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Comment by y2kenny | Hacker News Reader

May be the spotting is actually not that great. One way to test it is to find a popular, known-to-be good product that you have and see what the result is. The example I tried was the Instant Pot (which is rated D): https://www.fakespot.com/product/instant-pot-ip-duo60-7-in-1...

Oddly enough, the same product listing on the US site is rated as A (the above is for the Canadian site): https://www.fakespot.com/product/instant-pot-ip-duo60-7-in-1...

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It's not the product which is rated, but if the reviews seem to be genuine.

Right. And the point of my test is to test fake spotting algorithm by finding product that is highly unlikely to have fake reviews.

Just did a quick check again, the Canadian instant pot reviews are now rated as F while the US ones are rated as A. Same product, both ship and sold by Amazon, the algorithm returns polar opposite result.

And a known-good product doesn't mean it won't have fake reviews. The fake reviews are there to boost sales, even for legit products.

If it's an arms race for reviews, at some point, even good products will have to pay up to keep pace.

I don't understand. If your product is already rated 4.5+ stars with thousands of reviews, what's the point of adding fake review? How does that boost sales?

Normally the first hundreds were faked, followed by occasional fake reviews to drown out dissatisfaction

Even for known-good, popular, top-selling products? The example I cited has 24k+ reviews for the US and 3.8k+ for Canada.

Seeing as the site lists 11k reviews that were removed from the page, yes.

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