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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Online marketplace Amazon has placed a limit on the number of reviews shoppers can leave on the site.
In a bid to put a stop to false feedback, people can now write only five reviews a week of items not bought via the online store.
The change applies to most products and is part of efforts to clamp down on people selling positive comments.
The change is Amazon's latest step in its battle to ensure users trust its listings.
Hopefully this won't stop the sarcastic reviews that some serious products have attracted. They may be fake but they can be tremendously entertaining.
-- submitted from IRC
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Friday December 02 2016, @05:10AM
Actually, I was surprised Amazon would let me post a review of something I did not buy from them. Seems like being able to yap about something without putting your money where your mouth is would just invite shill reviews.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 02 2016, @05:15AM
There is always the small possibility that you bought the product from another source, so Amazon would have no record.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday December 02 2016, @05:43AM
And again, then why exactly would Amazon want their feedback? Items available at different big retailers are often subtly different, or are packaged/stored/sold differently, which might impact perception of product... And that's assuming you're not just attracting shills or irrational people who just want to go online and vent somewhere.
I understood the practice back in the 90s when Amazon was mostly a bookstore, and most people were reviewing a text that would be basically identical even in different printings or bindings or whatever. And back then there were few online forums for finding reviews (certainly not with Amazon's exhaustive booklist), so it helped cement Amazon as the place for finding as well as buying books.
But these rationales don't apply to the broader product base now offered, and online reviews of things are everywhere... So I assume the number of problematic reviews exceeds the benefit from non-vetified purchased these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @09:25AM
> Items available at different big retailers are often subtly different, or are packaged/stored/sold differently,
Have you ever used Amazon?
Because items available at amazon are often subtly different, or are packaged/stored/sold differently,
If a product has multiple variations, like say a 2TB and a 4TB external hard disk, [amazon.com] amazon mixes the reviews for all of them into one big pot. Sometimes the specific variant is noted in the review itself, lots of times it is not.
Furthermore, Amazon isn't the only seller on Amazon. Most listings have multiple sellers [amazon.com] and they mix the reviews for all the sellers into one big pot too. Hell, sometimes amazon ships you product from the inventor of a different seller than you ordered from because that's what is in your nearest warehouse and amazon just assumes they are all identical.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday December 02 2016, @02:06PM
I ran into that problem with reviews for multiple products with slightly different attributes e.g. storage capacities for drives and portable USB batteries, or different lengths of the same charging cable, but discovered that if you go to the actual reviews page (not just the review section on the main product page) it does let you filter out everything except the specific product you're looking at. For the 4TB drive you linked to, for example, the review page has a Format filter "Show only reviews for Capacity: 4TB | Color: black".
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 02 2016, @02:54PM
For when the blue version of the drive has a higher failure rate ;)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:24PM
Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. I bought a few USB battery banks recently from Anker where they modified the design but didn't change the actual product model or version or anything. So you'd have old reviews stating that it supports pass-through charging, and new reviews stating that it doesn't, and they're both correct and you can't filter them out because as far as Amazon is concerned it's the exact same product.
(FWIW, Anker support handled the issue quite well, and I now buy their products whenever possible. Trying to name and *not* shame)
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday December 02 2016, @10:41AM
Uhhhh...because there is tons of stuff that is the same no matter where you buy them? I've submitted reviews on bass guitars, foot pedals, amps, DSPs, a mixer, CPUs,GPUs, hard drives, and motherboards, only about a quarter of which I had bought directly from them but with all those items its the same everywhere you go and with the amount of thumbs ups and follow up questions I have gotten I think its safe to say folks like having someone who actually owns the stuff and knows a bit about the tech writing a review and answering questions through the comments.
At the end of the day this helps Amazon as people don't want the same marketing blurb BS reviews (and frankly most of us can spot those real easy, shills still don't know how to talk without marketing speak) or the uninformed "this sucks!" level of review so having people that actually know the gear, its pluses and minuses, so that a user can feel informed before they hit the buy button? Is a good thing.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday December 02 2016, @02:33PM
but with all those items its the same everywhere you go
Except when people review the wrong product. I've seen it a lot of times on Amazon -- sometimes it's clearly a shill who targeted the wrong product, sometimes it's clear to someone who actually owns the product that the person is confused, and sometimes it only comes out in comments.
and with the amount of thumbs ups and follow up questions I have gotten I think its safe to say folks like having someone who actually owns the stuff and knows a bit about the tech writing a review and answering questions through the comments.
And my bolded point is again the issue. Verifying purchase at least is a check on the fact that you likely own the stuff.
Look -- I think it's GREAT that you want to share your knowledge like that, and I know a lot of other people who do too. The question is NOT whether you provide a good service (and I have no doubt you could) -- the question for Amazon is whether the number of "good reviews" by people like you still exceeds the number of "bad reviews" generated by shills, spam, negative "reviews" by competitors, people who are confused about what product they actually bought, etc. Given the number of rather obvious "shill" reviews I've seen on Amazon in the past few years seems to have grown exponentially, or reviews that clearly aren't about the product in question... I think the case for reviews without a verified purchase is getting less clear.
And thus the question for Amazon becomes: are they trying to host product reviews of THEIR merchandise, or are they trying to be a blogging platform for folks who like to write reviews? The DESIGN of the site suggests the former, but if they are really aiming for the latter, there's better things they could do to improve the experience for both the "bloggers" and the customers.
people that actually know the gear, its pluses and minuses, so that a user can feel informed before they hit the buy button? Is a good thing.
So what you're saying is that "you actually know the gear," but you seem to prefer to buy a lot of stuff elsewhere. Why not put your effort into posting reviews and creating that wonderful culture on the websites of companies you actually purchase stuff from? Just wondering.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:53AM
The problem with your entire line of reasoning, one which I would argue makes it entirely moot, is thus...since Amazon opened up their market to third party resellers even products sold on amazon may not be the real thing so simply saying "it was bought here" doesn't mean shit anymore. I have seen Chibsons and Chenders (which for those that do not know are fake Gibson and Fender guitars, sold to deceive buyers into thinking they have the real thing but are in reality EXTREMELY subpar), more fake sandisk and kingston memory than I can count, fake laptop batteries, hell didn't we recently have an article here about a woman that bought one of those hoverboards from amazon that turned out to be a fake and burnt her house down?
I would argue that a few shill posts, which frankly could trivially be dealt with with a community policing system similar to what we have here with downvotes burying a review after X number of downvotes, is frankly far from the biggest issue amazon is facing right now. In fact I would argue that they NEED informed buyers that shop at other sites besides theirs as informed shoppers are buying less and less from them as their habit of throwing third party mechandise in with their own in the warehouses makes shopping with amazon more and more a game of "did I get fucked?" roulette with the odds of whether you did or not depending on how easy it is for Chinese companies to knock off the product in question.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday December 02 2016, @05:55AM
I used to buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. In a way, I felt it almost a duty to report back my impressions of the product, because I had also used those reviews left by others as a basis for my own decision to purchase or not. It was just my way of paying back into the system.
Most of the stuff I bought from them was excellent. A couple of things were disappointing, but they made it right.
I would use their review system to not only report back things I liked or disliked about the product, I would also leave tidbits on things like the specs on loseables ( like chargers ), so that if anyone was searching for replacement loseables, they could find a generic.
One day, something suddenly started where both sides simply stopped talking. Usually when I was trying to do a purchase. Just wait and wait. Page never loads. I watched CPU and network usage... no apparent bottleneck there.
I fussed about it on their discussion boards, but seemed all I attracted was some corporate guy telling me it was my fault for having an older system that could not keep up with their modern corporate system. Other people seemed to be having the same problem as I, but we were too much in a minority.
My problem was so specific to Amazon I seriously thought I had contracted a piece of malware specific to Amazon customers - with the hangups I was encountering were likely some script attempting to relay copies of my Amazon business to third parties.
However, I was of the distinct impression that the Amazonian mindset was that no-one cared to help me get to the root of this. Almost as if a fire was raging in the warehouse, no action would be taken by corporate until the fire was in the boardroom. Being I have worked corporate before, I could certainly understand this kind of mindset.
There was nothing their customer service bot could help me with.
I was hoping to get an Amazon IT guy to watch the packet transfer from his end and tell me who was dropping the ball. I could not tell. From my end ( monitoring with Wireshark ), I would send my last packet and get nothing back.
With the result being that awkward silence where both of us sit there an look at each other, both seemingly expecting the other to do something.
I ended up switching everything to AliExpress out of China.
I was getting to be one of their top reviewers too... nearing the top thousand.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @05:17AM
Amazon loves their shills. And since they are hawking such amazing items everybody will be more likely to give them all their money.
"Only" 5 items a week you haven't even bought is nothing but an empty gesture.
Fuck Amazon and their userbase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies [wikipedia.org]