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Inside the Business of Online Reviews For Hire
Rick Zeman writes "Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service. The New York Times tells of the rise and fall of the founder of one such hired third party service who had has been so successful planting paid fake reviews that he no longer trusts any online review. He should know. Because of him and his kind, it's estimated that one third of online reviews are fake."
Give us a link that doesn't require registration.. aieet?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When the only article in the story is requires a login. Next, please.
You only learn from reviews what something can't do, not what it can. I usually only look at negative reviews myself, and possibly fact-check against positive reviews. A product has to be truly great to garner all positive reviews. ...like Sonos-- check them out at Sonos.com, or buy at your local Target store! It changed my life! ;-)
I've seldom trusted consumer reviews, not because they might be fake, but because "consumers" often lack enough experience with large enough numbers of competing products for their opinions to hold any weight. When I'm looking for reviews of a product, I want professional reviews from journalists who are dedicated to researching the genre.
Back in the 1980's, if you read a review on the internet (usenet at the time, there was no web yet), you could be sure it was from a "real person", and was a real opinion, not a paid shill or something written by a marketer. You could be sure the resulting discussion was being engaged in by real people as well.
That culture has been lost from the entire internet, and it is increasingly hard to sort out what's real from what's not. Some of them are obvious, but the better shills are increasingly sophisticated. This is one of the many prices paid for the eternal september. It was overrun by the marketeers and the ad men, who ruined the commons for the rest of us.
Captcha: throngs
I also used to be skeptical about online reviews, especially when I saw MyCleanPC.com had so very many great online reviews. But then I tried out MyCleanPC, and I saw the truth for myself! The truth being, of course, that all online reviews are fake.
Does Consumer Reports still have a good reputation? If so, problem solved
Except they miss a lot of products. I used them for a time, and found that unless I was buying a car or a major appliance it wasn't all that useful.
This article is extremely insightful and very well written in a clear and concise format. It helped me and my family greatly and we are thrilled that we took the time to register with NYT. The article was so good that I have gone so far as to take out a one year paid subscription to the online version of the NYT.
I really can't stress it enough. If you do not read this article, you are losing out. I would read this article again.
Bill Needledick
Westbury, MN
It has long been known that many companies hire "armies" of reviewers and commentators to promote their product and hide any negative information under a ton of PR releases. Waggener Edstrom and a few others advertise their purpose and MO.
In the beginning, it was easy to pinpoint shills and marketeers; the word astroturf entered the English language after one of the first of such campaigns was identified. Now, they have become smarter; they use several accounts, with some doing "normal" comments and reviews to be seen as reliable and to be able to vote the more strident accounts up. These last accounts are either just spewing the PR garbage directly, and get created and abandoned very quickly, or they create a "personality", almost always biased towards a single company or product, but always somewhat discrete, trying to appear as genuine fans, upbeat about a product. These are harder to identify, as sometimes a blind fan might not be different from one of these shills; but usually blind fans don't get up voted as quickly as these are by the other company accounts.
Slashdot has been resisting these tactics, but they are pervasive, and there is money in this kind of trolling, so it is always a difficult battle...
Mine was damaged in shipping. One star.
Mr. Todd Jason Rutherford went into the business of poisoning the well, making the internet a worse and less reliable place, and now he just can't trust online reviews... Poor fellow, a dear innocent lamb in a cruel world.
Seriously, fuck this guy and the horse he rode in on. He poisoned the well, let him drink deeply. The only unfortunate part of his sordid story is that he helped impose the same lowered quality on the rest of us. Ah well, at least his business collapsed, ironically thanks to a bad review...
Bloggers are contacted constantly to write reviews.
I've been blogging since the 1990s. A few times a year, I'll write an article about some software and a few months later someone with a competing product will contact me asking me to review their software. Most of the time, they are pushing an open-core system and I reviewed a 100% F/LOSS package.
There has never been any suggestion that I do more than an honest review, but they have offered to help get the system up and working should I run into any issues.
I've never done any of those _requested_ reviews. It doesn't interest me and I don't blog for profit. I blog as a way to
a) help others
b) help me remember key steps
Based on my online searches, it appears that commercial video codec transcoders are the worst at this. They build hundreds of websites around a single stolen transcoder with slightly different GUIs - usually just to make ffmpeg have a GUI on Windows or OSX. Crazy.
Any of the mpg2avi, mpg2h264, mpgtomp4, ipad/ipod-video-converter and hundreds of similar tools are just like that - stolen code they try to repackage for $19.99 with a GUI. I've never seen a valid review for these online.
BTW, use the FLOSS tool handbrake for these converstions. If you need an output format that handbrake doesn't support, use ffmpeg or avconv directly. Those really are easy-to-use tools.
The trouble with crowdsourcing is that crowds can be sourced. I've been pointing this out for several years now. My "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" paper covers this. Some review spam is remarkably inept. My favorite, in the paper, is a set of three restaurant reviews that were clearly scraped from reviews of a car wash. Carpet cleaning reviews on Yelp tend to be amusing. The same phrases reappear in many reviews. Many reviews mention a company different than the one being reviewed. We know, of course, that over 80 million Facebook accounts are fake. Many of those fake accounts are being driven by 'bots posting fake reviews and social stats.
Social spam has been around for years, but went big-time in 2010. In Q4 2010, Google merged Google Places results into main web search. Google Places results could be easily spammed with fake reviews before that, but few people had bothered until those results boosted rankings in web search. Then the spam floodgates opened. Google was so heavily spammed that the mainstream press noticed. Google had to back off a bit on using Places results in web search to get their search quality back up.
The legacy of that debacle is that it became widely known that social spam was a safe, almost respectable SEO activity. Link farms, the previous way to spam Google, are expensive to run, and when Google detects one and blacklists it, an entire server farm suddenly becomes useless. Social spam doesn't put SEO operators at risk. The social networks even host the spam for free!
There's a potential winner in this - Amazon. Amazon knows if you actually paid money for the thing. They have identity data from credit cards. Amazon can still be spammed, but the spammer has to spend money, so the cost per spam is high.
I look for medium length reviews that are 2-4 stars.
You are naive if you think these are not fake. This is a standard fake review strategy: As soon as a product is available put up three reviews: 5, 5 and 4. This gives an average of 4.7, which works better than a perfect 5.0. After a few more days, put up a few more 5s, another 4, and a 2. The 2 says something like this: "This looks like a great product, but it didn't work for me because I needed compatibility with CP/M v0.8 (or some other problem that applies to absolutely nobody). But they refunded my money with no hassle at all, so I would be very happy to buy some of their other products such as (link) or (link)."
Marketers are well aware that people tend to discount perfect reviews, and tend to read the low reviews more carefully. So they adjust their marketing accordingly.
You have to learn to weigh up and read between the lines of both amateur and professional reviews.
:-
... (where I have written both good and bad reviews myself without censorship) and you will find lots of people saying Ryobi stuff is crap, but there is also a minority who say it is great. I have no doubt there is variation in people's experience (sometimes I have been the only person defending something myself) but clearly the balance is bad in such a case. But the ones saying crap often go into some detail as to why it is crap (or why it is good), and when they do that it starts to sound genuine.
For example, just an example, Ryobi garden machinery is crap, as I know from experience. Look up reviews eg here
www.reviewcentre.com
One issue raised about Ryobi is that you cannot easily get spares (in UK anyway - and Ryobi stuff sure needs spares). This is something that you might not think about when you buy (I thought it was a legal requirement for certain classes of goods), but having been warned by the reviews you can check out the point for yourself - try ordering a spare part from the place that is selling the whole items. And by "spares" I don't mean gloves and goggles (as the salesman will), I mean things like ignition coils and drive shafts. My point is that reviews can make you aware of aspects you may overlook, that you can then check for yourself if you don't believe it.
OTOH I read a customer review raving about something along the lines : "It's great! just as I expected! I am delighted with my new gizmo. It does everything I wanted it to. I can't wait to try it out for the first time !" Idiot.