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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."
That there is such a thing as the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
after all, they can't bully HTC on patents, so they have to do it by hiring whiners
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Android as OS
Are you really that high? Or did Samsung sponsor that? Please don't mod me as a troll, have some common sense!
captcha is "surreal"
... how much HTC paid for this accusation?
"With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone."
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.
they screwed their business themselves
no brand recognition
years of constant new phone releases under new names
crappy support and updates
crappy software. like a mail client with no push email to MS Exchange subfolders when every other android phone maker was doing it
This is, actually, normal behaviour from phone manufacturers who use Android as OS. There is tons of competition in the area and put blatantly, Android based setups cant stand out for favour that easily. This makes all the manufacturers play dirty, just like Google does. Don't be evil, my ass.
I wouldn't blame Google for for the work of a few minions of another company.
Reviews are the new lies, though. There's a Brooklyn camera/technology distributor, which routinely has glowing reviews in an online rating service, which seem to utterly fly in the face of many extremely negative reviews. Having briefly interacted with the company I see where the negatives are coming from and from reading the glowing reviews realize there's too much similarity, further, customers have accused them of being encouraged with gifts to leave not just positive reviews, but very positive ones. Further, they do quite a bit to try to have the negatives deleted or discredited. Scared me off so I bought my camera stuff elsewhere.
What we need is a reviewer review site.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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..........
Microsoft here. You remember all the nasty, sneaky, dirty tricks we've pulled over the years? Well, our latest trick is to make front groups who claim our competitors are now using those same tricks.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I can vouch for that, I signed up for a cash for review service, I get $2 for making positive Android reviews and occasional $3 for Samsung reviews. It pays similar to how bulk email spamming pays, course that's like 25 cents per hundred thousand or more depending on product being spammed.
if people are interested here is a "top 12 list" of companies that will pay you to review products, apps, os, etc.
http://www.blogstash.com/12-best-get-paid-to-review-sites-to-make-money-with/
every review either video, or written product review you post link, it gets verified and part of your account stats,
most places works similar to adsense on payouts. minimum of $100.00 in the account and they'll either send a check or direct deposit into paypal for you.
I get about $30-$50 from reviews to paypal, and I use that money to pay for my pc gaming wants :P
its shit, and make sure you always use a throw away email, I use: http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html
couple hours of bullshit reviews for 'free money', most half smart people should realize that online reviews are all bullshit.
even movie critic reviews online like tgwtg website is all bullshit, cause it's all paid for work. Either for sites like tgwtg is ad based revenue and some product reviews from other contributors to crappy blog sites that get paid to write written reviews for products...
the biggest thing any sane person should know is do not trust ANY online review. most are paid for and most are bullshit
Just thought I'd mention that manufacturing and marketing have very little to do with each other.
See: http://blog.thingsdesigner.com/uploads/id/tree_swing_development_requirements.jpg there's a reason this cartoon is so popular (it's mostly true & hilarious).
Whenever a company uses illegal tactics (I would assume this could be considered defamatory in Taiwan) to advance a product against competitors, just fine them based on a simple fee schedule that is the total number of products sold against the harmed competitor(s) times a sliding scale of severity based on how anti-competitive it was. If that means billions in fines, so be it. Just make it so black and white and inflexible that it becomes a matter of "did you do it?" "Yes?" "Then pay "$x * y" in fines and restitution.
Please contact your Samsung HR department asap, we have trouble finding out who to send the check to when people post as AC.
Does anyone else notice that many Samsung ads seem less about the products and more about making other people feel bad? I don't own an iPhone, but whenever I see a Samsung ad insulting some apple user all I can think is, "Boy those guys are jerks." If I need a product and the Samsung one is superior I'll probably buy it, but it would cross my mind that I don't want to be a jerk like the people in their ads.
Definitely no other company does this.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Yep, Amazon allows reviews without prior purchase. It's why there's a whole load of book reviews from people who never read the things, some of whom readily admit to this. It's more common on controversial topics.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
I generally agree; not to trust positive reviews of products made by someone with a marketing budget. I generally hone in on 3* reviews and actually read it to see the gist of what they are talking about.
Outside of that, you have newegg that is able to show reviews of verified purchasers. And this is exactly why Google is moving to the "real names" model. Because "fake names" will only hurt their bottom line in the long term. Someone could still pay a "real name" to review products, but even those could be detected automatically and investigated by an integrity department.
He was informative. The rules of modding are that you don't mod based on whether you agree or not, you mod based on the quality/usefulness of the information provided. Some idiots mod down everything they disagree with so effectively they are trying to censor others. That would make /. much worse. Modding up because you agree would have a similar though less harmful effect. Less harmful in that low modded comments tend to get filtered out. If you'd prefer a site where nothing was posted except what you agreed with then you should start your own.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
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.
Amazon does, for the simple reason that they realize not everyone buys their entire life from them, but they do want to serve as a nice review resource as well. It makes it ripe for abuse, but it also means that they can miss out on reviews from people who don't buy stuff from them. Games, for example - if most people bought from Steam, Amazon's reviews for them would be sparse for those who need to buy something as a gift for someone (yeah, you can probably do It through steam, but sometimes people like to have physical things).
As for iTunes, what happened was when you uninstalled an app, Apple asked if you wanted to rate it. Naturally, apps that got uninstalled typically were "bad" to the user so that naturally garnered a lot of 1-star reviews (if it was a fun app you enjoyed, you wouldn't uninstall it unless you absolutely had to, right?).
Because, AFAIK, iTunes has always required owning the app to review it (since you couldn't have gotten it elsewhere).
Because, AFAIK, iTunes has always required owning the app to review it (since you couldn't have gotten it elsewhere).
No, I'm a developer. Originally, anyone with an account could post a review, regardless of whether they had downloaded it. There was much gnashing of teeth by developers about it.