42% of Amazon's Reviews Might Be 'Unreliable' (chicagotribune.com) 79
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Bloomberg: Fake reviews on Amazon.com Inc. during the pandemic have reached levels typically seen during the holiday shopping season. About 42% of 720 million Amazon reviews assessed by the monitoring service Fakespot Inc. from March through September were unreliable, up from about 36% for the same period last year. The rise in fake reviews corresponded with the stampede online of millions of virus-avoiding shoppers.
"We've only seen those kinds of numbers in the Black Friday or Christmas period in 2019," said Fakespot founder and Chief Executive Officer Saoud Khalifah. "In 2020, the surge of fake reviews has proliferated in a rapid manner coinciding with lockdown measures in the USA." By contrast, almost 36% of Walmart.com reviews assessed by Fakespot during the same period were fake — about the same as last year.
Bogus reviews have plagued Amazon and other online marketplaces for years, despite the companies' efforts to purge them. The perpetrators, sometimes paid, either hype the virtues of a product or sabotage it to tank sales. Various automated services have emerged to help shoppers assess whether the reviews they're reading are real.
"We've only seen those kinds of numbers in the Black Friday or Christmas period in 2019," said Fakespot founder and Chief Executive Officer Saoud Khalifah. "In 2020, the surge of fake reviews has proliferated in a rapid manner coinciding with lockdown measures in the USA." By contrast, almost 36% of Walmart.com reviews assessed by Fakespot during the same period were fake — about the same as last year.
Bogus reviews have plagued Amazon and other online marketplaces for years, despite the companies' efforts to purge them. The perpetrators, sometimes paid, either hype the virtues of a product or sabotage it to tank sales. Various automated services have emerged to help shoppers assess whether the reviews they're reading are real.
I never read the 5 star reviews anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I never read the 5 star reviews anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're the guy. Stop reviewing the purchasing process on a PRODUCT review! That's not what it's for.
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When businesses evaluate customer surveys, they interpret five stars as "I will drive past other stores that carry the same products to shop here."
Similarly, there is nothing wrong with interpreting five stars as "I would buy this again, without researching alternatives."
Even if the rating is stupidly high, it is not stupid to use it. If it is honest. On Amazon they are not honest, have not been honest for at least ten years, and nothing is being done about it. So right action, wrong reasoning.
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It always seems to me to be an American thing. Adequacy is rated as 5 stars. It is the same with most services. Uber drivers and other service industry people seems to take anything short of 5 stars as a major failure on their part, and rate you as a bad customer for giving it.
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" I never understood 5 stars"
By and large, if the product does what its supposed to do, does it well, meets all expectations, and there are no complaints, and the purchase experience itself was smooth, then it gets 5 stars.
There now you understand how the rest of the world works. Recalibrate your expectations and you'll do fine.
seems that if a vendor does what they are suppose to do and ship the goods as legally required.. they get 5 stars. They shouldn't, they are just competent and deserve 3 stars for being an average competent seller.
You are just rating the seller? I'm primarily interested in the product. I'll take stars off if the seller was difficult in some notable way but that's it.
. 5 stars is when there is a shipping problem or out of stock issue and the CEO personally drives overs and sets up the TV or unpacks the groceries and potentially cooks dinner. That is EXCEPTIONAL service.
No. A mediocre TV with a mediocre picture quality and a
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"C" means the student has adequate understanding of the subject later. "A" means they have excellent understand the exceeds the 'average'. I think you think everyone should get a trophy for showing up and get a diploma for not dying. I don't understand how that world is going to work for you. I just guess all doctors should get 5 stars and everyone should get paid the same. There is no room
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I guess we are just going to have to disagree on grading systems and letters. "C" means the student has adequate understanding of the subject later. "A" means they have excellent understand the exceeds the 'average'.
There's less disagreement than you think. I think people and products are fundamentally different. Where I think it makes sense for students to accumulate knowledge around a bell curve distribution, with adequacy in the middle, and high and low achievers at the outliers, I don't think product reviews have the same distribution.
I envision the 5 star product rating as something like:
5 I'm perfectly happy with the product
4 It's pretty good, but there are some nit-picks that leave me short of perfectly content
3
Also, specific, factual reviews and mixed (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I tend toook for information other than if it's good or bad. What's good about it, what's bad about it?
any reviews that says "it's amazing +++" or "sucks. Use this other product instead" are crap.
What I look for isn't so much if the review says it good or bad, but WHAT they say is good or bad, things like "lightweight" vs "heavy duty". Kinda like how some toilet paper brands have ultra soft and ultra strong - because sometimes you want one, sometimes you want the other. Between two flashlights that take the same batteries, one will be bright, the other long-lasting. Also things like "sizes run a little small; if you're not sure get the larger size".
When I post a review I try to say positive and negative, or something that could be seen either way, and I look for reviews that do this:
The large, ribbed wheels work well on bumpy surfaces, but are noisy on smooth surfaces.
Review of Slashdot:
Commenters tell it like they see it, brutally honest (not soft and gentle).
A cheap tool ala Harbor Freight:
Gets the job done at a great price. Probably not durable for everyday use, but perfect if you only plan to use it a few times and don't want to spend too much.
Whether may comments in the tool are "good" or "bad" totally depends on what you want. If you're trying to find tools to use daily on your job you'll read my review as saying don't buy that one. If the reason you don't already have the tool is because you've never needed it before and you'll probably never need it again, my review tells you it's a good one for you to buy. That's the kind of info I look for. What is the product suitable for and what is it not suitable for; does it fit my needs.
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Remember to click the "helpful" button on reviews that are, well, helpful. Then they appear near the top.
Key details like "broke after a month" and "doesn't fit X" are what we need.
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"Key details like "broke after a month"
Are anecdotal; and only left by the person for which it broke after a month... I had a neighbor that bought a little beverage fridge for their garage/ wood workshop. The garage was dusty (heavy sawdust from the wood working going on), and wasn't insulated or air conditioned and it got uncomfortably hot several months out of the year of the year -- there was no way a $120 dollar beverage fridge intended for for an indoor kitchen counter was going to be able to cope with
might be? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say 92% of Amazon reviews are unreliable, definitely unreliable. Amazon is really garbage in 2020.
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At least the reviews of the Haribo sugar-free gummy bears are hilarious.
Exactly what it ways (Score:2)
Re: Exactly what it ways (Score:1)
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I always leave accurate and informative reviews on products that are less than stellar. Even if the flaw is tiny I will mention it, along with the good stuff.
I've been through 3 cases before I found one that didn't suck for my new phone. Most of the reviews were unhelpful rubbish so I took the time to do a couple of photos and point out the severe flaws. It's the only way these brands will learn to make stuff that isn't complete shit with obvious problems like "can't reach the fingerprint sensor".
I'm just g
Great Article! Will read again A+++ (Score:5, Funny)
Worthless PoS do not want to see again. F--- (Score:2)
Bad article, totally fake news and completely untrue. Waste of time, do not read. F---
Firstname Lastname (Score:2)
Re: Firstname Lastname (Score:1)
My husband said he likes this Article, so it must be good.
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In all seriousness this kind of "review" demonstrates the two major problems that legit reviews tend to have.
1. Barely literate buyers who are encouraged and even incentivised to write reviews, so they just put something generic and useless with 5 stars, usually 10 seconds after they opened the box.
2. Particularly on expensive items people are trying to feel good about spending a hefty chunk of change and justify the purchase to themselves, so will be minded to think it's better than it really is.
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I am not sure Amazon is interested in addressing this problem, but if they were it would be very expensive due to the need to manually i
Re: Great Article! Will read again A+++ (Score:2)
These reviewers likely rate a larger percentage of their purchases. I doubt it's as hard as you suggest, just need to understand where the statistical anomaly is.
Statistician: the needed changes (Score:2)
[yes, statistician really is one of my hats. So I'm overeducated . . . ]
Currently, there seem to be a notion that adequate means five stars, and four stars is negative.
The problem is using raw scores from users without norming them.
What needs to be dones is to both norm by user and to norm users with respect to one another.
A primitive norming by user would use the amount by which the score is above or below the *average* score assigned by that user. So a user that always assigns the same number, whether 5
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This article gave me cancer, do not read it! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: This article gave me cancer, do not read it! (Score:2)
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Made my day ;-)
No. Kidding. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just the 5 star reviews, as someone else pointed out, it's also the one star reviews that go like:
"This product is utter crap! It exploded as soon as I turned it on! Technical support speaks some dialect of R'lyehian! The product is made by child slave labor in Yemen! I couldn't even send it back! I got this instead: (link to some other amazon page) and all my problems were solved! My life became wonderful!"
And then you follow the link, and read the one star reviews that begin "This product is utter crap!"
For awhile I was comparing reviews on competing products, but it's not reliable. What works better is to google the product number and read reviews on some other site.
Re:No. Kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Another problem is that Amazon mixes inventory -- different marketplace resellers which make use the 'fulfilled by Amazon' option send their product to Amazon's warehouse as stock, as long as it has the same UPC code it all ends up together in the same bin. That means that the genuine Samsung wireless chargers from one seller end up getting mixed with the Chinese knockoff firestarters of another, and it is the luck of the draw what you end up receiving. The reviews for a particular product can be all over the place because in reality not everyone is receiving the same items.
Yeah. I'm a photographer, and the major camera brands use proprietary batteries. It's the luck of the draw whether you actually get that NIB battery or someone else's useless castoff. Lately, more likely the latter.
I'm thinking I'll just buy somewhere else. Amazon is no more reliable than ebay.
Re:No. Kidding. (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon is no more reliable than ebay.
Amazon is LESS reliable than eBay. At least if you buy from the same seller twice on eBay, you know what you're getting.
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But, free shipping! From a guy who just pissed into a Gatorade bottle!
Eliminating bots eliminates ad revenue (Score:5, Insightful)
It really sucks, but what I want everyone to know is that they could easily solve it. They could cut a small check to any of the major players and eliminate 99%+ of the bot postings for a painless and trivial fee.
Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter get money from serving ads. If a bot triggers an ad impression, they get revenue. Doing the right thing and kicking off non-human users pretending to be people would cost them money and reveal a lot less engagement than they advertise.
In my mind, they are frauding the companies paying to advertise on their site. It's depressing and the free market rewards this fraudulent behavior, but I just want it to be common knowledge that eliminating bots is pretty easy to do...or at the very least making it so expensive that only the most motivated could ever pull it off...but they don't. They choose to subject you to dealing with bots, trolls, fake reviews, fake posts, etc...so they can fraud their advertisers and communicate to investors and advertisers that they have a lot more users and engagement than they actually do.
Re:Eliminating bots eliminates ad revenue (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've seen some reviews that are direct copy/pastes.
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Re:Eliminating bots eliminates ad revenue (Score:4, Insightful)
Bots are only one way of gaming the system. The biggest issue is paid human reviewers, which are much harder to detect. Here you can read this article. [buzzfeednews.com] to see how these things work.
TLDR version:
Sellers reach out to Jessica through targeted Facebook ads touting free items or dedicated review groups with thousands of members, and give her a specific set of instructions to purchase their products on Amazon. After she leaves a 5-star review, the sellers reimburse her via PayPal or an Amazon gift card, and let her keep the items she reviews.
This is *extremely* difficult for Amazon to find and eliminate, because all the communication between the buyer and seller happens out-of-band. That is, to Amazon, the transaction looks no different than any other legitimate transaction. The only clue is the pattern of purchases and five-star reviews.
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One trick is to click on the name of the reviewer so you can see their other reviews. If they are mostly 5 star or a mixture of 5 star and 1 star then they are probably being paid and can be ignored.
The sites that rate reviews basically do that, evaluating reviewers on metrics like how prolific they are (e.g. if they most 20 reviews an hour and buy 200 random items a month they are problem getting them for free).
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I've said before and I'll say again that the best way to do it is to let reviewers be microcelebrities. Let Amazon users decide whose reviews are quality for themselves, and let those decisions weight the reviews and scores. I know it's feasible because way back in the way back (like over two decades ago) I worked for a company that built a music selling site that did this, for Creative Labs. It was supposed to accompany their mp3 players. Instead they just took the name and logo that had been designed for
Everyone learned to only look at the bad reviews (Score:2)
It sux, but this is usually the only useful info in Amazon reviews.
It is not a problem (Score:2)
You have to know how to read reviews, only looking at the stars is pretty worthless. Even the non-fake reviews are often simply clueless, no matter whether high or low.
So what you do is you look at some high, some low and some reviews in the middle. Then you read them. And that gives you both an insight into reviewer competence and what they found. Does not even take long once you have some experience. For example, I have bought numerous things that had some one-star reviews, simply because it was very clea
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There are a lot of fake reviews that give specifics why the product is great, even when it's not. The lies abound. Getting through them is almost impossible.
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There are a lot of fake reviews that give specifics why the product is great, even when it's not. The lies abound. Getting through them is almost impossible.
I find it quite possible. Just look for reviews that explain and justify. And definitely look into the negative ones. Has not failed me so far, except on one instance recently: Some devices with really bad electrical safety. But that is an expert question, I get that most reviewers will not be qualified to judge. I wrote a review with a warning and Amazon accepted that review.
42% ? "might be"? (Score:2)
First off, we can't have statistical accuracy in judging what might be, so we sure don't have 2 significant figures for our guess
As far as my own experience goes (sample size = 1 ) they all "might be" unreliable.
And because of that, I assume that they are.
I ignore the most glowing reviews and the ones the most scathing negative reviews.
I look instead for simple statements of fact that I can compare with data found elsewhere.
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More like "are fake". You start reading reviews and see they aren't even for the product advertised.
Huh (Score:2)
shocking (Score:2)
We need a system that reviews the reviewers (Score:2)
Re: We need a system that reviews the reviewers (Score:1)
Like meta-moderation? See, Slashdot can save the world!
Joking aside, more layers can't hurt.
100% are unreliable!! (Score:3)
By the simple fact that you have never met any of those people! (Behind the users. With no 1:1 relationship.)
There is zero basis for trusting any of them!
Aka: Who reviews the reviewer?
The only reviews you can trust, are those by people you know well enough to judge.
We're just all in denial about that fact, because we so desperately want anything to decide what to buy.
Because Amazon deliberately works against you. By maximizing how hard it is to compare products by properties, let alone measured with a standardized method, and maximizing the chance that you buy what they want you to buy, by making the search an active enemy of yours.
If you want a comparison to how it could be and how it should be, try skinflint.co.uk (Or if you speak German, its originals geizhals.at or geizhals.de, which have more products). Observe how it's almost a full SQL SELECT over a detailed product database in terms of power. Every product (try mainboards) has a ton of properties. And you can filter by them, including “at least n USB ports" and such, including by "price per unit" (e.g. price per GB for storage), sort, decide what columns to show, and then after all drilling down, still use the comparison function. ... It's like going back to Playboy. If Playboy deliberately contained surprise shit-smeared wrinkly Margaret Thatcher granny goatse and similar boner murderers as the first fold you open, trying to act as if that's the particular fetish you looked for.
Now look back at Amazon, and try their search.
I really don't get how you people can shop like this. It physically hurts, every time I search at Amazon. (So I stopped.)
I only wish that Skinflint site was better for Brits, and would exist at all for Americans... (For Germans and Austrians, it's great.)
How (Score:1)
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Damn near 100% are fake, because it s Amazon
Do you believe reviews from Trump?
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Amazon does not really want to fix it (Score:2)
Amazon does not really want to fix the issue. They could if they wanted to, but they just won't do anything about it, from personal experience. A while ago I bought the top seller binoculars from Amazon.co.uk because they looked shady and did some thorough technical reviews [ecuadors.net]. The result was that the sellers messaged me to warn me they are "reporting my account as a malicious rival", they left comments accusing me of being the owner of rival store "Agena Astro" (that was bizarre - that's a large and very repu
Who is posting those unreliable reviews? (Score:2)
If the number of "unreliable reviews" went up with the pandemic, you have you ask yourself why and who is posting those? Why would someone who has bots fill out reviews increase the bot review rate because people are sitting at home? You'd think they'd be stuffing fake reviews at highest possible rate to make most sales regardless of how many people are at home ordering. Perhaps the unreliable reviews come from real customers, some who purchased the item and are unable to write a reliable review, and maybe
We hit the magic number! (Score:2)
Time to give honest reviews, right now
fake reviews - necessary in fashion (Score:2)
Amazon review process is flawed (Score:2)
I used to post Amazon reviews. "Used to" being the operational part. My reviews were based on my actual experience with the products I bought from Amazon. Usually concise and to the point, with clear description of the good and bad.
However for the past year or so, Amazon has been rejecting all of my reviews. Canned messages all identical, about my review not meeting the "community guidelines". I've read the guidelines and there was nothing in my reviews that would infringe that. No appeal process, once a re
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I've had reviews removed by the vendor, even when the review is just the output of test tools showing the product description is fraudulent. Complaining to Amazon (and just _try_ to find where to complain about a vendor removing reviews!) got me more responses from the vendor. I no longer buy through Amazon; and have found anything I want through Amazon can typically be had cheaper elsewhere (such as the manufacturer's web site).
Fake news! (Score:2)
Only 42%? All online reviews are suspect.
...laura
This is a good story. (Score:2)
This is a good story. I brought five of them for my son. A+++
We know we know... (Score:1)
Bestsellers (Score:2)
I usually check amazon.com/bestsellers