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Comment by iammer | Hacker News Reader

Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and realize the reviews are fake. Amazon rejected my review because it didn't meet their guidelines since it mentioned "Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts."

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Same with me. Amazon rejected my review that was similar to yours, so I blogged about it instead: https://honeypot.net/post/amazon-seller-tried-to-bribe-me/

If it happens again, I'll go straight to blogging without bothering to report it to Amazon. I may not have that many readers, but it's more than the zero that I'd have through a rejected Amazon review.

I know I'm not adding anything new but I just wanted to chime in and say I've had the exact same experience as another data point for how widespread it seems to be.

I’ve had this experience probably 20+ times over the last few years with Amazon. Stars on Amazon cannot be trusted. Even products on Amazon from verified sellers can’t be trusted to not be fake. My general policy is don’t buy anything from Amazon for which I have any quality expectations.

Your comment made me go lookup my old reviews. It's crazy, most of them were deleted. I would have expected to receive some kind of notification.

I thought I could sift through the rubble to discern fake from real but now I know Amazon reviews are absolutely worthless.

Welcome to the world of enshittification of platforms.

Wonder if we could make a browser extension that stores and presents amazon reviews.

Could be useful to fill gaps on other sites too, for example when an uploader turns off comments on youtube.

It would be a pretty big middle finger to amazon if the primary site for amazon seller reviews was not actually amazon, but a third party site/app.

Yeah I've been wanting to have that "comment on anything" for a while.

It's possible in technical theory. But sharing the comments would be hard. Federation might work. Spam moderation could be hard. And most websites refuse to go into iframes, so your options are limited to browser extensions, SOCKS proxies, and Opera Mini style apps that re-render the page. Which means you'll get less than a percent of a percent of people to use it.

Ditto. I imagined it like leaving a post-it note on a page. If you found a fix for a product you could leave a note on the company's FAQ page. Problem is spam, in all it forms. Can you imagine political pages?

This has been floated out a couple of times, but there’s one more factor you’ve missed: The companies really want comments/reviews done by a platform they control and they will fight against 3rd party methods.

If it's done as a browser extension, the way Keepa is (it's used to monitor price history on amazon.com), there's absolutely nothing the companies can do about it.

Tactics that have been used against similar tools:

- Changing the generated HTML so that the extensions selectors no longer grab the right data (this becomes a cat and mouse game and there’s a non-zero chance that the extension authors tap out, especially if there’s not enough money to sustain the workload)

- Filing nuisance complaints (DMCA is a standard one here, but there are lots of others)

- Filing a copyright lawsuit in court

- Filing other court lawsuits (lost income, slander, etc)

In many cases the business knows they are fighting a losing battle but all they need is more resources, more time, or more patience.

Yeah, we already have a few extensions similar to this for viewing price history, such as Keepa. I use this one all the time since prices jump around so much; when I look at a product page on Amazon, Keepa inserts a big window with a price graph and other pickable info.

I received a “warning” insinuating that my Amazon account would be suspended for a bad review of a product that offered me a gift card for more than the value of the product in exchange for a screenshot of my 5-star review.

I am not sure what to make of this, I have considered that possibility the company has an employee on their payroll.

How is this not a violation of some kind of truth in advertising law? Is the US government just of the position now that "if you violate the law and make us your bitch it's totally cool as long as you're automating your crime and committing it at scale?"

Leave a 5 star review, get your gift card, then change or remove your review. If this was done often enough nobody would even try buying reviews.

That's an option. Still, it's not worth the small amount of money, to me, for a skeevy vendor like that to be able to say that they've paid me.

Like, I don't judge. And when I was younger and broke half the time, I might've leapt at the easy money. I just wouldn't do it today.

It's not about the money to me either.

I see it as, somebody acts unethically, and I can either (1) go along with their unethical behavior and personally benefit and encourage further unethical behavior, (2) refuse to participate, or (3) refuse to participate and discourage the unethical behavior.

You choose 2 and I choose 3.

That’s fair. If you want to scam the scammer, darned if I’ll say you’re wrong for doing it. It’s not my thing, but fine by me if you do.

> Amazon rejected my review

Someone should ask Bezos - was that a one or two-way door decision?

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