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Comment by ashelmire | Hacker News Reader

"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic"

Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.

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Worse still, Amazon will delete authentic reviews that contain information they don't like. For instance, I started working my way through all of the batteries on Amazon (top review on this product, for instance: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B009PPR5OU/ ), and Amazon deleted them from multiple products because of the table with cost/battery data (which is extremely relevant when reviewing a commodity product like Alkaline batteries). I got pissed off and quit reviewing stuff on Amazon unless it sucked (or in rare cases where a chinagarbage product and/or seller exceeded my expectations).

Additionally they delete reviews of the same product if distinct people are deemed to be somewhat connected or deemed to be in one household.

So if you and your spouse like to keep their own opinions and review separately never connect your accounts in any way.

Unless you both have different billing and shipping addreses, your accounts are already "connected" in their system.

As a seller, I can verify that one of the reasons I can request a review is removed from my product is because of cost. However, I cannot find a reference in their product review guidelines [1]. Seems like they need to update that guide, unless I missed it.

Sellers play a big part in flagging reviews that violate the guidelines. In fact, I think most of the culling of bad reviews comes from customers and sellers complaining and very little from automation as people here might imagine.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

This is actually very likely to be true. Over the entire amazon catalog, spanning some completely ridiculous number of items.

That of course, makes it a pointless statistic, and hopefully, not something, they seriously tell themselves matters.

I'm sure it sounds great for the press though!

IE you really want to know STH like "What percent of reviews are fake for the first two pages of items in the top 100/1000 categories on amazon"

or something that is weighted towards things people see/look at, not "amazon's entire catalog"

The fakes are a relatively new phenomena. A book like say 1984 has thousands of reviews over twenty years that are legit. They don’t break down fakes by year or tell you that 1% of new reviews are fake.

Also you have grey fakes with solicited reviews. I have a few vendors who offer significant discounts in exchange for reviews.

Fakes are at least three years old. At least, that's when the great I Was Given This Product For Free Or At A Discount plague started.

Plus these Chinese companies just rebrand and post new product listings free of the bad reviews, leaving the old ones to die.

Agreed -- but keep in mind that Amazon is old -- over 20 years old. There are billions of reviews.

I believe it. It's just very misleading.

Amazon obviously has a huge catalog. There's lots of niche products, where quite honestly, there just isn't enough money for fake reviews.

Not to mention some products like books, where most seem to be real.

The question Amazon isn't answering -- and what I think you're getting at -- is something like for top products in certain products like electronics -- what % are fake?

The answer to that I would wager is >50%.

There are three possible scenarios.

1. Amazon uses good ML techniques, and they don't work.

2. Amazon is doing something else to detect fraud, and it doesn't work.

3. Amazon is lying about the issue.

All 3 could be possible.

1. Amazon uses good ML techniques, and they don't work.

A good friend of mine worked on the recommendation engine ML side for AMZN until fairly recently. His review was that it's worse, and more expensive, than having hired people do it by hand.

But the sibling comment is more correct -- all three of these things are currently the case.

Couldn't it be that 1% is fake site-wide, but that for some products, 85% of 600 reviews might be fake? If I were Amazon and would want to downplay the issue, I would certainly quote the site-wide figure when the fake-review-posters are only paid to hype a couple of products.

1% seems way way too conservative, every product I click has a lot of them. Even if you count all the products people don't buy much, it has to be at least 5 or 10% fake reviews minimum.

The last time I needed headphones, I turned this on its head and bought AmazonBasics brand. Any chance of commingling there? Anyway they were great. I went back to buy more, but they were sadly discontinued.

I've only bought Sennheiser and Audio Technica headphones for the past couple of years. Good quality and good sound.

Lots of people hand out 5 star reviews too easily. They buy the cheapest headphones on Amazon, and if they make any sound at all it's five stars.

I just realized that I do that. It's just some misplaced pity from having worked in customer service where performance was tied into customer ratings.

Isn't that fair? If cheap headphones work you are getting what you paid for. No one should expect a $12 headphones to be as good as $100 headphones. A 5 star review for one means something different than 5 stars for the other.

I mean, I'm incredibly happy with my $24 Chinese bluetooth headphones.

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