems they're all 4.5 - 5* wonderful, yet dig into the bad reviews a bit and most of them don't even meet wire or shield spec. Even those coming from Amazon themselves.

Aside from reviews from specific, trustworthy people, reading the mid-tier and bad reviews gives a much better flavour of what a product is about, and the odd review tearing the product to pieces can be worth its weight in gold.

If it's a marketplace seller my starting point is to mistrust all reviews and let them earn trust really slowly.

I sure won't be going near Fakespot, especially when they're so intentionally vague in describing their own product - it'll be a score to game like your Klout score and all the other meaningless metrics. The astroturfers will adjust what's needed in the fakes to pass.

> Half the time the fakes are so ludicrously easy to spot that I really wonder why they bother.

They only need to be slightly difficult for a robot to flag as a fake. Most people will just sort products by a combination of price-and-rating, and buy the top-rated thing in their budget; it doesn't matter if the 5-star reviews are all Markov-chain generated garbage, all users see are the stars.

I know I'm probably atypical - a techie and old enough to be cynical of most things, but are most people really still that simplistic? Surely 3 or 4 crap purchases or 25%+ return rate is going to be enough to tell anyone that the star rating is worthless?

If it's got say 300+ reviews it's not like people are going to read all 300+ to figure out how many of them are fake.

I actually avoid the reviews with photos as 99% of the time they end with "I got this product for my fair and unbiased appraisal" or somesuch.

I've never quite got around to writing a browser plugin that excludes any review that have such a statement, and / or builds up a database of reviewers that are trustworthy on amazon.

The guys in the Top x of reviewers, who receive all this crap to review, basically it's their living, they aren't going to start bad mouthing it.

Maybe take the star rating of each review within a month of a new listing and then compare the average 6 months later to see how shill those initial reviewers are.

> Maybe take the star rating of each review within a month of a new listing and then compare the average 6 months later to see how shill those initial reviewers are.

Steam just updated its user review system to do just this: it shows both the overall rate of positive reviews as it did before, but also the positive rate in the last 30 days. Now, their prime motivation was probably more to do with things like patches (or the lack thereof), but it would probably do a pretty good job of counteracting paid/biased reviews from around launch as well.

A moving average might be a good idea there.

Giving Vine reviews a strike probably cuts all the "I received this item on spec..." garbage, with or without photo. what's left is photos from hopefully "normal" reviewers.

It might be interesting to compare a few products where you are knowledgeable and have a high degree of confidence in the review quality (one way or another) and seeing how you align with the Fakespot score.

The point of trusting Amazon reviews is to lower search time for an item. You basically have to read the reviews of every 4-5 star rated item if you don't trust the Amazon ratings

That's entirely the point though, especially since free-for-alling marketplace, Amazon have proved their rating is worse than useless. If you trust the star rating without reading the reviews of every item you have more money than sense, or it's a £1 item.

I basically do have to read the reviews of every item I buy from Amazon or buy somewhere more trustworthy. Which is most places of enough size to be well known.

That's really sad because in the early days of Amazon, before marketplace, Vine and unchecked shills, their rating was one of the better metrics going. They threw away every single ounce of trust they had earnt. Apparently intentionally.

IMDB ratings are the same - so untrustworthy as to be worthless noise. Early IMDB, before Amazon, I could trust the ratings blind.

A lot of ratings feel like the user could have a different perspective.

If you give 5 star to an erotic novel you can reasonably assume that the buyer will understand the genre and not compare it to Jane Austin. Technically Six Shades of Grey is a better erotic novel than Pride and Prejudice but that is a silly comparison to make.

A £300 laptop computer can be very good value for money and deserve 5 starts. But it may not be as good as a £500 machine with 3 stars. The problem is that people don't understand the product and buy purely based on the number of stars.

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