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Carbonite Stacks the Deck With 5-Star Reviews
The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"
No, prosecuted. That is conflict of interest.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Frankly I'm surprised to find any useful feedback at all, given the ease for submitting reviews. The only thing keeping
things from going completely insane is that large companies don't want to get caught cheating.
For smaller stuff, I've already noticed that on the digital products (like Kindle books) where the barrier for entry
is much lower, review spam is a much bigger issue.
If it is true that fake reviews are easy to spot, then it should be possible to get a computer to spot them too, you might think.
I find that online reviews are usually pretty worthless when there are, say, less than 5 contributors. Either the reviews are so good they must be employees, etc, or they are angry diatribes from disgruntled customers.
Try looking at reviews for almost any electrical item (even items you own and know to be good) - what you usually find is that all the reviews will be negative because the users are so angry when their device fails they are motivated to let out their frustration somewhere. On the other hand, when things tick along as normal then they can't be bothered to contribute to an online review system.
That is, of course, for the company shills...
I would be surprised if the marketing companies don't have such pseudo-people already. The could be used for both attack campaigns as well as polishing campaigns and if an ad company had enough clients it would be hard to tell that they weren't a legit reviewer with both positive and negative feedback. Most online reviews tend to be glowing or bottom of the barrel because people who have an average experience with a product are not motivated to provide feedback which would cost them time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Much of it is just greed. Auto mechanics have been ripping people off for many decades. It's just too easy to feed the average customer some bullshit and make some quick and easy money.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Why is anyone surprised?
Who says that anybody is "surprised"? It doesn't "surprise" me that people murder, steal, and cheat and that companies pollute, evade taxes, and bribe politicians.
I still want to see it reported and publicized.
So? What Pogue has observed is a SYMPTOM of the bigger problem, not the actual problem itself.
This is precisely how American capitalism works. It's utterly Darwinian: any tactic that enriches your survival prospects and doesn't get you drawn and quartered is perfectly fine. I hate to say it, but we made this bed for ourselves with our own particular brands of indoctrination and econo-political dogma. We mixed up a nasty batch of Koolaid and wound up drinking it ourselves. There are hidden costs to this sort of capitalism.
If you really want to put an end to this sort of behavior, we'll have to start by changing our actual collective values and ethics, and then change our messages of indoctrination that we whisper to our children and each other to reflect those new values. We need to get the population sipping a better mix of Koolaid; what we've been drinking for almost a century is pretty toxic. Violent games may not brainwash gamers to become violent, but the sort of subtle indoctrination that every American receives DOES lead to the sort of behavior that Pogue observed.
It will take a true collective effort and consensus in order to end it. Passing a few more kneejerk laws or whatever ain't gonna cure the underlying problem: Darwinian capitalism.
Well, I'm guessing the latter. I mean: does
A) power corrupt formerly honest and nice people, or
B) it's just natural selection at work, at the biggest turds float to the top?
It seems to me more like B, though I can't say I've done a real study or anything.
The thing is, if you have a dog-eat-dog set up, the ones who refuse to eat other dogs (e.g., because of having morals) never make it big in the first place. Either they don't get promoted, or they get their prices undercut by someone who saves by being a bigger fuck, and either go bankrupt or bought.
As an extreme example to illustrate a point, think, say, a third world country where it's not illegal to dump toxic stuff in rivers and safety laws are non-existent. So company A are the nice guys, they don't want to screw over their workers and community. They invest in filters, invest in safe equipment and training, doesn't bribe/deceive/lobby/make backroom deals, etc. So their products are more expensive. Their competitor, company B, are owned and led by a couple of greedy fucks, who just skip all that extra cost and do any tricks in the book to get a goverment subsidy or contract. If it's a big bribe or shady deal that gets that job done, so be it. So their products are cheaper. Do you have any doubts as to who's going to push the other off the market?
(It's not even as much a hypothetical example, because it used to happen in the first world too, in the not so distant past. E.g., back when the Titanic was built, the norm was IIRC to have one dead worker for every million dollars worth of ship built. The Titanic was remarkable in that they only had IIRC 3 dead workers in accidents during building. But anyway, roll that in your head, they actually made statistics and found it acceptable to kill people rather than spend money on safety. It's not a funny thought.)
It's easy to look afterwards at the big resulting conglomerate "B Industrial Corp" and think, "man, all that power corrupted them." But in fact they got to power by not being nice in the first place.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In fact, it will take regulation to correct the problem.
We've all got that selfish streak in us. We're willing to do the right thing in the interests of fairness, but only if we know everyone else is doing the right thing too.
Without regulation and a robust policing of those regulations we cannot have trust in the system. Slowly, little by little, the whole thing begins to break down as each individual sees that not everyone is playing by the rules, then they too set out on their own path using whatever tactics work for them.
Thirty years of deregulation has pretty much woven the problem deep into the system.
... only they weren't anonymous. I know this is Slashdot and no one RTFAs, but did you even read the posting?
Not anonymous, but incompetent. It is like the pointy-haired-manager's version of an astroturf campaign.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I read the negative reviews first. I will read some of the positive reviews but I start at the bottom and if I don't get turned off by them as I work my way up then I will probably buy the item.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
While I am not the worlds best writer, I do feel I ok
Is it safe to assume you keep an editor on retainer? Sorry, I just couldn't resist :).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Fairness and honesty can hardly be called tenets of communism. Laws that enforce fairness and honesty in business practices foster faith in our capitalist system and provide a level playing field for all those that conduct business within the system.
Without laws protecting consumers, the playing field is very much tilted in favor of those with deep legal pockets. Consumer protection laws also force businesses to compete honestly so that the best product at the best price will succeed in the market.
I highly doubt you will find a majority of any population that actually wants businesses to operate dishonestly. Regulations enforcing fairness and honesty ARE consensus.
I find that most people that protest laws protecting consumers usually are the ones trying to game the system to their advantage at the expense of those who could least defend themselves in court.
It's not communism to keep people honest.
Are worthless anyway. If you don't personally know the person, assume its a paid advertisement.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's really not true. For most books the reviews are quite good. This problem is still limited, though as Amazon seems like it is facing the same problem google did a decade ago. Their reviews are getting influential enough that people game the system. Amazon is going to need to start protecting itself and punishing people who try to game the system.
Lets try that "Freedom of Speach" defense when you yell FIRE in a theater.
Can you say "Freedom of Prosecution"?
Untruthful, damaging speech is not protected. You can't say anything you want in a commercial venue. Being purposefully deceptive for monetary gain is not protected speech.
--- So how about I sell you a car after telling you how perfectly it runs. When you discover that there is no engine in it remember "caveat emptor" so you not going to sue me are you?
(thank god I'm protected!)
And do you have proof they don't use their product and aren't satisfied with it???
....
And what makes anyone think other companies aren't doing this??
I read both the good reviews and the bad ones, and pay no attention to the 'stars' since most people are morons and couldn't properly rate a software package to begin with. I look for patterns in the good and bad reviews to point to areas where there might be issues. If one person whines about usability, it can probably be ignored. If 20 do, then maybe there is a usability problem.
In other words, think for yourself and do your own research instead of being lead around by someone who appears to know what they are talking about. I got through 4 years of high school because I knew how to BS an essay test. Didn't mean I knew what I was talking about.
Or that I do now
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.