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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I always discard the good reviews AND the bad ones as well. The middle ones explain often why the product is not THAT good and why it's not THAT bad. Exactly like the real life: nothing is black and white, but there's a lot of gray shades there in between.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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!)