2006
Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’ — Amazon is in trouble (mashable.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 70 points 3 years ago* (26 children)

Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It's manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.

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  • [–] 58 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    And unfortunately Firefox is sitting at 2 to 3% so even if Amazon were dependant on fake reviews, they have little to fear due to the low marketshare.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    Amazon makes a lot of money facilitating the sales of counterfeit goods.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    Sure. But they'd make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.

    They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon's market share.

    But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it's hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say...they make money either way, so it's not the highest-priority problem to fix--though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they've tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.

    But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that's fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too--likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole

    Lol, as of this hasn't already happened

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (8 children)

    I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don't show it with the amount they spend on it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (7 children)

    There are some things you can really only buy there. Which is why I bigly agree with the US government that they're a bigly monopoly bigly abusing their monopoly power (bigly).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    It extra sucks for rural America where you might only have a handful of stores to pick from and all are discount stores like Walmart and Dollar General. Makes it hard to buy better quality/up market items

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

    buy better quality/up market items

    I find this to be a challenge in general. Amazon and Walmart killed recognizable name brands as quality markers. Walmart forced their suppliers (some of which were name brands) down in quality and prices in order to maintain shelf space, and Amazon is just a haven for rip-off and junk goods.

    But the only places you can find quality with good warranty periods in my experience is ultra-high end suppliers in very top line stores. For instance, I'm trying to buy a leather jacket and everywhere I look both online or in person seems like a junk expo...except if you look at very high end stuff (800+ minimum, 1-2k median).

    I've had similar problems with furniture, and even home goods recently. The only place I've had any luck at all is Costco.

    PS: I do agree that small town America gets even more screwed because they don't have the high end stores to speak of.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Regarding furniture, check the Amish furniture stores! They make stuff that your grandkids will resent receiving as inheritance because they'll be how many decades old and still in perfectly serviceable condition

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm in CA, I dunno if that's around here. But it is good advice if you have local Amish.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    So if there's a Lancaster in your state (which there is) there's a good chance there is an Amish population, and they do tend to open showrooms in major cities to facilitate ordering. Do some googling and you should be able to find some (I did). The Amish have some incredibly skilled carpenters and if you're willing to spend the cash you'll get some absolutely wonderful furniture

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Got any examples? Between Walmart, Etsy, AliExpress, Best Buy, MonoPrice, Home Depot, and Wayfair, plus the fact that nearly every major store has online shopping and delivery...I really can't think of anything I could only get on Amazon. To be quite frank, I think the US government's case is sorta ridiculous.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.

    Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Why would this hurt Amazon?

    A product with 2002 reviews suddenly has only 2 reviews, and they are not the nicest ones... Whole Amazon with 2002 gazillion reviews suddenly has only 2 gazillion... :-)

    Seriously:

    I guess they own several of these "companies" where you can buy fake reviews for your product. And now these are facing their revenues sinking.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Do you have any evidence of that? I used to work for Amazon (as a programmer working on financial data, not delivering packages or anything), and they took review quality pretty damn seriously. They knew full well that customers losing faith in the quality of products on Amazon, it could crater their business.

    If some product with 2002 reviews suddenly drops to 2 reviews, 1.5 stars average...it'll sink to the bottom of pages of results, and people will click on a different one, with better reviews. It's not like they only have a couple products to offer, and they make money on more or less all of them.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I can't even begin to count how many times I have come acrossa slew of 5 star reviews for something COMPLETELY unrelated to the listed item at the very top of search results. Product: Wood Headphone Stand. Review: This kitchen whisk is so amazing, it saved my marriage, 23 out of 5 stars.

    OH and don't forget the reviewer that when you access their profile you see that they have posted 76 reviews in a single day and every single one of them is 5 stars with the title "Great 'X'! " where x is the product title.

    Don't get me wrong, I used Amazon back when it only sold books and I've been using Prime since it came out non-stop but the quality of the items, the search results, and the trust I have in the platform has gone waaaaaaaaaay down.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    That's basically an exploit. Different 'products' can be related, and the reviews are supposed to be useful across them. The most obvious examples are just different colors of socks, or different sizes of shirt. Sometimes it's variants on a product: one with a handle and one without, or different models of TV with the same screen, or whatever.

    But it's not Amazon who makes those connections, it's the companies entering product data. Some of them abuse it, and say products are related when they're not at all. Since there's millions of products listed, it takes time to identify and fix the false associations. In the meantime: people looking for headphone stands see reviews for whisks.

    But yeah, quality has gone down. It hits some product categories a lot worse than others: cheap electronics is a shitshow.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago*

    I think he's just suggesting that the plugin filters it down to what an algorithm considers legitimate. These plugins usually only filter when you click the item so it wouldn't necessarily move the result down, just reduce potential purchases (which would eventually drop the result.

    E: I'm probably stating the obvious above but the damage to bottom line might be after repeat findings until a user ultimately decides Amazon is mostly untrustworthy.

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