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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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(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.