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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.
Because, presumably, they expect everyone to preview their submission before hitting submit, and verify that what they are writing doesnâ(TM)t contain any such characters.
There are only a few grievances I have with this site, and its lack of friendliness to utf8 is one of them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They should also do something about "angry reviews" from people that have requested to be removed from marketing email, but are receiving it anyway through "marketplace.amazon.com", mostly badgering for reviews. Amazon refuses to stop those emails, so every time I receive one, I leave a one-star review for the product. I used to say that it was because they spammed me, and it didn't really reflect on the quality of the review, but then Amazon started deleting any review that mentioned spamming, so now I make up something about the quality of the product instead. This pollutes the review process and diminishes its usefulness, but at least I get my revenge. 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.
Between encouraging your daughter to write dishonest reviews for money and clogging up the review process yourself, you sound like a real winner. This people is why this country is so fucked up. People actually pat themselves on the back for being sociopathic asswipes.
My daughter makes money on Fiverr writing fake reviews
...and what have you done to correct this? Your daughter is learning fraud.
Of course, at this point it's likely already too late. She'll always use her intelligence to swindle people.
Congrats on making the world that much shittier.
Does anything about her doing this bother you, from a moral or ethical standpoint?
On one hand it seems harmless, but if you, yes you were to spend your hard-earned money on a crappy product and then found that you'd based your buying decision on secretly-incentivized reviews, would you not feel that you'd been mislead, lied to, or deceived?
If my son were to do this, I couldn't help but feel that he wasn't the person I'd hoped he be.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Does anything about her doing this bother you, from a moral or ethical standpoint?
Yes, but she is a 19 year old adult, so she makes her own decisions. I can think of about a zillion other things she could be doing that would bother me more.