Slashdot Mirror
Belkin's Amazon Rep Paying For Fake Online Reviews
remove office writes "I recently discovered that Belkin's lead online sales rep, Michael Bayard, has been secretly paying internet users to review his company's products favorably on Amazon.com and other websites like Newegg, whether or not they've ever used the devices. Bayard instructed the people he was paying to 'Write as if you own the product and are using it... Mark any other negative reviews as "not helpful" once you post yours.' Ironically, he was using Amazon's own Mechanical Turk service to hire his fraudsters. Did he honestly think he wouldn't get caught? Are Slashdotters aware of other examples of other such blatant astroturfing on behalf of a large tech company like Belkin?"
I will review any piece of crap i know nothing about for money.
I'm more surprised that there aren't more companies caught doing this. Its like being surprised that a professional was using hGH or 'roids.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Belkin have a history of dodgy behavior and should be avoided where possible. Their last trick was hijacking something like 1 in every thousand http connections and directing them to an advertising site.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1039_3-5104863.html
This company should be avoided where possible.
Microsoft gave some nice Ferrari laptops to some bloggers recently. It's easy to figure out to whom: just google favorable Vista reviews.
http://what-is-what.com/what_is/vista.html
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I missed out. If anyone wants me to review their products, I'm sure I can do it for the right price.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
It was recently reported that the Chinese government pays 300,000 astroturfers to go online and talk positively about the Chinese and the chinese government. Basically a modern day propoganda campain (melamine and lead based toys sold separately).
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Why did Belkin even both to do this? They make wonderful products. Just the other day, I got a Belkin Tunebase FM Transmitter with ClearScan for iPod and it was my best purchase ever. It plays my ipod over the radio with amazing fidelity, and my truck gets better gas mileage to boot. I've sold my home and I'm living out of my truck because the sound is so much better. (Where's my money?)
Seriously, the first thing that needs to happen is a bunch of people should "review" Belkin's products with the evidence that they're faking reviews. It'd pretty much finish them, at least with Amazon customers. This is extremely annoying and we need to make it as painful as possible.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It wasn't personal, I'm just supposed to do that after I post my glowing review of the belkin backpack as anon. otherwise I dont get paid.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Anyone with a brain who has checked out any product online, be it cars, computers or anything, finds a user group or ten with reviews. Some reviewers have used the product. Some reviewers have not. There is always "this is the bestest thing in the whole world" review. And there is the "this is the largest POS known" review. You toss the lovefest, and toss the POS review. Trust the middle. If all the reviewers seem happy, then it's probably good. If they all hate, then not so much. You are your own editor.
Shillington Labs provides independent product reviews. Our corporate motto is: "Product Reviews, Your Way!"
My wife posted a bad review of one company on Amazon- it really wasn't even bad, it was Neutral. They missed shipping their product by Christmas when there was time. And they kept calling us...once at 11pm at night. We weren't answering and thought they would give up but the harassment continued.
So finally she answered the phone and they offered her a bribe to remove the review. They offered to pay for the item she ordered. Sadly, she accepted.
So apparently this sort of manipulation of reviews is not uncommon.
I went into an electronics store recently and the staff let me try out wireless adapters to find out if it would work on my laptop ( running Ubuntu 8.04 at the time ). The first one we tried was a Belkin USB adapter and it worked fine. I brought it and haven't regretted my purchase in the slightest, in fact, I'd purchase more. The signal strength was way better than other adapters I'd used and it's never dropped the connection ( to a Linksys WRT54G ).
I'd probably recommend them for their hardware but it seems their ethics need to catch up.
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Although there is no way to prove any of this, 2 incidents immediately come to mind:
1) While reviewing The Orange Box game set on Amazon and seeing all the complaints about Steam, some guy actually had the nerve to make the assertion "Steam single handedly resurrected PC gaming" - as well as other off the wall comments like bragging about how many millions they've sold. After I highlighted a few statements of his and responded to his review - and implied twice that he must work for steam - the entire review and all the responses mysteriously disappeared.
2) Amazon's own reading device, Kindle. When it was released initially, you had people literally declaring war on anybody that said anything even remotely negative about it. Even if they complained about how certain features work, they would fall victim to endless insults and accusations of not having used the product. It was an all out witch hunt.
Sites like Thepiratebay don't generally have people hired by the entertainment industry writing favorable reviews about, say, Snakes on a Plane. There are advantages to buying, selling, and aquiring things illegally. People don't lie -- after all, their reputations are on the line. And depending on what's being bought and sold, sometimes quite a bit more.
There's an irony that illegal business is the most honest kind.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
As the build up of Vista 7 started it became apparent to me that this sort of thing was happening on Digg.com. Critical review of Microsoft simply disappeared as anything was just dugg way down to hide it.
It seemed readily apparent to me that someone was artificially altering anything Microsoft or Windows on Digg.com. I noticed a change where anything negative about Microsoft and Vista were dugg down and anything positive was dugg up. It didn't matter if the negative was spot on and making valid points, it was dugg down. Anything about Microsoft was dugg up. Even if the company was doing nasty things still.
I attributed it to: 1) either a few people had been creating multiple accounts in order to influence the vote, 2) people were being paid by Microsoft to go to digg and change the outcome, or 3) a bunch of Microsoft employees were actively seeking to alter the vote to make Vista 7 and Microsoft look better.
I also noticed several other people commenting as they saw the same thing.
This was like an overnight thing. One day everyone is telling it like it is about Vista and Microsoft and the next day anything anyone said that was negative was dugg way down. Anything positive was dugg way up, even if it was utterly false and few in the face of history.
I will say that Digg.com has declined. I have had to bury a slew of articles that were purely fluff, and moreso of late. Way too many totally stupid posts, uninformative conjecture articles, and poorly thought out pieces that tend to just waste my time.
Combined with the seemingly altered rankings of pro and negative comments regarding Microsoft and Vista I concluded that Digg.com was headed for a big decline.
Now that I see this sort of thing occuring regarding other large company products I can only conclude that there must be something more to my observations on Digg.com
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Astroturfing is an extremely harmful practice to companies in the long run. I remember a couple of particular travel companies on a site I frequent which did this. The companies themselves had a pretty decent reputation, but a few members were just a little bit too enthusiastic about recommending them, and were outed after a couple of months. Any goodwill the company had instantly collapsed, and any time a new traveler asked for advice relating to these companies, they were told to avoid them because of their marketing practices.
Somewhat strangely, it's actually the successful astroturfing campaigns that do the most damage in the long run. There's thousands of obvious attempts each year which immediately get spotted, and everyone nearly immediately forgets about them. But the few times it flies under the radar and is "trusted", the loss of that trust upon discovery is total and final, and it'll take years for the company to recover (if they ever do).
First, Belkin is astroturfing Amazon and Newegg. Next thing you'll be telling me is that Monster Cable's stuff isn't actually any better than the generic stuff!
Some of these products had 50, 5 star reviews.
I marked as helpful the 1-4 star reviews and marked as unhelpful all the 5 star reviews.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Criminals get dumber and dumber.
If he was not such a retard he'd just sign up with bogus accounts and write the reviews himself, from a public library terminal.
Actually I think they are getting smarter and smarter.
It's just the ones that don't learn that get caught.
Netgear PR department? Is that you?
Groucho not Karl.
Wow, now I know why you arent the CTO anymore.
you mean like this post: /. Post
After their fiasco a few years ago where they decided that it was acceptable to program their home routers to occasionally redirect web requests to their own page to sell people things, they hit my "certified 100% evil" list.
There's no getting off that list. I don't care if they start sending me flowers and candy. Nothing they can do will make me consider giving them a dime again. I don't even buy cables from them; last year I ordered a cable online and waited a week for it rather than buy one locally, because the local place only had Belkin cables in that type.
Not much different than the Linux zealot who hasn't touched a Windows machine since 1997
Gee, from looking at your chain of posts it seems you have a certain bias yourself. Have you EVER used a Linux system, or are you in fact the very uninformed Hater you dismiss so readily?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are they still hiring reviewers?
greed@All_Evils:~#
I hear the Nostromo has a really nasty bug.
There are a lot of reviews on Amazon and other retail sites written by people who clearly do not own the product. A lot of reviews are written by people who don't understand the concept of a review. You can find reviews for things which aren't even available to buy yet but Amazon have created a product page for. Seems to me there's a very easy to get rid of reviews people are being paid to write or are just idiots - sites should only allow people to post reviews for products which they have actually bought from that site. It would be easy enough to implement, just check against the would be reviewer's order history. Sure there would be a lot less reviews, but the ones that do get posted will worth something. Quality, not quantity.
What? You thought magazines were objective and impartial?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Why would they do that? Amazon themselves don't really suffer from false positives. (and remember, years ago they accidentally disclosed the editorial reviews' authors: 50% shills or publishers.)
Positive reviews move product. If anything, they have a real incentive to screen or discourage negative reviews.
....Amazon themselves don't really suffer from false positives....
That could not possibly be true IF Amazon is an honest business. Any deception, when it get known, will in the long run harm the one who deceives people. Amazon could stop this or at least slow it down to a trickle by only letting their customers who have bought that item write a review on that one and only once. It would have prevented the incident mentioned in the article and boost Amazon's reputation.
All theory is gray
Except huge swaths of doctors are *not* in good health at all. In the "Physician, Heal Thyself", department, they get tricked by HMO politics and overwork, sometimes trashing their diet, too fatigued to exercise, and as mentioned elsewhere, possibly even living on borrowed time just trying to keep going. One of my doctors was in this category.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Meanwhile newegg & buy.com will have a hard time telling the good reviews from the bad (Amazon can just check the Mechanical Turk logs). So what will Happen? Reseting the scores was suggested, which is great for Belkin, they get a fresh start. This seems like a win-win for them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They've made it onto my shit-list. They are specifically a company whos products I will avoid, and will avoid recommending in any instance where there is a reasonable alternative. And, due to their product lines, there are always alternatives.
If the company has any brains they will prosecute the manager criminally, or fire HIS boss who put him up to it.
For example, back while she was blogging, an ever-popular blog for writers was that of Miss Snark, a pseudonym of a NYC literary agent. She talked several times about the way agents and authors try to game their reviews and ratings. For example:
"Nonetheless I find it fascinating that buyers have cottoned on to the "five star friend" phenom. Miss Snark is as guilty as the next agent of both writing reviews (hey I DO like this book...I didn't exactly buy it though) and soliciting friends, relatives and passersby on the street to do the same. Time for a new strategy I guess....finding books from your cross town rivals and writing 1 star scathing reviews."
It's not just getting everyone you can to rate your book well -- it's also things like "front loading" (having your family, friends, agent, dog, whoever) buy as many copies as they can to boost the sales figures and attract more attention / make potential customers less hesitant to purchase it.
Hey, it's sales... In the words of Miss Snark:
Adding insult to injury, you tell me the book was "warmly received by reviewers". What you mean is that Amazon has good reviews, so I know you're not playing on my side of the street.
Here's some help: "reviewers" at Amazon are not reviewers. They're reader comments. Generally anonymous.
In case anyone else hasn't mentioned this to you yet, Amazon reviews don't meet criteria of an objective review. (Miss Snark loves snarky reviews of course). You'd be better off to tell me your mom liked it.
Tonight's Special: Leg of Salmon
The Internet is where people can interact anonymously. I can write someething that you can't trace back to me personally, so no matter what I say or do, it has no effect on the rest of my life.
I try to explain how incredibly dangerous this is to people. If you could drive a car and never, ever suffer any consequences of either personal injury or responsibility for damages you cause many people would drive recklessly and irreponsibly. Why not? Well, this is pretty much the situation on the Internet.
Everyone's "net friend" Lori Drew is likely to get off completely. Now did she directly reach out and kill someone? No, but partly because her obnoxious behavior happened on the Internet she is likely to receive no punishment, fine, saction or anything else. Most people that get "caught" doing evil on the Internet have no one but themselves to blame, because they bragged about it, often publicly. What about the folks that can keep quiet? Nothing ever happens to them.
So, if someone offered you $100 to stand in front of a movie theater telling people what a great movie you just saw when you hadn't seen the movie you probably wouldn't do it. However, offer someone $100 to write 10 reviews on the Internet about products they have never heard of and they often will. Because they have no personal connection with writing those reviews. Nothing at stake, so nothing to stop them.
Lots of people grew up with the idea that things "in print" are reliable. Basically, the Internet is "in print" and no part of it can be trusted at all. Think you are getting the real story anywhere at all> Why? Is it because you trust the person that wrote it? Why would you trust them? Why do you even believe the author is really the person identified with whatever it is you are reading? If you see something supposedly written by Barak Obama on the Internet why would you believe he wrote it? Were you there when he did it? Why couldn't it be anyone (me, for instance) just using his name? Why wouldn't anyone do that? Because it is wrong?
Anyone that really trusts a review, news article, diary, or anything else on the Internet needs to have some bad things happen to them so they wise up. Why do you think people are endlessly taken in on scams? Because they trusted something on the Internet.
I had something similar to happen to me. I gave a software engineering book a poor review, and it was removed without explanation a month or so later. I waited 6 months and submitted a watered-down version of same review under an alias, which has remained since. This is perhaps why you rarely see any grades below "C" on Amazon reviews. Publishers apparently bully Amazon and readers.
Table-ized A.I.
Treadmill and bike at the same time? Doesn't he know you aren't suppose to multitask?
I don't preview or spellcheck.
Not only because they both have the same family name, but because Michael clearly makes a case for Reviewing Products You Haven't Used...
Best Regards,
Durval Menezes.
I have never met a computer that didn't like me.
Is this really news?? Most positive product review are sappy BS about the product being the best thing since sliced bread or the internet, with very little insightful commentary. That leads me to believe they're always fake. I consider product reviews a form of advertising. And since most consumers, who are already easily influenced (such as by TV commercials and other mass advertising) won't bother looking for articles about fake reviews, the fake reviews will do their job, and convince people to buy the product. If you really want to find out about a product, you can dig through all the BS to find a review with insightful commentary (and then do some cross reference to verify the claims), but that can be difficult. I find it more helpful to read all the negative reviews of a seller or product. If the negative reviews don't paint a horrible picture, you can use them to weigh the product's or service's faults against its claimed benefits.
For example.
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
Company X is Belkin -- Belkin had a router which would redirect an occasional page view to an ad -- and which could be reconfigured from the OUTSIDE. They tried to make this sound less bad with Usenet postings, then deleted the postings later.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I'm not terribly surprised. I've run across reviews that seemed too thorough (and condescending) to be something composed by your average consumer. I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt Belkin is the only one that's paying people to pimp up their reviews.
It's a pretty safe bet that the good reviews are going to be astroturfed to some degree. If you don't assume that, you're living in a dream world. If you look at the bad reviews, you can see what pissed people off about the product. If what they say resonates for you, don't buy it. Sometimes what they say just indicates that they don't know what they're doing. But you can be pretty sure that they weren't astroturfed.
Although I suppose at some point manufacturers might start astroturfing the bad reviews too...
I use a belkin home router and it is awful. I have a high-speed internet connection and if I try to download something via wireless it gets blocked and I need to restart the router. Turning firewall off didn't help. Very crappy product...
I recently bought a USB TV Adapter for a "premium" computer from the "premium" computer store in the mall. The "premium" computer's web site had a 5-star rating.
The first device stopped working after 3 hours. I exchanged the device; but now the included software is very unreliable for scheduled recordings. (It works fine for live TV; my computer significantly exceeds the requirements.)
I don't understand how something that's so unreliable can get a 5-star rating.
No, I will not work for your startup
I honestly don't see why someone needs to pay Belkin to promote their gear positively. It's good gear. Good quality, decent performance. Belkin's biggest downfall is that it is grossly overpriced compared to it's competitors. An 8' Cat6 cable just should not cost $25, when I could buy a length of cable, some ends, and a crimping tool, for about $20 (ok maybe not THAT cheap, but you get my drift...) Of course, now we see it's because Belkin's spending too much money having people promote itself on Amazon (and who knows how many other websites - there are a large number of positively-reviewed products on NewEgg and such, that I have to wonder what the people were thinking....)
Can anyone tell me if these reviews are real or astroturfed? Of 271 reviews, almost half are five-star:
http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM/
Tag lost or not installed.
hasn't it? What about the stories about Microsoft?
Gary Null, the quack health guru, has his employees writing reviews of his "books".
Mark Bernstein, who sells hypertext software for the Macintosh, unsubtly suggests that he'll advertise on your blog if you mention his products,