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Comment by k33n | Hacker News Reader

I worked for Luma when they were having a review war with Eero. Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up with Eero's. We had an inferior product with a lot of problems, so it was a losing battle in the end.

Probably the most interesting part is that Amazon was one of our lead investors. We came to them for help, and they told us in a wink wink nudge nudge sort of way that our only option was to just keep buying positive reviews.

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> Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up with Eero's.

I can't help but feel that in addition to being unethical, this might also be illegal. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/03/los-a...

I have been disappointed to find that many startup founders — even those who work in "impact" or "education" — do not care about the ethics or legality of paid reviews. I had a discussion with one founder a few years back, and at first I thought he was simply unaware of the then-new FTC guidelines. But it became clear that he did not care if what he was doing was illegal since "it's just the way business gets done", in his words. Caveat emptor!

There are also no consequences, so there’s no reason for a company to act morally/legally in our current economic system. I’ve never heard of a company paying fines for buying positive reviews.

This is actually a pretty damning indictment. The most charitable thing you could say about Amazon vis-à-vis fake reviews is that they would like to get rid of them but are just overwhelmed by the difficulty of the problem. But this seems to indicate a tacit endorsement on their part. I guess we can’t expect any serious action on this problem anytime soon.

If I were in the market for some fraudulent reviews I think my first stop would be mechanical turk. I say that as someone with zero knowledge review fraud or mechanical turk but is it possible Amazon stand to gain more than they lose on paid reviews?

I'm curious, did Luma pay to put negative reviews out for Eero as well? I feel like a lot of the negative reviews I read these days are bought for.

Doctors in my area pay firms to pad their bad online reviews with glowing ones.

Wow, to know that a company bought fake reviews is one thing, but to know that Amazon themselves recommended to them to do so is another thing.

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