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Why You Shouldn't Trust Internet Comments
sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that all the reviews you read on Yelp and Amazon are easily manipulated. It's not that companies are stacking the deck, necessarily, it's that a few positive comments early on can influence future commenters. In fact, when researchers gamed the system on a real news aggregation site, the items received fake positive votes from the researchers were 32% more likely to receive more positive votes compared with a control (abstract). And those comments were no more likely than the control to be down-voted by the next viewer to see them. By the end of the study, positively manipulated comments got an overall boost of about 25%. However, the same did not hold true for negative manipulation. The ratings of comments that got a fake down vote were usually negated by an up vote by the next user to see them."
This comment is IMMENSELY trustworthy!
Nothing new here, move on...
What an excellent report. I read this to my Son and he loved it, would recommend to anyone and definitely read again. 5*
I've been here for over a decade and I STILL have yet to see Natalie Portman naked and petrified, despite all the hype.
Also, I miss OOG The Caveman.
is the best slashdot thread we've seen all week! I love it!
This is by far the most insightful treatment I've ever read on this important issue. Everyone who does business on the Internet must read this valuable study.
If someone has a bad experience, they will be pissed off and want to leave a bad comment. Often, that is the only recourse for a shitty service offered, or if a refund/exchange is no offered.
If someone has a genuinely good experience, they may be happy and want the product/business to do well, so they will leave a comment to aid in that.
I would think the only influence comes from choosing based on comments, not on leaving comments.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
What's interesting about the study is:
1) The manipulation was a single positive or negative vote applied at random immediately when the article went live.
2) People would tend to correct false negatives, but amplify false positives.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I trust the article that there may be subtle changes in future comments due to past comments. However, there is still a very valid difference between a 5-star item with 2,000 comments and a 1-star item with three or four comments, and that is good enough for me.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Would comment again.
My hypothesis:
1) Products with positive comments are more likely to be purchased.
2) People identify themselves by their choices, and no one wants to make a bad choice. Ergo, almost by definition, any choice people make is "the right one". At the very least, people are predisposed to liking what they spent money on.
Remember; When discussing all things retail, it's not how good the product is, but how well it satisfied the need. At least half the time, that need is largely imaginary.
Sure, I could RTFA, but this is more fun.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm always glad to hear about research like this myself, but this has severe ethics problems. You don't con people to show how easy it is to con the people. I know that rationalization is popular with some segment of you "hackers" out there, but whenever social scientists do this, they end up getting hasled about it.
Welcome, American time traveler from December 2008. Sorry to burst your bubble ...
No one would believe it anyway after this article.
When I check reviews, one of the first things I do is check the negative reviews. Why? Because half the one-stars are often jackasses with no clue what product and/or service they were buying. Other times, knowledgable and otherwise reasonable people have found the service or product being rated to be inadequate in some significant way.
And then I look for high ratings to see if they are reviewing the product in a reasonable manner. From there, I make my own decisions regarding the validity of both sides.
Anyone who decides just based on the stars/review-based numbers is a fool.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
It's not even comments. The paper refers to "upvotes" which makes it pretty clear that the study took place on Reddit and involved incrementing/decrementing the score when an article went live, by a single point.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Probably one of the best stories EVAR posted in the history of Slashdot, superb! 5/5 stars! My friends and I all read the story at work, then we ordered Chinese Food. The food arrived SOOPER early and was delicious. The Orange Beef and Sweet and Sour Chicken were DELICIOUS! I should know, I own the restaurant I'm posting this for on Yelp!
My wife has posted negative reviews on a certain vendor's website (from real product experience, not trolling) when a product she bought was unsatisfactory.
This elicited an immediate email from customer service offering various deals to bribe/entice her to change or withdraw the review. Companies are free to do what they wish on their website but that still struck me as disingenuous.
But how much less likely are you to down-mod a score-5 tweet than a score-1? And how much more likely are you to read-and-upvote a red firehose submission than an indigo?
Isn't this *everyone's* rating on eBay, and yet eBay is 99% populated by crooks at this point?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
that should have said "comment" not "tweet."
Your hosts file comments are not trustworthy.
The subject of this comment is true.
There is no value in positive comments.
If you're considering to buy something, you want to know where it fails, not where it succeeds.
Moreover I personally would never leave a positive comment. If it works as advertised, life can go on as normal. If it doesn't, then I leave a comment.
To use an example from /., it's not at all uncommon to see a comment go completely unnoticed from moderators for an hour, and then get a +1 from somebody, and within 30 minutes have gone from Score:1 or Score:2 to Score:5.
Bandwagon effects are quite well-known. After all, all your friends are paying attention to them! It seems to be a useful psychological reaction: If all your friends and family are jumping off the bridge, chances are you will too on the theory that they probably have a good reason to do so.
I am officially gone from
That's why I go straight for the bad reviews and see what people are actually saying about the product.
Technoli
(Just checking its validity)
A subtle astroturfing is one thing, but many of the fake postings are pretty hilariously transparent. Good help is hard to find.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I won't say who, but a few years ago I had a temporary SQL admin contract with a very large company. I remember the day they hired a good 20+ people who's job it was to do nothing but post fake reviews and make fake blog posts all day long. The called it "Professional Blogging". I've been disgusted by the lack of ethics and misguided moral compass of companies before, but to actually see something like that go down really shocked and disgusted me to my core.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Assuming the researched posted fake reviews real businesses and products, isn't there an ethic issue with this research.
I wouldn't like to be the owner of an otherwise good restaurant that ended up getting lots of bad reviews just because some researchers' coin flip decided my restaurant should get bad reviews for their research.
It just seems a tad unethical to try and randomly ruin businesses for a research paper.
Perhaps we should do some research on what happens when you randomly bankrupt researchers.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I thought you couldn't put anything on the Internet that isn't true....
I've certainly noticed that when I am one of the first to post on a Slashdot story, it tends to set the tone for many comments to follow. This was perhaps most noticeable when I pointed out all the BS in a certain anti-patent propaganda story. Commenters did some critical thinking and mostly agreed the story was a load of BS. It's apparent from other similar stories that without someone setting the tone, Slashdot readers generally revel in anti-patent propaganda, expanding it beyond the already BS claims in TFA of the day.
I only trust Amazon product comments if they are vetted and posted to http://leasthelpful.com/
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
A++++ wuld read again
And probably will when it gets duped in three days time.
I had to retract one + because of a missing word in the summary:
In fact, when researchers gamed the system on a real news aggregation site, the items that received fake positive votes from the researchers were 32% more likely to receive more positive votes compared with a control
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
informative and good coupons. best cat videos.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative" says the song. Same thing with upvotes.
This thread burned down my house, killed all my family, and kicked my dog. This is the worst thread ever, please don't read it or you can end up like me!
Everytime I look to buy something I am not not an expert on or are on the fence about quality, I look up reviews and sort by rating. And I look at negative ratings first because a vendor or retailer won't pad a product with negative reviews. And even though there will always be negative reviews from people who dont have a clue or give little to no info, there are som rea gems out there that give you a clear picture of what you are getting into.
Obligatory anecdotes:
When looking on newegg I sort by lowest score first and read the reviews. You always have some dummies who obviously have no idea what they are doing and rate 1 star because of a mistake they made. But you also run across some genuinely informative negative reviews which are more influential to me than positive reviews. For example, I was looking to buy a uATX board from ECS that had the AMD bobcat CPU onboard. It was perfect, had extra PCI shots for SATA cards for a low power Linux server box. It turns out in a few of the negative reviews there was an IRQ bug that severely impacted performance. I was close to buying it but then scratched it off my list.
Recently I was also looking to purchase a generator from a coworker who bought it after hurricane sandy but never used it, the box is unopened. The brand name was Generac and I have owned two other Generac products, a power washer and a 4kw generator. Both of those machines went south after little use, the generators exhaust valve stuck open when the valve seal went bad and allowed oil to seep down the valve and seize it (I fixed that but it never ran quite right, stalled and was a bitch to start). The power washer engine needed its carb rebuilt and then the water pump blew a shaft seal. But that was 6+ years ago and I figured Generac got their shit together by now. After reading negative reviews on Amazon I came to understand that Generac will try to weasel out of warranty repairs and "authorized" repair shops frequently change as they get shafted after Generac refuses to reimburse them for warranty repairs already performed. There were also negative reviews that warned of blown stator coils after a few hours use and lemons that wouldn't start out of the box. Since the generator could not be returned to the original vendor I took a pass even though I would get a sweet deal ($200 off retail as he wanted to dump it). Maybe it would have worked fine but I didn't want to risk losing 800 bucks and damage my business reputation.
This doesn't work with the non-obvious shills on sites like Amazon. There is no way for you to know whether a detailed story that sounds convincing is true or not. As has already been pointed out humans nearly always overestimate their ablity to detect a lie. Not all shills are obvious about it.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
This post's subject is untrustworthy
You can see the phenomenon on Slashdot itself.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sorry if my english isn't correct, I am from Spain. I think many opinions on internet websites may be just interested comments of some employees workers. Also many people talk's easily about everything and in some subjects, related in my job, I read really big mistakes. Internet is a good place to find out about many things but also a place were you can read may interested, lies, wrong information. You just to thinks twice anything you read, and also read it more than once.. And you never really know... http://www.reducirgastos.com/
http://www.reducirgastos.com
The article only talks about how reviews get rated after an initial rating, not about how subsequent reviews are good/bad if the initial review is good/bad. That would be the 'xxx people found this review helpful' - giving it a bunch of helpful ratings initially make more people likely to vote it helpful.
On a slightly related note, I wish Amazon would allow viewers to only view rating histograms of 'Amazon verified purchasers'. I remember when Amazon hadn't even released the Fire (except to Vine members - those who get the product early to review). There were lots of 1 star 'Sux, not worthy of sharing a table with my glorious iPad' reviews by people who hadn't even touched the product.
Anecdotal-ly, I found that if a review is rated high (in usefulness) on Amazon, it is generally quite good and detailed. That, and 2-4 star reviews generally have more details than one or five star reviews.
I can assure you that if I go somewhere based on positive reviews on Yelp or Urban Spoon, and the food sucks, I leave a very detailed, accurate review of exactly why the food sucked. Don't want some other poor soul to get stuck find out the same thing.
The comparison to Amazon/Yelp is misleading. They are confusing the rating of the comments (e.g. the "most helpful" positive/negative on Amazon) to the product rating. Upvoting a comment on Amazon does not change the product rating, and it doesn't on Yelp either. A comment does not become more trustworthy with upvotes - it just gets possibly seen more. If the researchers wanted to study Amazon ratings, they should have written fake positive reviews on Amazon products. Regarding the trustworthiness of comments, that's very hard to study - are you going to track down users and give them a lie detector test? It's almost like they realized their study was lame and tried to extrapolate it to a more exciting conclusion after-the-fact.
People can't change the truth but the truth can change people.
Casteism
Has been my motto.
Casteism
Can't change the truth? Whose truth, yours? Mine? Fox News fair and balanced truth? If the truth of history has always been written by the winners, one thing you can be certain of: it's not the whole truth.
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." --Oscar
Casteism
Absurdly complex rituals that only offer marginal gains are the marks of someone with OCD. Take your meds.
Not ad hominem at all. I didn't say that your methods didn't work, so it can't be ad hominem. I just said that for the small gains you get, there's a lot better ways to spend your time. I'm actually saying that these methods aren't useful to many people outside of a certain subset of people who have a certain mental quirk.
As I said - I believe you. It's faster. But not enough to matter. I haven't had any malware in years. So if you're obsessing about such minor details, the medication might give you some relief. You have been diagnosed, haven't you?
My statement wasn't really a wisecrack - just pinpointing the cause of your concerns. I'm putting absolutely no effort into my replies to you and yet you feel the need to do "research" for each and every reply, knowing that I'll just skim past it and reply. Another sign of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It's not an ad-hominem attack just because it relates to your mental state. You could probably benefit greatly from medication - at least you'd be able to spend some time outside and take a break from obsessing over HOSTS files.
What have *I* done better to help improve conditions? Nothing - it's not needed. Things are just fine even though there are possible attack vectors. Even though I can shave milliseconds off when that's nothing compared to the load times of the actual content. I have no desire to block ads nor tracking cookies. It just doesn't matter to me. At all.
I think you'll find the definition of trolling to apply to quite a bit of what you post on Slashdot. This time, it happens to be you that was trolled. It's not like you haven't annoyed enough people to deserve it. It's rather a lot of visual clutter on completely unrelated topics.
But...have you been diagnosed? You're avoiding the question.
You really should be concerned with your own well-being over this silly argument. Whether you tell me about it or not, you just might consider seeing a doctor who can help you.