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Amazon Fake Products and Fake Reviews
rsk writes "The first time I came across fake reviews on Amazon, it was hilarious. Using Amazon's Window Shop app, I came across a great category, 'Peculiar Products,' and was more than happy to look through it. Almost every one of the products I found on the list (Uranium Ore, 1 Gallon of Milk, Parent Child Test, Fresh Whole Rabbit) were fake, with thousands of reviews on them. As a shopper, I wasn't aware of how easy it was to apparently fake product reviews and it bothers me. When I'm shopping, the first (and a lot of times only) place I visit is Amazon to read the reviews if I'm in the market for something. I don't expect the reviews to be the word of God, but I do assume a certain level of legitimacy for most of them. While this won't affect my use of Amazon (especially not at this time of the year) I would like to bubble this up to Amazon's attention so some time is spent on improving the quality of the reviews."
Free advice is worth every penny.
*Still* negative function...
It's a joke. It's funny. It's not people gaming a system, it's people being funny. It's not some evil corporation pimping it's uranium, it's people who think half life jokes and Back to the Future references are the hip new thing.
One of my friends posted the original joke review to the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt a long time ago and for about a week, we got our kicks writing joke reviews and people approved of them because, well, they were funny. I'm appalled that you think this is gaming the system when it's just regular people having a good time.
As a shopper, I wasn't aware of how easy it was to apparently fake product reviews and it bothers me.
How on earth could that bother you? You didn't notice it until you stumbled into a weird category on some beta app. Do you have any sense of humor?
For what it's worth, Amazon is starting to allow reviewers who ordered the item from Amazon to mark on their review that Amazon confirms them as an owner. So you could probably in the future sort those reviews by those that wrote jokes and those that actually ordered the uranium (my god, how is this not on idle).
It really bothers you? How? Please tell me how I've ruined your shopping experience.
My work here is dung.
This is why Amazon likes to show you the top-rated positive comment and the top-rated negative comment. It's why they have reviewer ratings and the "Vine" program. It's why they have the whole meta-rating system in the first place. Don't ever take the star score at face value. Put more weight behind confirmed real names. Read review comments. It's not that hard to figure out.
If there is money or prestige involved, generally there are lies involved.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It's funny.
Laugh.
If such an innocent thing bothers you, I dread to think what else you disapprove of.
These reviews are just light-hearted humour, and to be honest, they ARE hilarious (always have been, always will be) and often just the perfect thing to make you smile after a boring three-hour meeting.
You want to "bubble this up to Amazon"? Seriously, don't you have anything better to do?
Here is a big example: the release of Spore. That game had thousands of bad reviews because of the DRM. People who never played/bought the game.
/. article, but maybe that is just me
Actually the review issue will be super simple to fix: if somebody buys a product from Amazon, if they also write a review on the product, there will be a special piece of text that says that the user who left the review bought the product from Amazon. To get rid of most of the bad/fake reviews, all Amazon needs to do is require that all reviews be from people who actually bought the product. This would also eliminate reviews on fake products, since unless the person paid for and bought the paid product, no review for them.
As for fake products, you would think there is some way to flag fake products to alert Amazon about it.
So, Amazon could easily fix these issues with items that are already in place (unless flagging products is not in place, but that sounds like something very odd that should be place if it is not), but it appears they choose not to. Maybe contacting Amazon directly and informing them about this would help out much better than a
The world is how you make it
Except if you actually think it doesn't happen with real products too, man, I hate to break down your ideal world bubble.
For a start, even as a joke, a lot of those jokes are just a cross between vandalism and fanboyism. E.g., it's trivial to run into reviews for games which not only aren't out there yet, but don't even have a beta or preview or much information out yet. I remember particularly Gothic 3 -- which eventually turned out to be a buggy bad joke -- which although just announced, and, really, all the information about it were a couple of screenshots that their engine works, and there were already gushing reviews for it on Amazon. You know, TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR!!! kinda reviews.
It's vandalism because even if it may be identifiable as an unfunny joke at that moment, fast forward a year and it's just noise in the actually useful signal.
Actually, even your kind of jokes sound like vandalism to me. It's having fun at the expense of spamming a useful resource and confusing the heck out of anyone who isn't magically aware whether the "Three Wolf Moon T-shirt" is a real product to buy or a joke, and whether the good or bad reviews are actual reviews or someone's bad idea of a joke.
You know, sorta like the guys posting goatse and rickrolling links on an unrelated mailing list. I don't doubt that in their deranged little brains it passes for freaking hilarious, but the rest of us just wish they'd die in a fire.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The only reviews I take at all seriously are at epinions.com and ConsumerReports.org .
And I read only the negative reviews for anything, anyway. Once I'm looking at something reviewed, I probably already want it, so I'm looking for reasons not to get it. And negative reviews are harder to write convincingly without actually knowing something about the thing and its context, anyway. Anyone mad enough at something to go to all that trouble is itself an honestly negative review.
--
make install -not war
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done