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Amazon Makes Good On Its Promise To Delete 'Incentivized' Reviews (techcrunch.com)
Amazon is making good on its promise to ban "incentivized" reviews from its website, according to a new analysis of over 32,000 products and around 65 million reviews. From a TechCrunch article: The ban was meant to address the growing problem of less trustworthy reviews that had been plaguing the retailer's site, leading to products with higher ratings than they would otherwise deserve. Incentivized reviews are those where the vendor offers free or discounted products to reviewers, in exchange for recipients writing their "honest opinion" of the item in an Amazon review. However, data has shown that these reviewers tend to write more positive reviews overall, with products earning an average of 4.74 stars out of five, compared with an average rating of 4.36 for non-incentivized reviews. Over time, these reviews proliferated on Amazon, and damaged consumers' trust in the review system as a whole. And that can impact consumers' purchase decisions.
So, did they distinguish between incentivized reviews and fake reviews (contracted for example from PR firms). Or are fake reviews considered part of the incentivized group.
For that matter, how the hell did they detect incentivized reviews in the first place?
The ban was meant to address the growing problem of less trustworthy reviews
How about addressing the problem of less trustworthy storefronts and products?
Why does Slashdot allow "special" characters in submitted stories when they don't display correctly in the summaries?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In the mean time I will continue to thumbs down any incentivized review I see - they are such trash.
IMO, this is a bad policy, plain and simple.
The reality of the matter is that incentivized reviews aren't really a problem, and actually prevent much worse problems. Incentivized reviews (where people get, for example, a free product in exchange for a review) serve a crucial purpose in the industry—allowing products from new publishers, new manufacturers, etc. to get reviewed by someone competent early on so that people will actually consider that product. (Most people won't seriously look at a product that has no reviews.) By banning them, Amazon is basically saying that new publishers, new authors, new manufacturers, etc. need not bother to sell there.
Worse, a ban on incentivized reviews significantly increases the pressure on small businesses to use truly unethical means of getting reviews, such as hiring companies that pay people to buy the product and write fake reviews. Lots of seriously bad products invariably have dozens of obviously fake five-star reviews, and that abuse of the system makes it even harder for legitimate businesses to get their foot in the door.
The only way this decision doesn't represent an absolute abandonment of Amazon's duty to protect consumers from outright fraud is if they also make participation in the Vine program free and available to anyone who asks, whether they are Amazon vendors or not. Otherwise, this ban just encourages outright fraud by eliminating the one legitimate means that most small businesses have for getting reviews.
And the policy isn't just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer. The notion that the difference between 4.74 stars and 4.36 is meaningful is laughable. Star ratings are completely meaningless in aggregate (at least without a standard deviation), because a product could have three five-star ratings that says "This product is great" and a one-star rating that says "This product burned down my house", and in aggregate, that product would have a 4.5-star rating. Everybody who actually buys products understands the fallacy of comparing star ratings, and instead reads the highest-rated high, low, and average reviews to see what they actually say about the product.
Moreover, anybody serious about buying the right product also does keyword searches looking for aspects of the product that interest or concern them. For this reason, consumers are served best by having as many reviews as possible, paid or otherwise, because (with the exception of very bad products) each review is likely to provide information about some aspect of the product that no other review provides. So deleting incentivized reviews is not just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer, because it reduces the amount of information available to consumers about products that they are considering buying.
I'm absolutely blown away at the absolute cluelessness of this decision. It is as though their management never actually bought a product on their own website, never sold any product anywhere, and couldn't be bothered to ask consumers or sellers what they thought. The resulting decision is utterly naïve.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Read the reviews, and look for those who had a need/background/set of tastes similar to yours.
They could have segregated the reviews allowing easy filtering as a more officially supported version. Then the item review could possibly show a split view 4.5/4.65
Amazon could solve this issue by only allowing reviews from people who have actually purchased the product on Amazon.
Sure, this would remove the ability to review products that you bought elsewhere, but I'm sure that's not a large percentage of reviews. If you bought the product from Amazon there's a good chance you're not a shill for the company. This also limits the reviews to one per customer per purchased product.
The only downside to this is we'll lose the hilarious "reviews" that some products get.. but that's a small price to pay for more legitimate reviews from real customers.
There's a lot to be said for that line of thought. I notice the "honest review in exchange for free/discount product" reviews and mentally give them less weight (not zero weight - just less), but I'd rather this be out in the open than something happening in the shadows without disclosure. All this is going to do is drive it underground.
"The obvious way for Amazon to fix this problem would be to stop spamming people that have requested to be removed from their marketing email list."
There are many other areas in which Amazon needs improvement:
When visiting an Amazon web page to try to understand a product better, Amazon tries to distract readers by displaying other products. To me, that is amazingly abusive and socially ignorant.
There are other scams besides some of the reviews. Some used books say the price is $0.01, one cent, but the shipping cost is $3.99. The total price should be listed.
There appears to be no protection by Amazon from dishonest sellers. I have, for example, seen complaints from buyers that say they ordered new hard drives but received used ones.
You have to read reviews with a lot of perception in mind. I find the bulk of honest (believable) reviews are negative reviews and I usually look through the negative ones to get a sense of whether there truly are deal-breaking issues. It's easy to tell the difference between bullshit negative reviews and real legit negative reviews, but not so easy to tell them apart with the positive ones.
Sort with negative reviews first. That will tell you the real story.
You give away copies of your books in exchange for reviews, don't you? Either that or you write incentivised reviews yourself, because I can tell this is personal for you.
Just like many areas of online life, for me this issue is about signal-to-noise ratio. In a fantasy world, just one honest and thorough review would be all you'd need to make a decision, that would be a perfect SNR. In reality, you have to deal with fake reviews, incentivised or otherwise biased reviews, reviews from clueless reviewers, and so forth, all of which you have to slog through in order to try and get some real impressions of the product. The SNR is shit, and it's a pain in the ass. As far as I'm concerned, getting rid of these incentivised reviews means one set of sub-optimal reviews that I don't have to slog through, so I'm all for it. There may still be good information to be extracted from these reviews, despite the incentive-induced bias, but I do not have the time.
I had a clean honest review "redacted" for no reason. Probably because the seller didn't want to lose sales.
I know people personally who have engaged in industrial scale review Shenanigans on Amazon for profit and can only imagine the cesspool of asshats involved. Screwing with Amazon has become an industry on to itself.
No point in using Amazon IMO. They spend too much time making excuses for their sellers. Seller reviews and good/bad ratio's are NOT front and center like they are on eBay. You have to go digging.
From my experience many sellers on Amazon have ratio's that would get them laughed at by any eBay buyer. (Low 90's or even 80's)
Then we have issues of Amazon actively leveraging their market position. Refusing to sell certain goods unless you join their little "Prime" club. Refusing to sell low cost items without buying something else. Playing games with intentional shipping delays while not offering much of anything in the way of savings.
Amazon refuses to keep their marketing goons on a leash and their community governance is teetering on the brink of Twitter level fail.
... to stop verbing nouns?
Actually, I haven't gotten around to it yet. :-) I'd like to be able to do so, as giving away books is pretty much the only way for new authors to get reviews, period. And literally every non-bestselling author eventually resorts to it; whether in the form of Goodreads giveaways, making the Kindle edition free for a day/week/month, or whatever, the net effect is the same—you're giving away copies of your book in the hopes that some of those people will review it.
There's no meaningful difference between making your books available electronically for free for a week and mailing out copies to willing reviewers except that the people who get a physical copy of the book feel more obliged to actually read the book and comment on it honestly, rather than just storing it on their hard drives and never getting around to reading it. The value of those incentivized reviews to the author (and, I suppose, to people looking at reviews) obviously decreases as you get more reviews, but that's really true for the early reviews of any product. After all, even things like computers get silent revisions that render early reviews incorrect. That's triply true for indie books. But there's definite value to having some reviews rather than none, even if you know that the first few reviews are going to be biased.
So you'd rather have no reviews? I'd rather have organic reviews if possible, but I'd much rather have a paid review than no reviews at all. I'd rather buy a product knowing that at least one person out there has obtained the product, used it, and given an opinion of it (even if that opinion is biased by having gotten it for free) than buy something completely blindly.
Besides, the SNR is going to be terrible no matter what. By eliminating reviews by people who are given the product for free (except through Amazon's Vine program, which gets an explicit exception):
The reality of the matter is that no matter what you do, the first few reviews are going to be biased. The first few reviews of a new author's books will invariably be written by family and friends, just as the first reviews of products are usually written by employees, their family members, or members of the press in exchange for product loans or donated copies or whatever. And this is true for all but the largest companies.
The irony is that the incentivized reviewers don't have a strong incentive to give all positive reviews or to accept every book/product for review, whereas all the other folks on that list do. So the SNR for early reviews will be worse under this system, not better, because either products won't have reviews (less signal) or the reviews will be lesser quality reviews by shills or family members instead of by people who merely got free products (higher noise). There's no plausible scenario in which this improves the SNR. At all.
Worse, the pay-to-play nature of this scheme borders on payola, because Amazon is re
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Which part of 4.74 vs 4.36 was it that you failed to understand?
I know this is off-topic, but the solution for lobbying is not to ban lobbying, but rather to ban our congresspeople from Washington D.C. I've said it before, and it is no less true now than when I first said it.
If all of our congresspeople were required to spend at least 330 days per year in their districts, participate in floor debates via videoconferencing, and vote remotely from their office in whatever district they serve, it would effectively be equivalent to a successful ban on lobbying. Big companies would have to send lobbyists on expensive tours around the country, raising the cost of lobbying by more than two orders of magnitude, whereas citizens within each district would suddenly gain the easy access to their representatives that the founding fathers envisioned when they designed Congress as a part-time job.
That shift in the balance of access would fix roughly 99% of what's wrong with our federal government today with a single law.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I don't read any reviews which start off with "this is my honest opinion". And the mentally retarded who complain about I purchased these sharp knifes, and I'm
only going to give them five stars, because I cut my finger.
If it does not have a picture I do not purchase it. Also why does Amazon hide the company's address! You think you are buying from the country you are in and it ends up you are purchasing something from China, which takes over a month to get delivered and then you have to pay import duty.
I refuse to pay twenty pounds Sterling so the delivery man put it on the floor and walked away. I then received a letter demanding the money or else they were going to send in debt collectors for the sum of twenty pounds Sterling. I took no notice of the letter and I have not seen their debt collectors.
As someone who absolutely refuses to trust any "I received this product at a discount" reviews, my wish would be this: leave the incentivized reviews alone, but provide me with a filter that I can click to make them disappear. That way when I see 200 reviews for a product, and all but 5 of them vanish when I use the filter, then I'll know not to bother.
Here's your bottom line up front: Amazon doesn't care about the quality of reviews. Period. Amazon cares about control of the process.
Here's how I know this:
I have been an amazon Vine member since 2009. At the time I was invited to start receiving "free" (no longer are they free: for the last two years, every item is assigned a "fair market value" (FMV) for tax purposes that results in an an annual 1099 for the IRS; generally the FMV is about 1/3 of the sticker price) items, I had written less than 20 reviews of things bought from amazon since 1997.
From 2012 until early last month, I also accepted and reviewed items provided directly to me through amazon vendors. Some where shipped directly to me, and some where provided through amazon via a vendor-supplied claim code that would result in an "amazon verified purchase badge. At the "high water mark" of my reviewing activity, I was ranked in the low two digits of amazon's "Top Reviewer Ranking" list.
The above represents three categories of reviews:
(1) Amazon supplied through Vine (which carries a giant green "Vine Customer Review of Free Product" banner)
(2) Vendor-supplied direct (and therefore, no "verified purchase" label)
(3) Vendor-supplied via claim code (and therefore labeled as "verified purchase"
(4) Things I bought from amazon with my own money (the "true" amazon verified purchases)
(5) Things I bought someplace else and reviewed on amazon.
For (1): Amazon generates the disclaimer. .I simply stated that fact of receiving the item for reviewing, in order to comply with both Amazon and an FTC requirement.
For (2) and (3): I provided the disclaimer at the end of the review. I didn't make a rhetorical attempt to convince you that I had provided an "honest evaluation...blah blah blah.."
I had no incentive to inflate the ratings on any of these products categories.
The stream of Vine items was not dependent on me offering a high rating, and I have 1-starred many big ticket items. Since 2009, the Vine program has sent me over 300 items..from Post-It notes and advance reviewer copies of books to high-end A/V equipment carrying 4-figure price tags; overall average value is about $65 for ALL products...but there is nearly a $1600 range between the most and least expensive items). I'll tell you more about why the scoring or strength of content was irrelevant to amazon in a second.
For vendor-provided items, the majority of these were Chinese-manufactured smalls (Bluetooth speakers, LED flashlights, Lightning cables, USB cables, kitchen items, RC vehicles, dashcams, GoPro knockoffs... although a few others popped into the "shiny" zone, and came from brand names you would recognize immediately), but I also had no incentive to inflate the scoring of these products either. Typically, the vendors had not read any of my reviews, they simply had my email address (and there is clearly an active network of vendors exchanging big lists of such email addresses). Before accepting an item I told each vendor that I would be disclosing the receipt of the item, and that the rating and review would be based directly on my user experience. The email associated with my amazon account received an average of about 35 such offers every day. Since amazon ended "incentived" reviews. I still get 15-20 offers daily, even though they are deleted without reading.
And for stuff I bought myself (on Amazon or elsewhere: just as with Vine and vendor-provided products: I reported my user experience. My overall average product rating was slightly above 4 for over 1600 reviews written since 2009..
In order, here's what amazon has done since October:
-Told ALL reviewers that they could no longer review items received for free from vendors.
-Deleted the entire contents of reviewers that amazon's magical systems decided were engaging in manipulative behavior. Sometimes this removed the reviews of obvious shill or dishonest reviewers...and sometimes this threw out the baby with the bathwater as honest
11/25/16. I don't know about ethically-challenged family members, but I do know that Amazon had "official" fake reviews, which were fairly easily detected -- usually they'd be extra-long so the automatic review controlling software would leave off the official admission on the end, so I'd have to click to see it. But they made great "tags" for crummy products, once I figured it out.
Another tip for the amazon-challenged: if the reviews are less than 10 or twenty, pay them no mind. Reviews are only really useful in 100s and up. Of course that leaves out a lot of stuff....
I will be able to find out which penis pump is truly worth of 4 stars or more.
Incentivized reviews (where people get, for example, a free product in exchange for a review) serve a crucial purpose in the industryâ"allowing products from new publishers, new manufacturers, etc. to get reviewed by someone competent early on so that people will actually consider that product.(Most people won't seriously look at a product that has no reviews.)
Strangely enough, people bought products before there were incentivized reviews on Amazon. In fact they bought lots of products - it wasn't until Amazon became huge that incentivized reviews became common.
There are many ethical techniques businesses can use to get the word out on their product - and once people buy any given product, some of them will leave reviews.
Incentivized reviews are not ethical - and no business with integrity would participate in creating these. Further, most customers don't want them - having lots of garbage reviews makes it hard to find useful ones, and customers with integrity don't like supporting businesses that lack integrity - which is why Amazon adopted this policy.
You have produced a lot of propaganda, but there's no substance to your claims. No doubt you have been benefiting from the incentivized review system in some fashion, and now you're trying to "justify" conduct lacking in integrity after the fact. You're like a child who lies about having done something wrong to try to keep from being punished. Grow up.
allowing products from new publishers, new manufacturers, etc. to get reviewed by someone competent early on so that people will actually consider that product.
Isn't that the problem Amazon's Vine program was created to fix? The difference is that Amazon controls the Vine program, so reviewers needn't feel any obligation to write anything but an honest review, but when sellers provide the product, reviewers might feel a bad review will mean it is less likely they get considered for freebies in the future even if they are expressly told otherwise, this is likely to have some influence on the review they write.