How do you know reviews were more reliable before ? In pretty much all industries people were hacking reviews before especially when channels were more limited. Nobody invented fraud yesterday.
The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it. If you don't do it you will be outcompeted by the ones who do. I've experienced this myself. I tried buying ads and writing organic posts but got little traffic on a site I wanted to promote. Then I decided to spend a few hundred dollars on fake upvotes and my ROI was easily 20x better than on ads. I had to be a bit more careful so it wasn't too obvious but I learned that these dark patterns work. I've heard of similar tactics used by unicorn startups in their early stages at much larger scale. The reviews weren't trustworthy before either, it's just more obvious now.
>>> The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it.
Yes. And this is a pattern we are seeing all over - thank you. It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper.
The fact that it was previously restricted to only monied interests means that it was relatively rare in the past. Yes, there were the magazines and floating 'reviewers' who everyone learned were shills for whatever company was paying them for a good review, but the bulk of the reviews were earnestly trying to live up to consumer expectations for such reviews. Once things became more 'democratic' and cheaper we saw the review version of Gresham's Law at work -- fraudulent reviews flooded out sincere ones and the system has mostly because useless for its intended purpose, it is now just another marketing channel.
What I find funny is when some multibillion company buys tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but each post gets like 1 like or 1 comment. Like, hello!!!!!
But maybe it's because of FTC rules: fake followers are legally okay, but fake likes and fake comments could be considered a fake review and therefore FTC violation.
Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me
For the same reason that on facebook I still get daily friend requests from very sexy women with a brand new profile, 4 friends total, none in common, in a random location in the world with 1 post linking to some dating site. It's because they just don't care. Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent.
This really isn't true. Remember that FB has many, many users and (presumably) many, many scammers, so one would expect to see lots of scams.
I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user).
So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.
My experience is different. I have many times reported a profile like this. Exactly as described above, a child can see it's a scam account. And then a couple of days later got message that after review the profile doesn't violate the community standards.
really? That's very odd (not that their reporting system sucks, it definitely does), but that you need to report it.
Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).
The social networks don't mind the bots if it leads to engagement. Their "anti-bot" policy is a joke. They know who the bots are. They only ban the ones that are anti-engagement (which they can also determine).
Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.
(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)
My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.
One example I can remember from 10+ years ago was newegg. I don't recall ever really feeling like I got "duped" based on the many online reviews there. I think that sentiment was pretty well revered and not just my personal opinions of it. Everything was pretty well spot on from my experiences. That said, I have no idea how that would fair these days.
I'll even go so far as to say back when Amazon was getting started their reviews were a lot more reliable as well.
It should be pointed out that current fake review issues are not just on fraudulent products.
For instance Aukey has been caught by Amazon, but in my experience their products were pretty good, and they probably played the fake review game mainly due to everyone else playing it, and it became an arms race.
The cynical take Aukey was taken out because they had good products and good reputation in a high margin category that Amazon wanted for their house brand to play a bigger role in.
- they can really fix it (e.g. by kicking every fake review mandator) and drown competiting products far below in the search results, leaving "Amazon's choice" ones at the top.
With way fewer reviews it will be harder to argue the ranking results legitimacy.
- they don't fix it, and as you say, get an excuse to kick any random brand trying to stay afloat on their platform.
"Amazon's Choice" are also littered with fake reviews. WSJ did a story on this and looked at hundreds of "[AC]" listings and found majority of listings had fake reviews; many of the fake reviews being the top reviews.
Newegg reviews were pretty good--they steered me away from a lot of noisy gear when building servers. That kind of feedback does not exist in the specs.
Honestly, I think 3rd party sellers are half the problem. Eliminating them won't fix everything though, since there are sites where the 1st party itself is dishonest (e.g., yelp), but if you trust the site and it is all 1st party then you're in a good state for reviews, since there's little incentive for anyone to fake them.
>Honestly, I think 3rd party sellers are half the problem.
Totally agree. Right now there's a spread from anyone can review anything (yelp, Google reviews) to purchase required to review. What if only 1 out of 20 purchases, selected randomly, were allowed to place a review?
Single person review shops become easier to spot - they are suddenly ordering way more than typical. Returns might skyrocket, which is expensive for everyone involved, however there's now another signal available to spot odd patterns of behavior.
Inclusion of a restocking fee, which is obviously not popular with consumers, is another option which would help make it more expensive to fake reviews.
There would be far fewer of them, and the consequences may not be worth it. That is why trust in a Target or Costco vetted vendor is higher than a small time seller named “eBizValue”.
Reviews were more "expert"-based 20 years or so again in magazines that had some editorial oversight and processes for selecting and reviewing products.
Of course, there were far fewer reviews available, companies still gamed reviewers/magazines but in different ways, and there was sometimes outright fraud around benchmarks, etc.
A huge portion of those reviews were payola, plain and simple. If a reviewer didn’t provide at least a somewhat positive review (even for complete dreck), they were often blacklisted.
Blacklisted how? 20 years ago consumer reports was considered a trusted source and they purchased everything they reviewed. How are you going to blacklist someone from going to the store and buying your product?
CR is the exception, and that’s why they charge their subscribers a lot of money.
The vast majority of publications fund “reviews” in different ways.
Some publications you can pay to have your product “featured” in.
In some others, companies give a reviewer who has a reputation for favorable reviews free products. The unspoken expectation is that the reviews will drive sales and that the free product (and free content) train keeps going.
And yet others have serious conflicts of interest with their supporting advertisers.
Consumer Reports buys the products they review. They can't be blacklisted if they're not relying on the manufacturer to send them a free demo/item.
(Youtube/Blog) Reviewers get blacklisted by companies by not providing a positive review about a product they were given. As they rely on scooping type style reviews, this means they not only don't get a free product to review, but they can't review it until after it's for sale instead of being able to 'preview' it for people and get more clicks that way.
Only problem is that CR then needs to wait until release day to start its review. While the corrupt get advance copies to review that get released in advance, or are embargoed until release day, but still, will get published way before CR can publish a proper review.
Honestly "don't buy stuff right after it comes out" is one of the simplest things you can do as a consumer to not buy a lot of lemons, even if you don't read Consumer Reports.
The "gotta have everything day one (or earlier!) to be cool!" is the most successful piece of meta-marketing imaginable.
A lot of reviewers try to be relevant by reviewing new things before they hit the market. That makes the manufacturer the only source of the product and the manufacturers have no reason to provide early access to people writing bad reviews and writing a review a month after everyone else just doesn't attract nearly as much attention.
Consumer Reports was (and still is!) so trusted because it is the one publication that lacks the usual conflicts of interest that every other publication has.
The Wirecutter (now part of NY Times) is another that doesn't accept freebie products, if I recall.
They do use affiliate links, so they have incentive to want you to buy _something_, but no incentive to give any particular brand or model a biased review.
I still can't believe people actually click on affiliate/tracking links. I get things based on Wirecutter reviews occasionally, but I always go to the product separately so it's not tracked.
As long as it's a generic referral program (Amazon?) in general I find it at least somewhat ok - I can see how they're getting paid, and I can assume (maybe?) they aren't getting a special kickback to sell that particular product over another one at Amazon or whatever.
When it's seller specific affiliate programs? It's all just spam basically.
No, no, let me rephrase: they would give good reviews to everyone that gave them free stuff that was good.
Customers asked "why aren't there any review saying a product is bad", so they started doing that with products whose manufacturers didn't advertise there or didn't give free stuff for review. They'd borrow, or buy a few Danelectro or Behringer pedals for $30 dollars just to make a bad review and "save face" to readers.
Basically they got "token bad products" to save face.
You definitely need a bottle for when you get some terrible product and you know the manufacturer won't like that it won't get reviewed.
Funny enough, the situation is even worse now: with YouTube reviewers, there's no more expectation of neutrality as with professional journalists in the past. So all quality reviews are praising products.
People still get that. They just also get reviews from others online. Forums have been invaluable to me for finding out information about niche fields where I do not have a person familiar with that in my social circles.
It was based upon a tree of trust. And at least there was a synthetic consensus everyone agreed upon. Everyone was misled by state media, but now people switch from one tree of trust to another, depending on predictive power, which leads into conspiracy trees, because they always predict the worst outcome. A clock that screams doom all day long, will never betray you.
Youre right that I can't be sure at a macro level, but I personally found Amazon reviews more useful and accurate relative to the things I actually bought a decade ago than I do now.
