Some months back I gave a so so review on AirBNB and had it removed. I asked why, I was sent a link and cut and pasted guidelines. Responding using Reason led to being completely ignored.

Then I discovered a reddit subgroup where hosts tell each other tips to easily get reviews removed.

The whole review system has become corrupted. The complaint is that only motivated people put positive or negative reviews, which is only partially true. It's actually gaslighting by marketing people.

Not surprised by Amazon. Fakespot helps somewhat it seems... as does not ordering from Amazon where possible. I just ordered a jacket with a 20 pct coupon from a sporting goods store that sells the same item on Amazon.. without the 20 pct discount.

The trick is to remove negative reviews that violate guidelines, but for positive reviews that violate common sense and ethics, nyet.

Consumer reports is one that comes to mind (they are also non-profit), as well as rtings. If you are looking for reviews for more niche products though, your pretty much on your own when it comes to finding out if its good or not.

https://terrylove.com/forums/index.php?threads/consumer-repo... is an example.

You used to be able to find forums and similar for almost anything; now you’re left with Reddit threads and half-remembered comments. Anything under $50 is just a crapshoot.

When google removed the option to search discussion boards I knew the internet was changing and the changes were going to be bad. Google discussion search was the most powerful tool to find real world information. You could put in the model number of some product you knew nothing about (e.g. a camera or boat motor) and discussion search results would reveal many different forum threads where professionals and aficionados had discussed the product in detail; those same forums were already hard to find and a search for "boat motor forum" wouldn't necessarily bring you to the same forums and even if so, requires many extra steps to arrive at the same thread.

They make money through affiliate links, but they claim that the writers/reviewers have no knowledge of which companies have affiliate relationships with the Wirecutter so it doesn't bias their picks.

That said rtings at least standardizes their tests so you can ignore the editorialized part of the review.

It convinced me that the people writing these "reviews" have no idea what they're talking about and cannot be trusted. When the recommendations are for categories that I'm not an expert in, they can recommend whatever they want and I can't dispute it. When it's for a category that I know something about, and the recommendation is for the very worst kind of cheap junk product, it does raise a lot of doubt in my mind.

Not wanting to derail the discussion but if it was that that put you of the review site you mention, it could be worth reconsidering..

And, while I like the idea, there are two main details preventing me from pursuing it:

- Moderating content provided by users is exhausting/costly. - I see no other way than ads to fund it, while it can potentially work as a paid app, it won't work until there is enough content (the chicken-egg problem).

1. https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to...

Wow, thanks for sharing the post.

Limiting the scope to just product reviews could make the idea a lot more feasible. Since you would be putting yourself directly in the purchasing path it might be easier to monetize the extension too.

What subreddit is that?

I've done numerous reviews over the years and have never got such a notication, but your comment has me wondering if my reviews are still there!

Amazon did notify me my review got yanked.

I've heard it described as "malicious compliance."

Which is unfortunately still Chrome-only...

EDIT: I guess at no point is Amazon actually harmed by this scheme. However, the companies trying to buy 5-star reviews are themselves exploited to the extent that people do this.

The cost to the original company is a lost sale, a lost product, and $20 [lost] in exchange for a legitimate looking 5-star review (from someone who is not a bot). That may well be worth it for the company, so I'm not sure this scheme would actually stop dishonest reviews, only make it worse.

Sometimes when I see a product being sold FBA I will do a search on Alibaba (they’re always on Alibaba) to find the wholesale price. I’ve found that the markup on most products is high enough that if a seller were to give every buyer $20, they’d still be making money.

(Buying reviews might actually be illegal though, so that's a strong argument to not do it.)

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/

Specifically the chapter "Introducing... the Scrub" discusses exactly this sentiment.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub

> In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely.

Playing To Win is about people who refuse to learn the rules of a game. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that people who understand the rules very well are pointing out that they have holes in them.

Scrub statement: "throws are cheap". Informed statement: "the way SF2 tick throw setups work biases the gameplay too far in favor of the player with offensive agency." You'll note that the latter makes no mistake about the purpose of the rules and makes no judgments about players using the tools provided. Instead it focuses on system interactions and their net result. You'll note that almost every big fighting game in the 20 years since the end of the SF2 series has reduced the power of tick throws by means of frame data or broader system changes. Players generally decided that getting the first knockdown should not have that much influence over a match.

Scrub statement: "I hate people who get upset at review purchasing." Informed statement: "Review purchasing makes the buying process worse for everyone by creating incentives to deceive buyers, increasing costs for sellers that purchase reviews and reducing sales to sellers who do not. It shifts the Nash equilibrium towards paying more for lower-quality products." Again, the latter examines the system interactions and emergent behavior rather than making moral judgments about the participants.

Second, I have the same disagreement with you as I do with the other chains. Which is that, de facto paying for reviews is currently a rule in the system. I can tell it's a rule because it's happening, and there's no rules or punishment appearing stop it. In video games, the rules are explicitly coded and nothing beyond that code is permitted. This is why bugs vs intended behaviour becomes a conversation of intent, because the code is obviously allowing it and the code is the ruleset.

But that's not true in real life. And that's the part that all responses like yours are missing. There's a game being played at Amazon, where boosting your review stats correlated with boosting your sales stats. Except the permitted ruleset is everything not explicitly prohibited and punished by Amazon. Complaining about people buying reviews is just being a scrub not understanding the rules. The correct conversation to be having is the same as when an apparent bug is found in a game: Is this intended behaviour from Amazon's perspective, and if not what active action are they going to do about it?

They can patch the glitch to restore what people considered the normal, designed, and balanced gameplay, or they can state that's just how the system works now and people need to choose whether to accept that or not and play something else.

Amazon can fix (or attempt to at least) the problem and make it harder for sellers to get 5 star reviews and lower reviews averages for some big selling items, or they can choose to do nothing, and some people will decide to leave and shop elsewhere because they can't trust the site and reviews.

Actually, there's a third option, which is that they can say they are doing everything they can to fix the problem while not doing much, therefore maximizing both reviews/profit as well as customer satisfaction in the short term. If they actually start fixing the problem before too long, it might be the maximal solution for them, but if they take too long their reputation will suffer even more (and it may give competitors a toe-hold). I suspect Amazon is doing this. I have no idea if they can go longer, are at the point they need to change, or are too late, but as a customer it sucks right now.

(Luigi Barzini mentions an Italian book on card-playing--written, I think, by a clergyman--that begins "Always try to see your opponents' cards." He was trying to point out the light value to that Italians assign to official rules.)

Having that "arbitrary" throw mechanic in the game was done intentionally to make the game more balanced and enjoyable for the customer. The only people complaining about it are very very early beginners, who don't realize that removing that mechanic would completely break the game balance and make it unplayable. It is an advertised feature, not a bug, in this specific scenario.

I don't think that we can say the same about paid reviews on Amazon. It isn't a rule (i.e., Amazon doesn't require every seller to offer gift cards in exchange for 5-star reviews), and it doesn't exist to increase the value that Amazon marketplace provides to their customers, it does the opposite.

P.S. I actually agree with what you said completely. It just that the comment that brought up the videogame analogy didn't realize how completely different the situation there was, so it ended up derailing the further chain of arguments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

A charitable view would be that Amazon is trying to create a system that rewards fair sellers and provides unbiased reviews to consumers, while unscrupulous actors attempt to defeat that by engaging in new forms of grift. If the unscrupulous actors are 10% less effective because of Amazon's efforts, does that mean the "purpose" of the system has shifted 10% away from honest dealing? If Amazon all but eliminates dishonesty, does that mean the "purpose" of the system is to have an ever present, tiny baseline of fraud? At that point, better to use a different word.

It's because of strategic equivocation between the "actor" being implied in the "purpose." The implication is that Amazon creates the system and this is their purpose, but the cybernetician's definition of purpose is more like "the role this system plays in the overall society in light of all the infinite restrictions on everyone's behavior."

I would agree with that until something like this happens, where Amazon prevents people from letting other people know that the reviews are paid.

> If the unscrupulous actors are 10% less effective because of Amazon's efforts, does that mean the "purpose" of the system has shifted 10% away from honest dealing? If Amazon all but eliminates dishonesty, does that mean the "purpose" of the system is to have an ever present, tiny baseline of fraud? At that point, better to use a different word.

I'll think on your point. I'm not sure how to quantify purposefulness.

> It's because of strategic equivocation between the "actor" being implied in the "purpose." The implication is that Amazon creates the system and this is their purpose, but the cybernetician's definition of purpose is more like "the role this system plays in the overall society in light of all the infinite restrictions on everyone's behavior."

Point taken.

> If you have two actors within a system that are at odds, using the term "purpose" to refer to the system is either mostly incoherent, or (in most cases) trying to import the connotation of "purpose" into a conversation.

I think that one can still imagine that the point of a competitive endeavor is separate from the purpose of the competitors involved in the system.

Thanks for the reply, I'll consider your ideas.

It's very hard to balance a game to be fun both for most players and for the e-sports players.

Note also that the "average" player, the one that is average in the sense of being randomly picked among the players playing at any specific time, is likely to spend a lot of time in the game, and therefore is also likely to be exceptionally good - for instance the "most played" games have a median gameplay time of only ~30 hours!

I am with you on this one. Not in the least part, because I don't think that the analogy the parent comment brought up is valid here at all (and I am saying that as someone who actually read that book they mentioned).

In the example the parent comment brought up, it even says "[...]throwing is an integral part of the design - it's meant to be there[...]". That throwing mechanic was an intentional addition to the game, to counter-balance people who constantly block. The only people complaining about it are those who don't understand the game well or early beginners (we are talking someone who never played any fighting games before at all). Every single person playing competitively understands that without throws, the balance would be completely off, and the game would become unplayable competitively. In fact, it would become a completely different kind of game altogether. And throws aren't some hidden feature, it is featured prominently in tutorials and all.

While with gift cards in exchange for amazon reviews, it isn't an intentional mechanic advertised as a feature of the service. Amazon doesn't come out and say "this is one of our core features, without it our service would go down the drain and become unusable." It is still against the rules, and I cannot think of any logical reason it is helpful for buyers in terms of making Amazon.com a better marketplace (aside from the cash gain to the customer writing the paid review, but that's just a personal gain and doesn't make the marketplace better).

At a deeper level, that people won't "exploit the brokenness for their own gain" is key to a functioning society. Just as the promise of laying out rules in detail (expert systems) failed to capture the complexity required to get high-functioning AI, societies can not function by formal rules (laws and regulations) alone. There are sorts of complexities about norms, mores, and moral codes that are important to keep societies and organizations running. What is expected behavior when everyone is queued up to buy tickets at an event, but there is no formal sign saying "please queue here"? I mean you could audiciously walk up, stand next to the person in front of the line, and then walk up to the windows when they say "next please" and not be breaking any written rule, but everyone sure would be angry, and if everyone did it you'd have near total anarachy where the pushiest or strongest always got to the front of the line first.

One of the biggest problems with internet scale is that its pretty easy to start running into individuals who ARE ok with exploiting the rules, or just ignoring them. This can be because they are from societies with different norms than the one they are encountering online, or just because they are in the small minority of people who just don't care. This effect is aided and abetted by the relative anonymity online. If you cut in line, people who you can see and here are going to yell at you right now. Break the social norm (or actual policy) of not paying for reviews and you'll most likely just get a strongly worded letter and possible ban on selling (which is easy enough to get around).

In short though, not exploiting a broken rule or system just because its broken isn't silly. Its the a huge part of having a functioning society.

Again, the above presupposes intentional design, or judgement that emergent behavior nonetheless keeps gameplay in balance..

What's more, changing a rule can make a game fundamentally different experience that appeals to a new audience. Simple rules (no sniper in counter strike for example) lead to a different game that a subset of the addressable audience finds more enjoyable.

I'll finish with taking a quibble with the statement that "winning is not meant to be equally divided among players." That is true to a degree, but it also should not be overly concentrated among just a few. It is not fun to be consistently dominated and a game where a feeling of success or enjoyment is only accessible to a select few is unlikely to attract much of an audience.

I guess my viewpoint assumes that gameplay is legitimately & deliberately balanced. I suppose this is much harder in videogames with game characters having different skill sets. It's much harder to evaluate whether or not there is balance between them than, say, Monopoly: Everyone starts the same there-- the dog isn't any better off than the thimble. (Though I usually play as the dog, and pretend the thimble is a fire hydrant as I pass it by & do what dogs do... I may not be very mature for my age. It makes my kids laugh though)

In the long term, someone will exploit that brokenness. The key to a functioning society is repairing those broken places imo.

Doing something which is technically legal, benefits you, but causes other players to “hate playing” is not a good long term strategy. This normally ends with either the person being rejected, or, if the rest of people are nice, the group itself disbanding.

Nothing silly about this.

The less money I have, the more incentive I have to take advantage of these schemes. For me, the effort of earning 20$ this way would make this a few hundred dollars net loss (compared to working my job instead). So yeah, give me a 1000$ coupon and I am game!

For the same reason, I rarely return items I buy if they are in the under 50$ category, or write negative reviews for products that suck. It's just a waste of time, considering time is the most precious resource, and it is also money. I often write positive reviews for products that amaze me (doesn't happen too often), but here the product gave me so much value that I am willing to spend my time for this.

Maybe not in the short term, but in the long term it could. There are already things I haven't purchased because the review contents just didn't seem right, lots of 5 star and 1 star, practically no 3 or 4 star.

I can't be the only one, and the situation is only getting worse.

What might hurt amazon ia if people who buy junk get mad and reduce overall Amazon shopping even for good products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT4IJYzbMi0

Maybe there should be a site with current gift card offers - call it something like reviewbribes.com?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038734

And now we are left to wonder if the price deltas are helping middlemen retailers fund these review manipulation shenanigans, so why not just cut out the amazon exploit portion out of the equation?

Here on HN, we have a savvy audience that understands the problem on Amazon with counterfeits, fakes, and low-quality items. I don't usually have this problem myself, because I go out of my way to buy things from sellers that I recognize, such as Logitech for instance, which owns the top results for "webcam" even though they have fewer reviews and higher prices.

In your case, I think there are warning signs for the product in question. An unknown seller hawking a cheap knock-off looking webcam with a fake sale price... I really do not enjoy being the devil's advocate but, come on.

Amazon might reprimand the seller. They might even ban them. But if so, they will just pop back up over night with a new name. Their cheapo products are unlabelled, unbranded and modestly packaged for exactly this benefit.

I'm honestly shocked by this comment - warning sides aside, paying for reviews should cause a ban.

I am as unconvinced by this argument about "popping back" as I am by people who say that raising taxes is useless because people will just hide their money.

So sellers are doing a sort of "money laundering" of product listings, placing new items, descriptions, and photos over an existing item.

The likely result of that policy would be that scammers would order the product of their competitors, take a picture of it with fake gift cards, report it to Amazon, and drive out the non-scummy vendors.

No, they will pay for those and have them soon enough. Even the OP says the product was sitting at >4,000 reviews at time of purchase and now is over 12,000. The reviews are easy to come by, of course.

I am not pointing out that the seller here is right by any means. I fully agree that paying for 5-star reviews is reprehensible and unethical, and it's similarly unethical for ANY marketplace to feature items that have paid for positive reviews. But now we've arrived at a part that is beyond Amazon itself, haven't we? The concept of "paid positive reviews" is not confined to Amazon, naturally.

This is why it's important to be a "literate consumer". That is to say, keen and discerning and aware. Like I said in my post, the buyer (in this case, OP) absolutely CHOSE a product that was visually an unbranded "knock off" of a webcam that Amazon actually featured HIGHER in their own search results. You can see which camera I am talking about being the "knockoff" and which is the "original", I hope.

A person with high "consumer literacy" will not just pick the cheap option with a bunch of 5-star reviews. Not in 2020, and not on Amazon.com -- these plain facts mean nothing about the seller's reputation or the product's quality. Every "literate consumer" should already know this! It doesn't mean it's OK for the seller to do what they do, but it's important that we all know the reality is that they DO do it.

> Every "literate consumer" should already know this!

So, it is my fault that Amazon promotes false advertising? Should I be punished for not seeing thru the lies that Amazon shows in their website? I don't think so. Don't blame the victim, blame the scammer.

Who was the victim here? The OP was a repeat buyer, implying he already had the item and was satisfied enough to buy it again. Hardly sounds like a victim.

Look, I'll rewrite what I wrote earlier but more simply: Paying for good reviews = bad. Posting a good review to get paid for it = bad. There are approximately 12,000 bad people in the scenario this thread is about.

But there are platitudes and there is real advice. The platitude is "scammers are bad". Very good, I agree with that. The advice is to be cautious where you spend your money, and be aware of who you're giving it to. That is the consumer's choice. You can choose to give it to the no-name company you've never heard of who just-so-happens to have more reviews than any other item for the search term "webcam", or, you can choose to buy the Logitech for a little more.

Hoping individuals will solve this won't work, because the malignant vendor has a much stronger incentive to find new ways to cheat than individual consumers do to figure out those cheats and take countermeasures.

The proper level to solve this at is higher up. Platforms and regulators in specific.

Morally it should, but business-wise, for Amazon, it shouldn't. Amazon already has the monopoly and drove a lot of smaller retailers out of business; the counterfeit problem is not (yet?) causing people to shop elsewhere, probably because for a lot of goods there either isn't an elsewhere or the elsewhere is still a worse experience (longer delivery, etc).

Our regulatory environment also doesn't hold Amazon liable for selling counterfeit and/or dangerous goods (bad batteries which catch fire, etc), so there is yet again no pressure on Amazon to do anything.

Amazon doesn't really care whether you get a bad/counterfeit item, they get their money regardless. Until this changes there's no reason for Amazon to act.

For another example, most ice machines for consumer use all use the exact same flawed mechanical mechanism.

Someone cut a few cents of the BOM by dropping detection of when the water tray had fully rotated, and instead the mechanism will eventually break due to repeated stress as they just run the motor a few seconds too long. For occasional use it works. For frequent use and you'll easily cause them to break in the exact same manner each time after about a year.

Models keep disappearing, presumably because too many break within the warranty period, but then new ones with slightly different exteriors and the exact same broken interior mechanism appears. This has gone on for many years.

When I last bought one it took ages to find one that used another design, hampered by lack of pictures showing the tray. Finally did find one and never buying another brand again if I can avoid it.

And that's fine. But if so they'll pop up again with zero reviews and have to work at rebuilding the scam.

This is a pretty shocking comment. Amazon suggests that Amazon reviews are worth at least something. If they are not then they should all be removed and we can go back following your strategy of "buying from companies that I know the name of, because they will be best". Now excuse me while I go and buy an IBM laptop.

More and more it is proven that reviews themselves don't mean much. You should consider your own personal relationship with the brand, or from people you trust. Of course we don't all have the luxury of those things and sometimes you need to read a few reviews. After all, without GOOD and HONEST reviews we probably would not have a company like Anker, which I love dearly and who did it all right... but like with all things, you have to be critical of what you see and read and hear. Reviewers are not always honest, people are not always honest. Particularly when there is money at stake, particularly when you're online.

I'll have you know that the movie "Wolfman's Got Nards" is currently sitting at 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Does that mean you should go watch "Wolfman's Got Nards"?

That's fine - I'm not sure it's what Amazon are gooing for though.

Personal relationships with a social construct indicate the need for proffesional help. Amd imaginary friends.

But yes, the whole point of brand marketing is to invoke a relationship in the mind of the [potential] buyer. And when you have people who devote their life to it there has to be someone out there who is good at it using whatever pysch tricks they can.

So no wonder some people fall for it. It's almost inevitable.

I buy a lot of stuff from AliExpress - I'd love to be able to go one up the chain and find the factories that are building this stuff.

What you want is the export agent, he will likely send a sample if you can produce a valid company profile

You will even pay reduced taxes for a sample, but make sure they have already a business relationship in your general area because they will have already done the legwork to certify the product and it'll clear custom straight away

I think of the five FAANG companies only Apple and Netflix have even a remote semblance of caring about the customer.

Google and Facebook certainly don't and that was known since before the announced antitrust lawsuits.

Unless you’re talking about end-users? In which case that’s like asking if McDonalds look after their cows well :)

When I got the phone, I realized that the case had never arrived. Google refused to do anything, citing a 2-week limit on disputes. They told me to take it up with the shipper, but provided no guidance on how to do so and never responded when I asked.

Given that the cases are clearly high margin items, I was blown away by how terrible their customer service was.

Normal users of the service are not their customers in most cases.

I think that's the first time I've seen those two in the same sentence. They do a ton of things they thing is "better" and it turns out to be a bad situation for the customer.

The only problem might be if Amazon decided you were affiliated with the scammy seller and penalized your account or blocked you from buying.

I reported it to Amazon customer service, and they gave me a $5 account credit for making the report. Not sure if any action was taken against the seller.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect that a single reported case is going to result in visible action. (competitors/griefers can easily abuse this).

In this case it's quite reasonable to expect prompt, visible action. The grefier problem is easily solved with a modicum of due diligence by Amazon. All it has to do is conduct an investigation to confirm the complaint, which is as easy as ordering the item in question and confirming it contains the offer reported by a single customer.

If it's too onerous for Amazon to spend $20 our of its billions to conduct and investigation, it could even write in terms to its contracts saying it reserves the right to inspect any seller inventory for compliance.

The number of humans available to perform daily investigations versus the total number of products sold makes this most decidedly not "easy".

The easiest thing to do here would be to simply return the item because the seller crossed your personal ethical line, and state that as the reason. A large number of returns on an item will definitely get the sellers and Amazon's attention.

Only if you're taking the blinkered tech mindset that employing people to do anything is hard. Amazon employs 1.2 million people [1], and has people employed that literally touch every single physical items it ships at least once. Every time you contact them you talk to one of their thousands of customer service agents. It's totally easy for an organization like that to staff a compliance department to investigate policy violation complaint.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/now/amazon-projects-strong-holiday-sal...

Amazon, being one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, can afford to do that and then some. Yeah, it won't be exactly $20, but it will still be a tiny amount for a company that size.

I mean, "inspecting the products you sell for compliance" shouldn't be an optional thing, but a basic function of a retail business.

Unless Amazon loses because of these misrepresentations, they're not going to care. Cash flow and sales volume up, and they'll let anything go unless it somehow causes lost sales at scale.

Always, always, buyer beware.

I make two fake companies selling the same product. Each of them asks buyers to write a fake review 50% of the time. One of the companies should pass the Amazon inspection.

Well, then you say Amazon can place more than one order for each product. I just keep tweaking the numbers. I'll have 2% of customers for each of my fake companies get asked to write a review. One of them will not get flagged and the fake reviews will help them rise to the top.

I wasn't talking about proactively ordering one of everything, but ordering something in response to a specific complaint about a specific practice. So, while we're making up numbers, they might actually end up ordering 10 copies of 0.01% of their items. Make the penalties for getting caught onerous enough, and they might deter the practice completely.

Sure, some vendor might then only put a solicitation in 1 in 20 items, but they'll still have a significant chance of getting caught, and it's not like Amazon should be so transparent about the process so a vendor can game it.

But to my original point: it's totally practical for Amazon to take visible action in response to a single complaint, without opening the door up to griefing.

The reason for this is that they don't need to rely 100% on crowdsourced feedback for compliance enforcement (and to think they would shows a really blinkered webtech-centric viewpoint). The complaint -> investigation -> substantiation -> enforcement process is tried and true technology that's even older than UNIX.