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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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @08:00PM
I run into a considerable number of reviews from people who have been given the product for free. I have never seen a review less than 4 stars for those reviews. Some of those reviewers have obvious chips on their shoulders, presumably from people leaving comments in their other reviews questioning their honesty, so they'll add a whole paragraph on how impartial they are and the fact that they got it for free (they always use the same canned "free or at a discount" statement) makes no difference to them. And to them I say "bullshit". Show me a handful of 2-star reviews for free items and I might change my tune. Save me the pathetic paragraph about how impartial you are when you are too afraid to give up your gravy train of free stuff to give a really honest review.
Not too long ago I was searching for a precision screwdriver set. One set had 22 reviews. All but one of the reviews were from people who got it free for their "honest" review, and call me cynical, but those 21 reviews were all 4 or 5 stars (the one lone one was 3-stars).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @09:26PM
Oh, I forgot to add, I wish I could filter out the "I got this for free" reviews. I see that they will let you see the "verified purchase" reviews first. I'd also like to filter out the Vine reviews too for the same reason of conflict of interest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @01:13AM
Amazon has recently forbidden those kinds of reviews unless they got the product through Amazon's vine program.
So, its a big improvement, but not 100%
PS, the reason they had that standard line about how they got but are impartial it is because that disclosure was the rule (from amazon or maybe the FTC) before amazon decided to disallow them completely.