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Samsung Accused of Paying For Negative HTC Reviews
judgecorp writes "Samsung Taiwan has been accused of paying to have negative reviews of HTC products put online by students who recommended Samsung devices instead. The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission is investigating Samsung's advertising agency in Taiwan, and Samsung Taiwan has responded by cancelling all Internet marketing."
Personally I believe the HTC One is a remarkable phone, exceedingly pretty and I love the fact that HTC dared to go against the mainstream with their camera by focusing on good low-light performance at the mega-pixel race's expense. While the Samsung Galaxy S III has nice specs it looks like ass and Samsung is seemingly afraid of trying new things now that they believe they've found a winning formula. I hope HTC can gain some market-share from Samsung and continues to experiment with their phones.
The amazon situation is far worse and more widespread. I actually left a review for a book, a rather scathing one pointing out all the of problems with it. It was a scholarly book, not fiction. The book had dozens of 5 star reviews but was riddled with so many errors as to make it 1) virtually unreadable and 2) horrendously incorrect even to first year students and pretty much anyone with a brain cell.
Within hours I had hundreds of "unhelpful" votes followed by a steady stream of profanity thrown at me on my comment. Amazon removed my comment for review 6 times before putting it back due to complaints by the author. Then 8 years later the "author" and I use that term loosely, wrote another book and stuck a link to my review inside it with 12 pages of profanity laced verbiage regarding how bad a person I was and what I did with my mother. The author then posted a link to his new book in my comment so that I would be aware of its existence.
I've since removed my review because I'm frankly sick of the notifications that it's been hammered again. As it turned out though, the majority of the reviews were the authors friends and various fake accounts. It's so widespread on amazon these days I dont even read reviews anymore.
The kicker is the book was a scholarly look at the peaceful proliferation of Buddhism in the world..........
This is one of the reasons I think ACs should be banned or at the very least start with a -2 because we have seen so much shilling and its soooo much easier to hide that with AC posts. After all you can look at the posting history and go "Well this poster only seems to post in topics concerning company A and only has glowing things to say about company A" and thus get a pretty good idea they are getting paid whereas for an AC post its impossible to tell if this is a pattern or if the poster merely likes a product.
Anybody can look at my history and see I like and hate a lot of things, often made by the same companies, so unless a company was stupid enough to pay for having some of their products royally slammed its just my opinion. How can I tell with an AC whether they just like something and are being honest in their like or if they are being paid to like it? Not any way that I can tell which is why I'm no fan of ACs. At least in the past ACs were primarily for trolling and bad jokes, your penisbird and other dirty ASCII art as well as old jokes like the "how to care for your nigger" post but now you can get whole articles and not have a dozen legit posts, its ALL ACs which means the entire thread is suspect IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.