from the Fake-News...-Triple-Pun-Intended dept.
Admittedly this is more of a Sla... I mean Soyvertisement. However, I just heard about it this weekend, and it sounds both interesting and useful. I thought others might find it interesting as well
Long story short: ReviewMeta is a website which can be used to try to detect fake reviews on Amazon.
In my defense, it is somewhat technologically interesting. The system supposedly uses various heuristics and algorithms in order to accomplish this, such as searching for suspicious submission patterns, text entered, and timing windows to try to find fakes.
The "news" source I heard it from was a radio/podcast at: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370
Related Stories
Amazon still hasn't fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews:
Like thousands of other parents, I decided to get my kids a cheap drone for Christmas. I spent $24 for a plastic flying machine with rudimentary collision-avoidance capabilities. A plastic cage mostly kept small fingers away from the four propellers. The kids were delighted for the first couple of hours.
[...] The kids enjoyed the drone so much in its few brief hours of functionality that I thought I might buy them another one.... If I did more research and spent a bit more money, I hoped I could find a higher-quality model that wouldn't fall apart after a few hours.
So I went to Amazon.com, searched for "children's drone," and sorted by "average customer review," figuring the best-reviewed drones were likely to be high quality. They weren't.
[...] "Absolutely love this honey," wrote one reviewer in the UK in March 2019. "It's quite different from any supermarket-purchased honey I've tried."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @10:39AM (3 children)
Actually, I find by far the most helpful reviews to come from pissed off people who experienced a disappointment and took their woe to the reviews.
You have to read the entry carefully.... is this a pissed off customer, is it some ignoramus who had no reason buying something like that in the first place? Or is it a competitor trying to make the other guy look bad. Or even worse, a spite review... just pure revenge trying to groundlessly destroy someone's listing.
Five star reviews are a dime a dozen... but I will fish through them. If I get a lot of them that read like ad copy, then I have a tendency to dismiss all the positive reviews as tainted, I know good and well that whole forum has been targeted by a "reputation management agency", and read mostly the negative ones... and what I am looking for is documentation to poor manufacture or design. A lot of people will give something a three-star, because the liked the concept, but the product itself was lacking, and in a good review, they are very specific about exactly how the product failed to meet their expectations.
I have posted quite a few Amazon reviews myself, and have some highly rated. One of the highest rated ones was where I spilled the beans on a design shortcoming on a nice little flashlight, but it does have an irritating failure mode in which the tail switch becomes erratic, and repeated hitting and twisting fails to re-establish a stable connection... turns out there is a little ring in the end cap, that screws in if you can get a pair of needle nose pliers into the two little holes and tighten it up. I still liked the flashlight, but knew not everyone would see what the problem was and might throw a perfectly good flashlight away only because the aluminum tail cap retaining ring will corrode within a month and make an erratic connection which will drive someone trying to use the flashlight nuts. ( Ultrafire WF-502B ). I still think its a wonderful little flashlight... as long as you know about that little retaining ring that works loose once in a while. You can fix it with a paper clip if you don't have pliers small enough to go into the holes.
You can generally tell by reading the thing whether you have a pleased customer replying as a "thank you, job well done", a salesman, or someone posting in the heat of passion over getting taken on sour goods. But do not pay too much attention to the one-stars either... a lot of those come from ignoramuses that have unrealistic expectations. You have to read what they write, and make your mind up from there. Some of the one stars are justified. I don't think I have ever left one though. I think the lowest I ever ranked anything was 3-star, and left a good deal of text over why. I will be very specific. The worst I had was an 18650 battery holder that fell quite a bit short of what I expected, but it did work.
If there is no text with the rating, its useless.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:42PM
Agreed on the "3-star" reviews. Those are often the most informative, because they tend to be balanced and list both pros and cons. Someone who is able to do so is often looking at the product more objectively. 5-star reviews are often worthless, unless it's a truly extraordinary product and/or the reviewer is informed and honest enough to note any minor flaws even while acknowledging the overall goodness of the product. 1-star reviews are sometimes useful for serious flaws, but as you point out, they are also frequently from someone who doesn't know what they're doing (they bought the wrong product for their application, or didn't use it correctly, or didn't actually like what the product does in the first place, etc.) or just has an overreaction to something stupid and unrelated to product quality (e.g., "Shipping speed was terrible!" "Why do they make this product in blue? Blue is stupid." etc.). And yes, occasionally fake reviews from competitors.
So, 2-star and 3-star are where I tend to look most. Such reviewers are often objective enough to recognize a product isn't all bad, but they'll also have some serious criticism.
I've found Amazon's review ranking system has changed for the worse over the years. And I seriously suspect that it tries to hide the more damning reviews. After all, Amazon is in the business of selling products, so having prominent top reviews saying a product is crap isn't generally good for anyone. (And, as any good salesman knows, the few returns you get even from crappy products are often worth the sales to many people who shrug when the thing breaks or never get around to returning.)
For a while, several years back, I wrote a number of reviews for Amazon. My most common ranking was probably 2-star and 3-star, because most of the things I was motivated to write reviews for were things that I thought had some significant flaws but which still had some merit. I tended to try to be objective and give nuance, and several of my reviews got a large amount of positive feedback (some hundreds of upvotes). For a few books, I had the most useful critical review (or whatever they called it) for a long time because of that, and for a couple books my review was ranked first in the list or at least among the top visible reviews.
No longer. Those reviews have now been buried among other negative reviews, and if you even search specifically in 2-star or 3-star rankings, you'll have to dig a while to find mine... even though they are very detailed and have lots of positive votes.
So I stopped writing long nuanced reviews for the most part. Why should I bother when the system buries reviews that are voted most helpful?
(And note that my reviews were older, and I can understand somewhat privileging newer reviews for many products, since manufacturing quality can change, etc. But most book reviews are based on the content of the book, which doesn't tend to change over time -- significant new book editions generally get a new Amazon page. So why should a book review from last month with 2 upvotes be promoted to the main page over one from a few years back with 200 upvotes? My admittedly casual look at this trend seems to indicate that negative reviews age faster and take more positive feedback to land on the top visible reviews list for a product.)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 08 2018, @04:39PM (1 child)
That's how I shop. I sort reviews from worst to best and read through them. A 5 star works great review is completely worthless compared to the one star containing a detailed rant about what exactly broke and why/how.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:49AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:44PM (2 children)
... when it works on the entire internet and not just on Amazon.
https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1610398084 [reviewmeta.com]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday August 08 2018, @04:29PM
I rate internet a 7. It has Social Media, it has porn stars. But it also has ISIS and Fake News (the failing @nytimes [twitter.com], @NBCNews [twitter.com], @ABC [twitter.com], @CBS [twitter.com], @CNN [twitter.com] & @BBC [twitter.com]). We're losing so many people to them. Would be PERFECTO if we had some way of closing internet up -- like China has. Talk to Sundar from Google?
(Score: 1) by Paradise Pete on Wednesday August 08 2018, @04:55PM
Fakespot [fakespot.com] is pretty good.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:56PM
great article
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh