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Amazon Puts New Limit On Customer Reviews: No More Than 5 a Week Except For Verified Purchases (geekwire.com)
Amazon says it will start capping the number of product reviews any customer can submit in a given week, limiting each person to five/week except for products that have been verified by the company as purchased by the reviewer. From a GeekWire report: Books, music and video are exempt from the limit, but the new cap applies to the rest of Amazon's vast online selection of products. It's the latest move by the e-commerce giant to police its online reviews, a critical resource used by many online shoppers to assess products before buying. The news comes during the peak holiday shopping season, the most important time of year for Amazon, as the company tries to get more people comfortable with doing more of their shopping online. An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the changes in a message to GeekWire, and they're spelled out in Amazon's updated Community Guidelines.
TBH, I would much prefer that *only* verified buyers review an item.
Yeah, I admit that the joke reviews are often seriously great comedy, but honestly - verified buyers only means that potential buyers will know one way or the other if the thing is worthwhile. This is especially true when it comes to anything political, or anything sold by Twitter's Target Of The Week - hordes of frothing people with a keyboard and a bad case of butthurt (or worse, SJW fever) flood the item with bad reviews, even though they've never paid money for the thing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The overall result is that instead of 20 fake reviews from a single account, there are now 20 fake reviews spread over four different accounts. This just makes it more inconvenient for the people posting fake reviews, but doesn't really do anything to stop them. Maybe that makes it economically infeasible for a few of them and they go on to something more economically viable for them like pimping their grandmother, but this isn't going to be that big of a shakeup.
I don't get why Amazon or any shopping site would allow non-buyers to review stuff, or even conversely (aside from sociopathic trolls) why people would review products they didn't get from there. If I bought something from Bed, Bath & Beyond and didn't like it, I'd sort it out w/ them, and maybe post something on the product's website, but I wouldn't post that on Amazon. Unless I bought the product in question from there.
If it's a real scam, take them to court or the BBB, but other than that, it's not my job to put companies out of business and even more people out of work