It was falling behind. The dodgy stores were getting more creative and Fakespot needed to play catch up.
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review.
You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE.
Then an expensive option I was suprised happened - I bought a Dyson clone vacuum cleaner off of Amazon. A few weeks later, the company emailed me and said 'We have a new model. Buy that one, leave a review, we'll refund the purchase'. So I did it. This happened about 10 more times in 2024. My outdoor shed is entirely stick vacuums.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
I think Fakespot would have difficulty with all 3 of these scenarios.
Some company paid be 100 bucks to change my review to be positive so they sent the money via PayPal no problem then I changed the review to say they paid me to write a glowing review and of course Amazon ended up removing the review for being harmful to their customers
Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
You can't use the word "counterfeit" or suggest that. But you can absolutely give 1 star and explain you only got milliamps. I have a bunch of 1 star reviews. I've never had anything taken down except when I used the word "counterfeit". Also, I get it -- how do you know if it's actually counterfeit, or genuine but low-quality? There are a bunch of things I've bought that I suspected were counterfeit, then went to my local store and discovered no, the authentic item is just crap.
Silk is particularly bad. Order anything "silk" from amazon and you are almost certainly getting satin. Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.
Amazon should be busted for false advertising. Millions of products filled with lies and amazon does absolutely nothing to curate (other than removing comments warning others that a product is fake).
> Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.
Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.
I've had one taken down. I pointed out the deception in the naming and that the product looked nothing like the real thing, nor did it fit. Only later did I realize they were selling it as "Genuine Beam", not that it was genuine "Beam"--I thought they were just making clear that it wasn't a knockoff. (Beam is the actual company name.)
you're supposed to report this to amazon customer service not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.
Well, last week Amazon customer support flow routed me to an LLM chat bot which hallucinated a 1-800 number to call which was most definitely not Amazon on the other end. That's the real usefulness of LLMs: blackhole any dissent now that your monopoly is fully operational.
It was always free to ignore customers. A thin layer of AI slop doesn't change the behavior. Competition should close the loop here, but free markets don't exist and power has marketshare has been consolidated.
Yeah, I'm generally aware of that - but I needed them fast, and decided it was worth taking a gamble. (I did at least get a return/refund, so there's that.)
It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate. They also have a massive problem with fake bad reviews where a competitor spams competing products to try to increase sales of their own.
They have so many flavors of fraud that it’s very hard to get it right consistently at scale.
Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.
> Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate
They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.
I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.
The problem is that they have an obvious incentive to err on the side of positive reviews. Because if every product on the site has a 1 star review few people will buy anything. But if most of them have 5 stars people will be much more eager to purchase.
Not only that, but if you get people buying lemons from scammers, some percentage will forgo the refund process and re-engage with Amazon to buy something else: Amazon gets a cut of that too, plus more eyes on other products during that process. And even if there is refund, the platform will get that money back from the seller anyway.
> Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.
That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and misconceptions against something that you yourself don't like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't actually like it.
Yeah, they can't always get it right but something that would go a long way towards combatting it: Reputation scores on reporting. Accounts that have spent a fair amount of money over a fair amount of time and which do not have a track record of making false reports should be allowed to flag things. And if a product gets enough flags a human looks into it. The more times you flag something that is deemed wrong the more your vote counts in the future. The more times they decide it's clearly legit the less your vote counts. (And there would be a not sure range in the middle that produces no change.)
And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported a search that returned three pages of results for one product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last I looked it was still three pages.
> It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate.
Well that's on Amazon then. They could go the Walmart route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get, Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they all have very strict and extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.
But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.
I thought I was pretty clear that I wasn’t excusing them, just correcting a naive misconception around “why don’t they just allow all negative reviews”.
You make good points, but I'm not convinced this isn't deliberate on the part of Amazon. First, Amazon deliberately keeps buyers in the dark - e.g. sellers can pay extra to avoid comingling, but Amazon gives buyers no way to find this out. Second, this kind of reckless approach to fakes is what enabled Amazon's rapid growth over traditional retailers with hand-picked, verified goods. It's not surprising they try to sweep problems with their approach under the rug.
Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard towards fraud.
What I don't understand is why some law firm, heavy with Ivy league predators, does not eye Amazon's fraud engine as a pot of generational gold to be taken? Sure, it will take some effort, but that's a huge pot of gold just sitting in the open with this blatant fraud in broad daylight.
> If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.
Or more likely a jaded B-student who has been around the block a few times.
The reason this works is that the C-students include students who have always known that their social network would facilitate them being rainmakers, while B-students are often middle-class try-hards who don’t have the right social network and don’t have the social skills to develop the right one.
Amazon does have the Vine program so if companies want to have a legitimate free product review program they can opt in. I’m in Vine and we’re supposed to leave a review based on using the product, take photos, etc. If anything goes wrong we are not supposed to send the product back, return it, etc. The sellers can’t contact us and if we do we’re supposed to report it. The automated “did you get the product” are fine but it’s not ok for them to bribe us.
Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.
> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.
Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.
Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."
Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."
In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.
I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?
This doesn't work unless you have someone verifying that products from both sellers are identical. Seller A could be selling real logitech gear and seller B could be selling clones, as is common on poorly policed markets like Amazon and Aliexpress.
And most of the products I've seen "grouped" in this way haven't had identifiable branding, they were just generic functional products like "heat shrink", or "M4x20 screws".
> I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?
I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and, unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if the platform can identify the counterfeits, then it should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly mingled reviews.)
The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.
One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
Amusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western knives, all these problems go away because those duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and there’s even premium cloning brands which have duplicate store fronts
This is true of a lot of product types, but there is often a QC process that happens for the "premier" name brand that they were manufactured for. And these "duplicates" are frequently the irregulars that didn't make the cut.
In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly.
This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.
I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.
With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.
Buy $50 something from aliexpress, doesn't work, you can't do anything. Seller wont refund directly, you need to send the item back... to china... and fill out export forms and pay more than $50 for registered mail.
Amazon? Doesn't work? Doesn't matter why, here's the return label, we'll refund you the moment we get the return.
I just returned something on AliExpress last week.(Wrong items sent.) Sagawa showed up at my door to collect the package, I paid nothing, and AliExpress refunded me before it even left the country once Sagawa notified them that the package was collected.
I've never had to return to AliExpress - if I've had an issue they (AliExpress) have just instantly refunded me without having to go through the seller(admittedly this is maybe 2 items in nearly 10 years).
Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.
I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.
The thing is, you paid for that in the price which is often 3x more for the same thing you could get on Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I had issue only once when I got something different than I ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere. Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those must be really good counterfeits, because they measure fine.
I kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also because they can't compete anymore.
Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
Yeah my partner and I quit using them because we’d buy like 5-10 things and return them all because of issues like not matching the product listing or being garbage quality. The last straw was when they clawed back a return refund 4 times on the same return. Each time she would have to call them to get it reinstated.
I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as it depends massively on how close you live to one of their distribution centres. I can get most shit from Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.
If something is not remotely up to standard, do a return. I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful for them and probably only stick there is.
It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.
The stuff on aliexpress is not low quality. I mean, some for sure is if you look for the cheapest items, but there is plenty of solid quality stuff there as well.
Yeah but honestly unless it's a repeat purchase, I'll pay it for the customer service (and ordering experience frankly) being similarly up 5,000-20,000%.
Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.
I do Amazon Vine reviews and we learn quickly all the things we can't say. For health products you can hardly say anything due to the legalities of appearing to make health claims. People also get their reviews removed regularly for claiming something is inauthentic. I kind of get why, because a person probably doesn't have the equipment to really determine that, and Amazon has separate channels for reporting such things. Basically reviews are just for relating your experience of a product. There are ways of communicating lack of authenticity by being more humble, as in noting that it doesn't seem like leather, or when burned it melts like plastic. I've reviewed many e.g. fake memory cards, and had no problem noting that it has less capacity than claimed, and showing some test programs' results that confirm.
Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN. So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other third-party seller without doing proper quality control. Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention to this longstanding problem.
I bought a light fixture that had a design flaw that turned it into a fire hazard. I contacted Amazon and provided proof, hoping they’d take the product down and prevent harm to others. They did initially but within a few days the same exact item with matching SKU and photos was listed.
I have an entire category of items I will never buy from Amazon. They don’t look out for customers ahead of time, only on the backend when you complain.
My wife has bought a handful of flat-pack cabinets and shelves over the last year, and it has been an experience in frustration, and furniture half assembled for weeks while we wait on a weirdly sized bolt to arrive from china because it was missing, or in one case, an entire door, or in another case a handle had been tapped to the wrong size (too big) for the bolts.
The crazy thing is these $100-250 products ship with instructions on getting 100% of your purchase back if you leave a 5-star review and email them proof you did.
I had one do something that presented a different angle for a complaint...
Some Amazon seller included some US postage stamps as a gift, along with a glossy full-color printed offer to pay me cash or more stamps for a positive review.
So I took the stamps to a post office, some kind of manager looked at them, said they'd almost guarantee that the stamps were counterfeit. So I left the stamps and the glossy offer (with the sellers's contact info) with them, to refer higher up to some kind of investigation.
I'd guess probably it will only lead back to some overseas seller who is untraceable, and who just pops back up under 10 new different names. But maybe someday Amazon will be under some kind of KYC-like obligation, to only permit sellers and other supply chain that can be held accountable for illegal/counterfeit/dangerous/stolen/etc. products.
They can but they won’t. My original review was still there (as in was included in my updated review) saying how it was fundamentally flawed and will break. Was some video tripod with this dumb mechanism that would work itself loose by just panning. Never seen anything like it.
Plus side looks like the product doesn’t exist on Amazon so guess there’s a victory there somewhere.
Sure, just like the highway patrol can do something about speeding. Note that “do something” does not convey “completely eliminate with perfect fairness and accuracy”.
That must explain why I’ve seen bad reviews that have 5 stars. I guess the review itself really does not matter as much as long as the stupid starts are there.
It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.
I can understand going for the "free upgrade" the first time around, but why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after that? Do you plan to sell them later?
You sound like my wife. I don't know. I grew up kind of poor and my mindset still has a "If I can get an item typically worth $100-200 for free, TAKE IT".
The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.
this example suggests that you'd be happy to get paid in an alternative currency in exchange for Amazon reviews, and that currency is vacuums?! tbh I think your wife is right and you know it.
All moral implications are minimal if your morals are flexible enough.
The OP is effectively taking thousands of dollars in bribes to erode public trust. I think even a child would see that this is wrong.
I know every man has their price, but I hope when the time comes my price will be higher than "a bunch of vacuums I don't need and I can't even be bothered to sell".
I see where you are coming from, but this is Amazon, a juggernaut which is impossible to render accountable. So, OP is effectively filling their shed space with things which are useless to them and whose monetary value they won't realize. They are also tainting their soul. But by posting fake reviews, they erode trust on Amazon and cause it (some) financial harm. OP is, thus, doing a public service at some personal expense.
I often buy products from Amazon based on how fast they can deliver, with the soonest being approximately five days where I live. They routinely advertise one delivery time and deliver three or four days later, which essentially is false advertising and harmful to local businesses who could easily compete on delivery time. And this is Amazon fulfillment.
To be fair, he didn't specify that the reviews were false. Maybe he only agreed because he legitimately likes the vacuums. I think if someone offered me a product I like for free in return for a review, I'd do it. I wouldn't leave a positive review on a bad product though.
Come on, let's be honest here, they wouldn't keep sending you products for free if you left anything less than a stellar review. That's the entire problem with incentivized reviews.
Sure, but consider the costs of consuming your space with junk. Now you have less room for things you care about, there's a maintenance burden, and there's a mental burden as well
Yes, but were the vacuums actually good? He left 10 reviews for this company, which may have led other people to buy them, and made this company look better than it is... just so he could stuff his shed full of them? That's kinda fucked up. He even said he felt kinda shady about it, so my guess is that the reviews weren't honest.
Who knows. I have lots of siblings and my spouse does as well, so that’s nine vacuums accounted for. Add in both sets of parents and I’d have one left over to gift to someone who also needs one.
I’m not sure how to take your comment other than uncharitably so I’ll just concede that you obviously have smaller dust collection needs than I do.
> I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
Why would you want 12 vacuums? What are you going to do with them? Isn't that a senseless amount of redundant objects to horde? Don't you want room for other things in your shed?
I'm struggling to believe you have a dozen new vacuum cleaners in your shed. It's quite an extraordinary claim. Are you willing to share some evidence?
Sure. It's cold, rainy, and midnight but here's what came up in my email when searching "vacuum". It's not all, and you can see some I didn't reply to but -
I was looking forward to seeing 12 neatly stacked & boxed vacuum cleaners in a dimly lit corner of your shed ;-)
That said, thanks for sharing the emails/headers.
It's curious that Amazon hasn't flagged you for purchasing & reviewing multiple similar items in such a short span of time. I would imagine it would be quite easy to spot someone who's bought and reviewed 12 vacuum cleaners in a 2 or 3 year window.
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
I had a tool manufacturer read a bad review on one of the big box home improvement stores in the US, they contacted me within a day (the store must have gave them my email address?) and offered to send me my choice of replacement tool, for free, in exchange for taking my review down.
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.
I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.
I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.
I wonder if reviews should have a field for "how long have I owned it" (or even "about when did I buy it", to track changes in manufacturing quality). Places like TrustPilot would probably benefit from coming back to people and saying, "Here's a review you wrote a year ago; anything you want to add?"
Manufacturers could even submit an "expected lifespan", and reviews could be marked where they were made within that lifespan. A bad review after 7 years of owning a 5-year product shouldn't count as much as a bad review 7 years after owning a 10-year product.
> I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.
The point remains that you don't need to "buy" reviews. You don't need to give out coupons, or gift cards, or rewards or in fact anything. Hence why I said "it's not that complicated" as per:
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
They were mostly honest - I just always included something like 'an upgrade from my last one' but these clones are all so similar and all effective. Can do the whole house on a single charge, strong enough, has the low projecting light to highlight dust, high number of attachments.
Does the job. I'm no vacuum connoisseur (Which you think I'd be after all of these) but none were scammy products.
Ah, I was looking at a Dyson a while back, and wondering if they were worth buying. Went for something else in the end, as I thought they were a bit pricey for what they offered, and didn't dare go for a clone.
Would you happen to have a link to the model you got (or one of the similar models), to get an idea of which clone could be worth considering next time?
When you have extremely generous return policies then reviews matter less. They are still relevant if your'e trying to optimize for buy once for life, but in that case you should just be going for established brands instead, where their reputation is their review.
They don't build them like they used to, in my experience most consumer electronics/appliance brands that are still considered high quality are just coasting on the reputation they built up in the 70s, 80s and 90s. In many categories it's getting almost impossible to find products that aren't just generic whitelabeled junk resold by "established brands".
1. The whitelabeled junk is getting very good. In some categories, the brand name stuff has degraded to the point that the aliexpress version is better and cheaper.
2. The IoTification of everything means that a lot of traditionally long lasting items are as durable as their WiFi board - i.e. not very. This also plays into number (1) - where cheap, Chinese, items either lack IoT features or provide them only locally instead of requiring an online account.
I had to leave a video review component (No face). I wonder if any shoppers ever wondered why the same monotone man was constantly buying and reviewing vaccuum cleaners if he's always leaving positive reviews?!
> Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity
I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.
I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?
I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.
Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage, then went on to create Brave, which is yet another Chromium wrapper just with bad crypto monetization and other scummy practices.
Couldn't imagine what Mozilla would be like today if he stayed around and tried to integrate crypto. At the end of the day, main post shows Firefox engineering is keeping up with Chrome which is a feat no other browser has accomplished.
For the record I also dislike the top brass at Mozilla for the same reasons I dislike Eich - trendchasing instead of making a good browser. Firefox is succeeding because of the engineers and despite the c-suite.
This gets really tiresome to rebuke. He supported a proposition that was supported by the MAJORITY of the citizens at the time and that was already six years old when we became Mozilla CEO. Some people wrote hit pieces even though he even distanced himself from it. He was not fired, he stepped back voluntarily.
Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.
I think this is the real answer; they've got a vague mission statement, they saw something they wanted to support, opted to buy it, and in classic Mozilla fashion let it squander because the managers in charge moved on.
It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.
Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.
I do get the feeling that Mozilla has no idea what their goal is any more. Another one they are like is Yahoo! Just seem to be endlessly trying new things but not really committing to any of the new things one they have them.
I’d guess the idea was about generalizing the team’s efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But that horse has left the barn.
Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.
> Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.
I don't actually think there was (or needed to be) one...keep in mind they're a non-profit. I think they just wanted to make the internet a safer place, but semi-extraneous (particularly unprofitable) projects sadly need to be cut aggressively with the rising threat of the google antitrust suit, as they may lose most of their income.
That doesn't necessarily change the overall mission of the organization, but definitely does give them more flexibility to offer paid options to help sustain development, should they see an opening in the future.
This is more or less taken directly from Thunderbird's website (which I think is a fair comparison): "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. This structure gives us the flexibility to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird’s development far into the future."
Why is Mozilla, supposedly a subsidiary of a nonprofit with the goal of making the internet better, looking for business models in the first place? They should be looking for donations, sponsors, government grants, etc.
Right, why even buy it in the first place? I can't imagine the landscape has changed much, unless the most popular comment here is all the evidence you need...
I recall seeing the Mozilla Review Checker pop up on Amazon shortly after I started using it as my daily driver.
I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
Rather that taking yet another opportunity to dump on Mozilla (it's easy, I know), I think a better question would be who is the alternative out there doing the work that Fakespot tried to do? Is this telling us that the task is too large for any current solutions to handle?
Just relying on consumer judgement has certainly proven to be inadequate in combating fake reviews, and without incentive, we're not going to get many legitimate reviews.
I did search around looking for alternatives and the landscape isn't great. There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.
TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.
SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for
Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs
If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!
I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
Please help me understand why a subscription to your service should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend.
I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.
I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
Attribution revenue is what I would consider the gold standard for these types of services.
It makes sense on paper, if the service helps confirm legitimate reviews for you and convinces you to purchase said product, they should receive attribution revenue for helping generate the purchase.
The reality is much much messier though, because often times the people who award attribution revenue have a conflict of interest against any service that could even potentially expose bad practices happening on their marketplace.
I once worked for a popular deal site that developed a price tracking extension, a certain marketplace threatened to completely ban us from attribution revenue and we had to kill the extension over night despite our users loving it.
I saw that actually. I mentioned in another post on here recently that I figured that the only way a Fakespot v2 could exist is with a subscription model, but on the other hand, it's probably not something I could afford. Good luck with it though! You could always try advertising & affiliate links as a test to monetize the service as well.
Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate affiliate links after the Honey scandal: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-co...
Yeah, probably not in the extension itself. But, Fakespot, on their web based reviews, had listings to alternative or better rated products than the one you were searching for. Possibly a bit of a conflict, but as far as I'm aware, it's the only way Fakespot was monetized.
I’ve basically settled on only buying major brands that I already know from Amazon unless it’s something that I’m okay throwing away if it doesn’t work out. I then judge by my assessment of the bad reviews.
IMHO judging these random Chinese products with the nonsense capital letter brands by actual reviews is a lost cause.
>I’ve basically settled on only buying major brands that I already know from Amazon
I wouldn't even do that, unless you can't find it anywhere else. Amazon commingles their returns form 3rd party sellers and Amazon direct. So you might order an item, find out it was actually a broken returned item, and then have Amazon call you a liar.
For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.
Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.
I sell books on Amazon.com through their KDP Direct platform, and I have one book with two different covers; each is its own "book" in their catalog. FakeSpot repeatedly marked reviews I knew were valid as fake; I knew this based on the fact that the same reviewer reviewed the "other" book and that review was NOT flagged as fake. And this happened multiple times, and sometimes the wording of the two reviews were different. Further investigation showed FakeSpot had rather a poor reputation overall due to too many false positives. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned.
With removal of reviews that the seller doesn't like, there's really no point to taking Amazon's star ratings or reviews seriously. It's all a big lie.
I’ve started resorting to the “x bought this month” metric instead. If a product works for thousands of people and they continue to buy 500+ units a month, clearly it is a good option.
If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.
Except with clothes and especially belts, I've noticed. It seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they buy and returns two of them. It makes it harder to identify shitty clothes.
How do you know that 500 people didn't buy a scam product this month? I put as much faith in the X people bought this as I do the X people have this in their cart. It's all a way of trying to stoke FOMO
You don’t. However, that risk is mitigated with a simple, easy to use return policy, where you actually get your cash back (not airline vouchers or points or made-up things to keep you in the ecosystem).
what makes you believe that the number you see in “x bought this month” is not some variant of
if (session_is_gullible_to_displayed_sales_number) {
return HIGH_SALESNUMBER;
}
?
There’s also the strangely still-not-even-admitted-as-problematic Amazon item page referent shuffle, where one item is for sale on a given page, and the item sold by that page points to one item by a given seller. The reviews of this item are spammed positively, and then the item being sold on that page is changed by the seller, yet the reviews follow the page, not the item sold at the time the review was placed.
This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.
Counterfeit items are contraband and may not be legal to be shipped or mailed, as they are evidence that a crime may have occurred. To return counterfeit items for material benefit to the seller or agent in order to receive a refund is possibly helping the fraud to continue by allowing the destruction of property/evidence. I advise all folks who suspect counterfeit goods to report them to the FTC and their local police department to get a police report, and insist that the police take the item(s) as evidence, then provide the police report to Amazon to facilitate the refund, instead of returning the potential contraband to the contraband dealer for them to sell again or for them to destroy the insufficiently misleading fake item.
Scammers are somehow using Amazon itself as an A/B test for if your fakes pass muster, from what I can tell, and everyone loses but Amazon and the bad guys. How long must this continue?
I haven’t done this myself, but I have discovered that it is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a previously working device suddenly stopped charging within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund, they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge. So Amazon said please don’t ship it, but to dispose of it according to my local disposal regulations.
In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people about this important issue at my own freebooted unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat or something caused Caesar’s to be on lockdown. At this talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X which would work when powered via USB C but would not charge or work unplugged. All features and functions still worked otherwise.
> You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
It’s funny you mention that, as I really had to almost haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message. The message is the medium. It’s the multi sensory experience of being appealed to which is the payload that runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if you ingest it in the way presented and intended.
Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!
So you know what we do now? Ignore the overall rating: it's worthless. Instead, go directly to the 1*. They're the only true indicator of a product/place/service.
I'm not saying take them all at face value. You still have to put in some work. But all the data is in the one-stars.
Unfortunately 1* are often bragging of some maniacs who bought a fork and they complain it is not working great as a spoon, or just black PR from the competitors. Whole reviews system is not working.
The key is the ratio of crazy to sane 1 star reviews. Mostly crazies? Then the service is probably good. But if there are many sane 1 star reviews? Might be a bad place.
“Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).”
This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read.
As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those reviews.
The only way to know about a product is to read about it elsewhere like New York Times which is not selling the product themselves.
More often than not those sources are getting paid for product placement. Wire-cutter, NYT, JD Power, Wired - they all get advertisement money for "reviews".
Of course. But they have a reputational stake in their recommendation as well.
I take a Wirecutter top pick as meaning something very different from Bobby123's glowing review. Wirecutter may have been influenced by ad money a bit. Bobby123 may not even exist or may be entirely driven by seller compensation. And I'll never see Bobby123 again.
Some online retailers (such as galaxus for those in Europe) include return statistics on the sale page against comparison brands as well as price history graphs. This helps stamp out two of the core complaints about amazon: fake reviews and fraudulent discounts.
If you look around, you'll see products on Amazon occasionally marked as "frequently returned". It has steered me away from a few purchases.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
Did Fakespot work? I can't see how it would stand a chance against LLM generated reviews without even having the log (keystroke?) data that Amazon does.
Better than nothing. Not sure how well it worked or if it used any particularly advanced AI similarity checker or sentiment analysis.
It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.
The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.
I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100% accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
My own form of Amazon punishment for allowing fake reviews is to send back their falsely reviewed crap on their own dime. If they want to save $$ they should clean up the review process.
B. Personal Information Collected Automatically
We may collect personal information automatically when you use our Services.
Automatic Collection of Personal Information.
We may collect the following information automatically when you use our Services:
Contact Information:
Your email address
Identifiers:
User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. This information could be provided via your Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation codes.
Device ID: Your device information which includes, but is not limited to, information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device.
Usage Data:
Product Interaction: How you interact with our Services and what features you use within the Services, including Fakespot’s sort bar, highlights, review grade, seller ratings, alternative sellers, settings and popups.
Other Usage Data: Individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Service, and other information about how you interact with the Service.
Browser Information: Information your internet browser provides when you access and use our Services.
Application Search History: Information you provide when you perform searches in our Services.
Purchase Information: Your purchase history or purchase tendencies which we may use to recommend better products and sellers.
Location Information. We may collect your location information, such as geolocation based on your IP address in connection with your use of our Services.
Publicly Available Information. In providing our Services we may collect data (including personal information such as profile names of reviewers) that is made publicly available via the internet on the websites analyzed and crawled by our Services.
There is one clear route to solving this problem and I already pay money to get it, it's an independent third party consumer review site.
They are good at objectively evaluating consumer products, they simply buy all the main models of a thing and review them all. I trust them (which is very important in this space). I happily pay for this service.
AI has made it completely impossible to detect fake reviews now, so it would have died naturally. Amazon (and other retailers) has the access to heuristics on their end that could help with fake review detection that fakespot doesn't, but it's likely a very low priority for them (if it is one at all)
As most humans are afraid to be against the consensus of the room, fake reviews and sentiment seeding is extremely effective against the general population. Also note that bad actors use it to create bad sentiment to it's competitors.
Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway.
Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable. Also can combine this with marketplace reviews considering reliability.
If there is no review than have to trust the brand and if there is no brand then it is a gamble
Do you even need Fakespot anymore for Amazon? I think we can fairly assume that whatever is purchased on that platform will be junk. I rarely purchase anything from Amazon these days except protein bars or items I treat as disposable. More often than not, when I order legitimate items, I get either counterfeit items or previously refunded items that are certainly not in "new" condition. I go into actual stores these days for any serious purchases.
I think by now I have quickly learnt that they can just read all the worst reviews and see if they can: 1. put up with the drawbacks, 2. see how frequent manufacturing defects are. 5* reviews are only useful if they upload real images.
It was falling behind. The dodgy stores were getting more creative and Fakespot needed to play catch up.
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review.
You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE.
Then an expensive option I was suprised happened - I bought a Dyson clone vacuum cleaner off of Amazon. A few weeks later, the company emailed me and said 'We have a new model. Buy that one, leave a review, we'll refund the purchase'. So I did it. This happened about 10 more times in 2024. My outdoor shed is entirely stick vacuums.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
I think Fakespot would have difficulty with all 3 of these scenarios.
Some company paid be 100 bucks to change my review to be positive so they sent the money via PayPal no problem then I changed the review to say they paid me to write a glowing review and of course Amazon ended up removing the review for being harmful to their customers
Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
You can't use the word "counterfeit" or suggest that. But you can absolutely give 1 star and explain you only got milliamps. I have a bunch of 1 star reviews. I've never had anything taken down except when I used the word "counterfeit". Also, I get it -- how do you know if it's actually counterfeit, or genuine but low-quality? There are a bunch of things I've bought that I suspected were counterfeit, then went to my local store and discovered no, the authentic item is just crap.
Silk is particularly bad. Order anything "silk" from amazon and you are almost certainly getting satin. Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.
Amazon should be busted for false advertising. Millions of products filled with lies and amazon does absolutely nothing to curate (other than removing comments warning others that a product is fake).
> Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.
Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.
It's happened to my reviews. The seller contested it and got Amazon to remove my review.
I have no way to get the review back up or to contest the action.
But sometimes you know it's counterfeit.
I've had one taken down. I pointed out the deception in the naming and that the product looked nothing like the real thing, nor did it fit. Only later did I realize they were selling it as "Genuine Beam", not that it was genuine "Beam"--I thought they were just making clear that it wasn't a knockoff. (Beam is the actual company name.)
you're supposed to report this to amazon customer service not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.
Well, last week Amazon customer support flow routed me to an LLM chat bot which hallucinated a 1-800 number to call which was most definitely not Amazon on the other end. That's the real usefulness of LLMs: blackhole any dissent now that your monopoly is fully operational.
Internally we brag about how our LLM black hole "delights our customers"
It was always free to ignore customers. A thin layer of AI slop doesn't change the behavior. Competition should close the loop here, but free markets don't exist and power has marketshare has been consolidated.
Amazing BS policy, even people on Hacker Hews don’t know this approach.
An "Every Wrong Door" Policy
Do you believe this?
Amazon is not the place I'd go to for electronics parts. Mouser and Digikey are my go-tos.
Yeah, I'm generally aware of that - but I needed them fast, and decided it was worth taking a gamble. (I did at least get a return/refund, so there's that.)
Lcsc is cheap and ok.
So Amazon is complicit in fraud.
It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate. They also have a massive problem with fake bad reviews where a competitor spams competing products to try to increase sales of their own.
They have so many flavors of fraud that it’s very hard to get it right consistently at scale.
Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.
> Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate
They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.
I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.
Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI company or the word "without": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes
The problem is that they have an obvious incentive to err on the side of positive reviews. Because if every product on the site has a 1 star review few people will buy anything. But if most of them have 5 stars people will be much more eager to purchase.
Not only that, but if you get people buying lemons from scammers, some percentage will forgo the refund process and re-engage with Amazon to buy something else: Amazon gets a cut of that too, plus more eyes on other products during that process. And even if there is refund, the platform will get that money back from the seller anyway.
For a one-shot game, sure.
But when people buy a 5-star product that sucks and return it, Amazon loses money.
Amazon is better off having low ratings for products that are returned more.
> Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.
That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and misconceptions against something that you yourself don't like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't actually like it.
Yeah, they can't always get it right but something that would go a long way towards combatting it: Reputation scores on reporting. Accounts that have spent a fair amount of money over a fair amount of time and which do not have a track record of making false reports should be allowed to flag things. And if a product gets enough flags a human looks into it. The more times you flag something that is deemed wrong the more your vote counts in the future. The more times they decide it's clearly legit the less your vote counts. (And there would be a not sure range in the middle that produces no change.)
And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported a search that returned three pages of results for one product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last I looked it was still three pages.
> It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate.
Well that's on Amazon then. They could go the Walmart route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get, Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they all have very strict and extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.
But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.
I thought I was pretty clear that I wasn’t excusing them, just correcting a naive misconception around “why don’t they just allow all negative reviews”.
You make good points, but I'm not convinced this isn't deliberate on the part of Amazon. First, Amazon deliberately keeps buyers in the dark - e.g. sellers can pay extra to avoid comingling, but Amazon gives buyers no way to find this out. Second, this kind of reckless approach to fakes is what enabled Amazon's rapid growth over traditional retailers with hand-picked, verified goods. It's not surprising they try to sweep problems with their approach under the rug.
Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard towards fraud.
What I don't understand is why some law firm, heavy with Ivy league predators, does not eye Amazon's fraud engine as a pot of generational gold to be taken? Sure, it will take some effort, but that's a huge pot of gold just sitting in the open with this blatant fraud in broad daylight.
There’s an old law school adage that A students become professors, B students go to work for C students.
It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive hustlers.
> There’s an old law school adage that A students become professors
If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.
> If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.
Or more likely a jaded B-student who has been around the block a few times.
The reason this works is that the C-students include students who have always known that their social network would facilitate them being rainmakers, while B-students are often middle-class try-hards who don’t have the right social network and don’t have the social skills to develop the right one.
Amazon does have the Vine program so if companies want to have a legitimate free product review program they can opt in. I’m in Vine and we’re supposed to leave a review based on using the product, take photos, etc. If anything goes wrong we are not supposed to send the product back, return it, etc. The sellers can’t contact us and if we do we’re supposed to report it. The automated “did you get the product” are fine but it’s not ok for them to bribe us.
Facilitating fraud.
Didn't Napster get buttfucked for "facilitating" piracy?
Should have been owned by Bezos so they'd be immune from laws that affect only mere mortals.
Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.
At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.
Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.
(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)
> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.
Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.
Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."
Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."
In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.
I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?
This doesn't work unless you have someone verifying that products from both sellers are identical. Seller A could be selling real logitech gear and seller B could be selling clones, as is common on poorly policed markets like Amazon and Aliexpress.
And most of the products I've seen "grouped" in this way haven't had identifiable branding, they were just generic functional products like "heat shrink", or "M4x20 screws".
> I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?
I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and, unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if the platform can identify the counterfeits, then it should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly mingled reviews.)
The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.
One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
Amusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western knives, all these problems go away because those duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and there’s even premium cloning brands which have duplicate store fronts
This is true of a lot of product types, but there is often a QC process that happens for the "premier" name brand that they were manufactured for. And these "duplicates" are frequently the irregulars that didn't make the cut.
In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly.
This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.
What kind of knives are we talking about?
I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.
I’ve been playing with cssbuy (there is pandabuy too) lately. Aliexpress range at temu prices basically.
"It's great! Haven't tried it yet, but it looks nice"
(average aliexpress review on many tech items)
“Item received, will update later when I try it” = it killed them
I prefer eBay at least it’s cheaper and the sellers care about reputation
With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.
If you buy from china, it’s going to take weeks. If you buy from US and live in Canada, you’re going to pay a lot of customs.
In 2007, I bought a used MacBook on Ebay for $870, with shipping it was about $900. That was back when the currency was on parity.
It arrived with $300 custom fees. I could have bought a new one at that price.
If you pay about 5-10% more you can get it from a us based drop shipper. Obviously if you buy it from china you might as well get it from aliexpress
Ebay is not the best for dropshipped Chinese crap. It's markedly better for about anything else.
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Amazon is great for returns.
Buy $50 something from aliexpress, doesn't work, you can't do anything. Seller wont refund directly, you need to send the item back... to china... and fill out export forms and pay more than $50 for registered mail.
Amazon? Doesn't work? Doesn't matter why, here's the return label, we'll refund you the moment we get the return.
I just returned something on AliExpress last week.(Wrong items sent.) Sagawa showed up at my door to collect the package, I paid nothing, and AliExpress refunded me before it even left the country once Sagawa notified them that the package was collected.
So it really depends where you live.
I've never had to return to AliExpress - if I've had an issue they (AliExpress) have just instantly refunded me without having to go through the seller(admittedly this is maybe 2 items in nearly 10 years).
Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.
I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.
The thing is, you paid for that in the price which is often 3x more for the same thing you could get on Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I had issue only once when I got something different than I ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere. Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those must be really good counterfeits, because they measure fine.
I kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also because they can't compete anymore.
Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
Yeah my partner and I quit using them because we’d buy like 5-10 things and return them all because of issues like not matching the product listing or being garbage quality. The last straw was when they clawed back a return refund 4 times on the same return. Each time she would have to call them to get it reinstated.
>typically a week or more
I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as it depends massively on how close you live to one of their distribution centres. I can get most shit from Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.
If something is not remotely up to standard, do a return. I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful for them and probably only stick there is.
It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.
The stuff on aliexpress is not low quality. I mean, some for sure is if you look for the cheapest items, but there is plenty of solid quality stuff there as well.
Most of the Chinese crap sold on Amazon is identical to what you find on AliExpress and Temu marked up 50-200%.
Yeah but honestly unless it's a repeat purchase, I'll pay it for the customer service (and ordering experience frankly) being similarly up 5,000-20,000%.
Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.
I do Amazon Vine reviews and we learn quickly all the things we can't say. For health products you can hardly say anything due to the legalities of appearing to make health claims. People also get their reviews removed regularly for claiming something is inauthentic. I kind of get why, because a person probably doesn't have the equipment to really determine that, and Amazon has separate channels for reporting such things. Basically reviews are just for relating your experience of a product. There are ways of communicating lack of authenticity by being more humble, as in noting that it doesn't seem like leather, or when burned it melts like plastic. I've reviewed many e.g. fake memory cards, and had no problem noting that it has less capacity than claimed, and showing some test programs' results that confirm.
Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN. So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other third-party seller without doing proper quality control. Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention to this longstanding problem.
This is the real issue.
If Amazon put out the effort to actually combat all the shady things their marketplace helps facilitate, they wouldn't make nearly as much money.
Much cheaper to just buy out the governments (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/summary?id=D0000...) that could make legal trouble for you.
I bought a light fixture that had a design flaw that turned it into a fire hazard. I contacted Amazon and provided proof, hoping they’d take the product down and prevent harm to others. They did initially but within a few days the same exact item with matching SKU and photos was listed.
I have an entire category of items I will never buy from Amazon. They don’t look out for customers ahead of time, only on the backend when you complain.
My wife has bought a handful of flat-pack cabinets and shelves over the last year, and it has been an experience in frustration, and furniture half assembled for weeks while we wait on a weirdly sized bolt to arrive from china because it was missing, or in one case, an entire door, or in another case a handle had been tapped to the wrong size (too big) for the bolts.
The crazy thing is these $100-250 products ship with instructions on getting 100% of your purchase back if you leave a 5-star review and email them proof you did.
At least IKEA has a specific way to handle that, including IIRC a dedicated area at their stores.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/spare-parts/
I had one do something that presented a different angle for a complaint...
Some Amazon seller included some US postage stamps as a gift, along with a glossy full-color printed offer to pay me cash or more stamps for a positive review.
So I took the stamps to a post office, some kind of manager looked at them, said they'd almost guarantee that the stamps were counterfeit. So I left the stamps and the glossy offer (with the sellers's contact info) with them, to refer higher up to some kind of investigation.
I'd guess probably it will only lead back to some overseas seller who is untraceable, and who just pops back up under 10 new different names. But maybe someday Amazon will be under some kind of KYC-like obligation, to only permit sellers and other supply chain that can be held accountable for illegal/counterfeit/dangerous/stolen/etc. products.
Some company said they know where I live and they will pay me a visit if I don't remove the bad review (product was dangerous). That was on Amazon.
Do they know where we live? Aren't orders fulfilled by Amazon?
Amazon also has sellers that do their own fulfillment.
Did you report this to the police?
No, because we have mickey mouse police here in the UK. I deleted the review.
So they _can_ do something about fake reviews.
They can but they won’t. My original review was still there (as in was included in my updated review) saying how it was fundamentally flawed and will break. Was some video tripod with this dumb mechanism that would work itself loose by just panning. Never seen anything like it.
Plus side looks like the product doesn’t exist on Amazon so guess there’s a victory there somewhere.
Sure, just like the highway patrol can do something about speeding. Note that “do something” does not convey “completely eliminate with perfect fairness and accuracy”.
Nope, only real reviews.
That must explain why I’ve seen bad reviews that have 5 stars. I guess the review itself really does not matter as much as long as the stupid starts are there.
It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.
Thank you for sharing that anecdote… just terrible behavior on Amazons part.
wow, full circle.. and just.. what to even do with that
Just buy from anywhere else? It's not like there aren't plenty of other stores on the internet selling whatever garbage you need.
The obvious implication being who Amazon considers to be their "customer". Hint, it's not you.
I can understand going for the "free upgrade" the first time around, but why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after that? Do you plan to sell them later?
Obviously, the plan is to eventually collect enough to construct a Dyson sphere.
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You sound like my wife. I don't know. I grew up kind of poor and my mindset still has a "If I can get an item typically worth $100-200 for free, TAKE IT".
The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.
Fake reviewer vs low ballers…
Just hand them out as gifts to friends and family. Stick vacs for Christmas. Maybe keep a spare handy when the first one eventually breaks.
this example suggests that you'd be happy to get paid in an alternative currency in exchange for Amazon reviews, and that currency is vacuums?! tbh I think your wife is right and you know it.
It's a waste of internet space writing tautologies. The wife is always right.
Good thing the Internet isn't almost out of space
It’s the rational option if someone is giving you something for less than it costs you and the moral implications of the action is minimal (at best).
All moral implications are minimal if your morals are flexible enough.
The OP is effectively taking thousands of dollars in bribes to erode public trust. I think even a child would see that this is wrong.
I know every man has their price, but I hope when the time comes my price will be higher than "a bunch of vacuums I don't need and I can't even be bothered to sell".
I see where you are coming from, but this is Amazon, a juggernaut which is impossible to render accountable. So, OP is effectively filling their shed space with things which are useless to them and whose monetary value they won't realize. They are also tainting their soul. But by posting fake reviews, they erode trust on Amazon and cause it (some) financial harm. OP is, thus, doing a public service at some personal expense.
I often buy products from Amazon based on how fast they can deliver, with the soonest being approximately five days where I live. They routinely advertise one delivery time and deliver three or four days later, which essentially is false advertising and harmful to local businesses who could easily compete on delivery time. And this is Amazon fulfillment.
To be fair, he didn't specify that the reviews were false. Maybe he only agreed because he legitimately likes the vacuums. I think if someone offered me a product I like for free in return for a review, I'd do it. I wouldn't leave a positive review on a bad product though.
Come on, let's be honest here, they wouldn't keep sending you products for free if you left anything less than a stellar review. That's the entire problem with incentivized reviews.
Sure, but consider the costs of consuming your space with junk. Now you have less room for things you care about, there's a maintenance burden, and there's a mental burden as well
Yes, but were the vacuums actually good? He left 10 reviews for this company, which may have led other people to buy them, and made this company look better than it is... just so he could stuff his shed full of them? That's kinda fucked up. He even said he felt kinda shady about it, so my guess is that the reviews weren't honest.
What is the difference between doing this, and any product review currently available on youtube?
This is the best summary.
Not having things and regretting passing up on something is much more real for people that had problem with money before.
Having too many things is just abstract unless you had that problem maybe
Is 12 vacuums abstract?
It is abstract in the sense that you might not see why that would be a problem
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Probably the most HN-coded response I can imagine to someone asking why you would possibly want 12 vacuum cleaners.
Who knows. I have lots of siblings and my spouse does as well, so that’s nine vacuums accounted for. Add in both sets of parents and I’d have one left over to gift to someone who also needs one.
I’m not sure how to take your comment other than uncharitably so I’ll just concede that you obviously have smaller dust collection needs than I do.
Christmas gifts for the whole family.
Stocking up to give them out at Christmas?
> why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after that?
This guy took bribes to leave fake reviews. He obviously sucks. /s
> I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
Why would you want 12 vacuums? What are you going to do with them? Isn't that a senseless amount of redundant objects to horde? Don't you want room for other things in your shed?
>Don't you want room for other things in your shed?
To be fair, it's vacuum so it doesn't occupy space.
But space is entirely occupied by vacuum.
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> Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
All it takes to lose civilisation is for everyone to think as selfishly as this.
Nah, civilizations been running on this attitude since it's inception, and here we are.
There's never been a magical golden age where people were any different than they are.
The difference is mostly that people with this mindset were less empowered to enact upon it.
But we've democratized fraud now.
I'm struggling to believe you have a dozen new vacuum cleaners in your shed. It's quite an extraordinary claim. Are you willing to share some evidence?
Sure. It's cold, rainy, and midnight but here's what came up in my email when searching "vacuum". It's not all, and you can see some I didn't reply to but -
https://imgur.com/a/F0u9xVM
I was looking forward to seeing 12 neatly stacked & boxed vacuum cleaners in a dimly lit corner of your shed ;-)
That said, thanks for sharing the emails/headers.
It's curious that Amazon hasn't flagged you for purchasing & reviewing multiple similar items in such a short span of time. I would imagine it would be quite easy to spot someone who's bought and reviewed 12 vacuum cleaners in a 2 or 3 year window.
Example of the contents of an offer:
https://imgur.com/a/q634ty4
> Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
Thank you for the laugh.
But why keep them all? Why not give some away to friends or neighbours, or even sell them?
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
I had a tool manufacturer read a bad review on one of the big box home improvement stores in the US, they contacted me within a day (the store must have gave them my email address?) and offered to send me my choice of replacement tool, for free, in exchange for taking my review down.
Helps me learn which companies not to trust.
I always wondered why Amazon would show me ads for vacuums after I just bought a vacuum from them.
This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there are avid vacuum collectors.
Oooh, I had the same deal but with cameras... Maybe they should pivot into a site showing deals w/ scammers.
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.
I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.
> I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review
Uh, this is how it's supposed to work? Make a good product, get good reviews for free.
"Make a crappy / mediocre product and pay people to write good reviews" is completely different.
Good product? Oh lord no. I just got to people before they could figure out it was bad.
Note: I did not last long in this business before hitting the eject button.
I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.
I wonder if reviews should have a field for "how long have I owned it" (or even "about when did I buy it", to track changes in manufacturing quality). Places like TrustPilot would probably benefit from coming back to people and saying, "Here's a review you wrote a year ago; anything you want to add?"
Manufacturers could even submit an "expected lifespan", and reviews could be marked where they were made within that lifespan. A bad review after 7 years of owning a 5-year product shouldn't count as much as a bad review 7 years after owning a 10-year product.
> I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.
The point remains that you don't need to "buy" reviews. You don't need to give out coupons, or gift cards, or rewards or in fact anything. Hence why I said "it's not that complicated" as per:
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
Why pay for what you can get for free?
Leave honest reviews (not saying you're not) and don't feel dirty. You'd actually be helping.
They were mostly honest - I just always included something like 'an upgrade from my last one' but these clones are all so similar and all effective. Can do the whole house on a single charge, strong enough, has the low projecting light to highlight dust, high number of attachments.
Does the job. I'm no vacuum connoisseur (Which you think I'd be after all of these) but none were scammy products.
Ah, I was looking at a Dyson a while back, and wondering if they were worth buying. Went for something else in the end, as I thought they were a bit pricey for what they offered, and didn't dare go for a clone.
Would you happen to have a link to the model you got (or one of the similar models), to get an idea of which clone could be worth considering next time?
Can I have a vacuum?
Why did they choose you for vacuum pimp? You got high "consumer rating" or something?
When you have extremely generous return policies then reviews matter less. They are still relevant if your'e trying to optimize for buy once for life, but in that case you should just be going for established brands instead, where their reputation is their review.
They don't build them like they used to, in my experience most consumer electronics/appliance brands that are still considered high quality are just coasting on the reputation they built up in the 70s, 80s and 90s. In many categories it's getting almost impossible to find products that aren't just generic whitelabeled junk resold by "established brands".
Very true. Two other things are happening.
1. The whitelabeled junk is getting very good. In some categories, the brand name stuff has degraded to the point that the aliexpress version is better and cheaper.
2. The IoTification of everything means that a lot of traditionally long lasting items are as durable as their WiFi board - i.e. not very. This also plays into number (1) - where cheap, Chinese, items either lack IoT features or provide them only locally instead of requiring an online account.
Brands don't mean much when they're constantly bought up by other companies and then used to whitewash poorer quality products.
Yes, trademarks don't make sense when the entity behind them can change completely. The whole point was to protect consumers.
It's one thing to detect fake language patterns; it's another when the review is technically real but incentivized into dishonesty
Horrible for the environment
… Wanna send me a vacuum?
Wait what. You have 12 vacs?
anyway, I can imagine some small territory in time where fakespot can accurately deal with the flood. But then..
Yes.
I had to leave a video review component (No face). I wonder if any shoppers ever wondered why the same monotone man was constantly buying and reviewing vaccuum cleaners if he's always leaving positive reviews?!
Dyson always struck me as scammy. All the way back to the 19990s. More proof.
Because fake Dyson clones exist?
> Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity
I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.
I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?
I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.
Mozilla seems infected by corporate board members who probably have conflicts of interest including investments in Amazon, Google, etc.
Mozilla seems to be infected by upper management that feels a need to justify ever spiraling salaries.
It's easier to justify a new thing than it is to make an improvement in an existing thing.
Why do you think VPs love new projects / products so much?
Couldn't agree more. After the founder of the company itself Brendan Eich was fired it only went downhill
Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage, then went on to create Brave, which is yet another Chromium wrapper just with bad crypto monetization and other scummy practices.
Couldn't imagine what Mozilla would be like today if he stayed around and tried to integrate crypto. At the end of the day, main post shows Firefox engineering is keeping up with Chrome which is a feat no other browser has accomplished.
For the record I also dislike the top brass at Mozilla for the same reasons I dislike Eich - trendchasing instead of making a good browser. Firefox is succeeding because of the engineers and despite the c-suite.
> Firefox is succeeding because of the engineers
By what metric is Firefox succeeding?
>Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage
This gets really tiresome to rebuke. He supported a proposition that was supported by the MAJORITY of the citizens at the time and that was already six years old when we became Mozilla CEO. Some people wrote hit pieces even though he even distanced himself from it. He was not fired, he stepped back voluntarily.
Are they hiring?
Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.
I think this is the real answer; they've got a vague mission statement, they saw something they wanted to support, opted to buy it, and in classic Mozilla fashion let it squander because the managers in charge moved on.
It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.
Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.
I do get the feeling that Mozilla has no idea what their goal is any more. Another one they are like is Yahoo! Just seem to be endlessly trying new things but not really committing to any of the new things one they have them.
I’d guess the idea was about generalizing the team’s efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But that horse has left the barn.
Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.
> Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.
And also, apparently, selling your data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612, and particularly move-on's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213945.
I don't actually think there was (or needed to be) one...keep in mind they're a non-profit. I think they just wanted to make the internet a safer place, but semi-extraneous (particularly unprofitable) projects sadly need to be cut aggressively with the rising threat of the google antitrust suit, as they may lose most of their income.
Mozilla Corp is a for profit organization owned by a non-profit foundation.
That doesn't necessarily change the overall mission of the organization, but definitely does give them more flexibility to offer paid options to help sustain development, should they see an opening in the future.
This is more or less taken directly from Thunderbird's website (which I think is a fair comparison): "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. This structure gives us the flexibility to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird’s development far into the future."
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/about/
Why is Mozilla, supposedly a subsidiary of a nonprofit with the goal of making the internet better, looking for business models in the first place? They should be looking for donations, sponsors, government grants, etc.
Right, why even buy it in the first place? I can't imagine the landscape has changed much, unless the most popular comment here is all the evidence you need...
They could have slid in their referral link, which would probably make them decent money, but the "ick" factor is pretty high from consumers.
I'm sure there will be a replacement though, and I'm sure they will go hard with referral links.
Just make it opt in
I recall seeing the Mozilla Review Checker pop up on Amazon shortly after I started using it as my daily driver.
I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
Feels like they bought a cool tool, didn't know how to plug it into anything meaningful, and quietly sunset it when it didn’t fit the roadmap
Similar feelings about Pocket too. Mozilla seems to be on a cleaning spree
Rather that taking yet another opportunity to dump on Mozilla (it's easy, I know), I think a better question would be who is the alternative out there doing the work that Fakespot tried to do? Is this telling us that the task is too large for any current solutions to handle?
Just relying on consumer judgement has certainly proven to be inadequate in combating fake reviews, and without incentive, we're not going to get many legitimate reviews.
I can almost assure you, the plan is to run it into the ground,
Why? Can’t imagine any realistic push for this when there’s theoretically much more money to be made by creating a product that people pay to use.
I did search around looking for alternatives and the landscape isn't great. There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.
TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.
SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for
Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs
There are a few others on AlternativeTo that weren't there the last time I checked. https://alternativeto.net/software/fakespot/
On Reddit, some people were mentioning alternatives, including asking ChatGPT about the product and it might have some kinda helpful advice, but nothing like Fakespot offered. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ktm4g4/now_that_f...
If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!
I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
Please help me understand why a subscription to your service should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend.
I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.
I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
Attribution revenue is what I would consider the gold standard for these types of services.
It makes sense on paper, if the service helps confirm legitimate reviews for you and convinces you to purchase said product, they should receive attribution revenue for helping generate the purchase.
The reality is much much messier though, because often times the people who award attribution revenue have a conflict of interest against any service that could even potentially expose bad practices happening on their marketplace.
I once worked for a popular deal site that developed a price tracking extension, a certain marketplace threatened to completely ban us from attribution revenue and we had to kill the extension over night despite our users loving it.
I saw that actually. I mentioned in another post on here recently that I figured that the only way a Fakespot v2 could exist is with a subscription model, but on the other hand, it's probably not something I could afford. Good luck with it though! You could always try advertising & affiliate links as a test to monetize the service as well.
Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate affiliate links after the Honey scandal: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-co...
Yeah, probably not in the extension itself. But, Fakespot, on their web based reviews, had listings to alternative or better rated products than the one you were searching for. Possibly a bit of a conflict, but as far as I'm aware, it's the only way Fakespot was monetized.
I really don't think this is going to work well, like how is an LLM going to know someone paid me for my review?
Subscription seems wrong, will prevent adoption
Should show me something instantly, I should be able to paste in a url
Hmm I can see the angle
I’ve basically settled on only buying major brands that I already know from Amazon unless it’s something that I’m okay throwing away if it doesn’t work out. I then judge by my assessment of the bad reviews.
IMHO judging these random Chinese products with the nonsense capital letter brands by actual reviews is a lost cause.
>I’ve basically settled on only buying major brands that I already know from Amazon
I wouldn't even do that, unless you can't find it anywhere else. Amazon commingles their returns form 3rd party sellers and Amazon direct. So you might order an item, find out it was actually a broken returned item, and then have Amazon call you a liar.
Yeah same here. The sad thing is that even with this Amazon is still better than most of the competition.
For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.
Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil
Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.
Indeed. You would need a plugin running on user computers, or maybe even control over User Agent. Insurmountable blocker for Mozilla.
DeepSpeech shuttered in 2021. The repo was just made read-only the other day
April 12 2021
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-partners-with-nv...
https://venturebeat.com/business/mozilla-winds-down-deepspee...
So they wrote a ping pong shader for monetization going with the user or selling out the user.
I sell books on Amazon.com through their KDP Direct platform, and I have one book with two different covers; each is its own "book" in their catalog. FakeSpot repeatedly marked reviews I knew were valid as fake; I knew this based on the fact that the same reviewer reviewed the "other" book and that review was NOT flagged as fake. And this happened multiple times, and sometimes the wording of the two reviews were different. Further investigation showed FakeSpot had rather a poor reputation overall due to too many false positives. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned.
That's interesting! Did you have any guesses as to what might have been setting it off to mark those reviews as false positives?
I have managed some Amazon product pages, which I know have never used fake reviews. Fakespot consistently had false positives for these items
It's just hard to build a blunt tool that doesn't occasionally whack honest users too
It is possible that that reviewer writes diverse reviews on random books so that the paid reviews it leaves have some cover.
With removal of reviews that the seller doesn't like, there's really no point to taking Amazon's star ratings or reviews seriously. It's all a big lie.
I’ve started resorting to the “x bought this month” metric instead. If a product works for thousands of people and they continue to buy 500+ units a month, clearly it is a good option.
If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.
They also tell you if a product has a high return rate, which is helpful.
Except with clothes and especially belts, I've noticed. It seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they buy and returns two of them. It makes it harder to identify shitty clothes.
> It seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they buy and returns two of them.
Amazon used to offer this as a service!
How do you know that 500 people didn't buy a scam product this month? I put as much faith in the X people bought this as I do the X people have this in their cart. It's all a way of trying to stoke FOMO
You don’t. However, that risk is mitigated with a simple, easy to use return policy, where you actually get your cash back (not airline vouchers or points or made-up things to keep you in the ecosystem).
what makes you believe that the number you see in “x bought this month” is not some variant of if (session_is_gullible_to_displayed_sales_number) { return HIGH_SALESNUMBER; } ?
Pretty sure that metric can be gamed
There’s also the strangely still-not-even-admitted-as-problematic Amazon item page referent shuffle, where one item is for sale on a given page, and the item sold by that page points to one item by a given seller. The reviews of this item are spammed positively, and then the item being sold on that page is changed by the seller, yet the reviews follow the page, not the item sold at the time the review was placed.
This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.
It sure does get there quick though. And heads back to the warehouse for free if you don’t like it.
Counterfeit items are contraband and may not be legal to be shipped or mailed, as they are evidence that a crime may have occurred. To return counterfeit items for material benefit to the seller or agent in order to receive a refund is possibly helping the fraud to continue by allowing the destruction of property/evidence. I advise all folks who suspect counterfeit goods to report them to the FTC and their local police department to get a police report, and insist that the police take the item(s) as evidence, then provide the police report to Amazon to facilitate the refund, instead of returning the potential contraband to the contraband dealer for them to sell again or for them to destroy the insufficiently misleading fake item.
Scammers are somehow using Amazon itself as an A/B test for if your fakes pass muster, from what I can tell, and everyone loses but Amazon and the bad guys. How long must this continue?
Is this something you've actually done? You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
> Is this something you've actually done?
I haven’t done this myself, but I have discovered that it is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a previously working device suddenly stopped charging within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund, they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge. So Amazon said please don’t ship it, but to dispose of it according to my local disposal regulations.
In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people about this important issue at my own freebooted unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat or something caused Caesar’s to be on lockdown. At this talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X which would work when powered via USB C but would not charge or work unplugged. All features and functions still worked otherwise.
> You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
It’s funny you mention that, as I really had to almost haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message. The message is the medium. It’s the multi sensory experience of being appealed to which is the payload that runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if you ingest it in the way presented and intended.
Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!
I've basically defaulted to looking for 3-star reviews with coherent complaints
Me and my partner just don't trust any reviews any more. Blogged about it here:
https://johnnydecimal.com/20-29-communication/22-blog/22.00....
So you know what we do now? Ignore the overall rating: it's worthless. Instead, go directly to the 1*. They're the only true indicator of a product/place/service.
I'm not saying take them all at face value. You still have to put in some work. But all the data is in the one-stars.
Unfortunately 1* are often bragging of some maniacs who bought a fork and they complain it is not working great as a spoon, or just black PR from the competitors. Whole reviews system is not working.
The key is the ratio of crazy to sane 1 star reviews. Mostly crazies? Then the service is probably good. But if there are many sane 1 star reviews? Might be a bad place.
2 and 3 star reviews as well. If 5 of them mention the battery went out, amazon is denying service and the company is non-responsive? Next.
Discussion (1222 points, 1 month ago, 761 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662
(62 points, 27 days ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184974
Yup! And today's the day.
مشک آن است که خود ببوید نه آنکه عطار بگوید
“Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).”
This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read.
As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those reviews.
The only way to know about a product is to read about it elsewhere like New York Times which is not selling the product themselves.
More often than not those sources are getting paid for product placement. Wire-cutter, NYT, JD Power, Wired - they all get advertisement money for "reviews".
Of course. But they have a reputational stake in their recommendation as well.
I take a Wirecutter top pick as meaning something very different from Bobby123's glowing review. Wirecutter may have been influenced by ad money a bit. Bobby123 may not even exist or may be entirely driven by seller compensation. And I'll never see Bobby123 again.
"Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable model" seems to be a recurring theme.
Some online retailers (such as galaxus for those in Europe) include return statistics on the sale page against comparison brands as well as price history graphs. This helps stamp out two of the core complaints about amazon: fake reviews and fraudulent discounts.
If you look around, you'll see products on Amazon occasionally marked as "frequently returned". It has steered me away from a few purchases.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
If you have to buy a back massage in bulk as backups, doesn't that means it's crap quality? Are your standards that low?
There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
Did Fakespot work? I can't see how it would stand a chance against LLM generated reviews without even having the log (keystroke?) data that Amazon does.
Better than nothing. Not sure how well it worked or if it used any particularly advanced AI similarity checker or sentiment analysis.
It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
The last year it's been a mixed bag.
One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.
The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.
I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100% accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
I think a lot of real reviews are written by ChatGPT. People are lazy!
I saw an instagram ad the other day offering to buy established Reddit accounts, presumably so that can post fake reviews.
I also got offered some money over telegram to review a hotel from a large chain and leave a positive review.
Governments should block Instagram and Facebook until they start doing something about ads about ilegal offerings.
I've seen ads selling fake clothes, real clothes but with a fake store, money exchange scams, and a few others.
Governments should block Instagram and Facebook. Period. No takesie backsides. And Google, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Hacker News, ....
My own form of Amazon punishment for allowing fake reviews is to send back their falsely reviewed crap on their own dime. If they want to save $$ they should clean up the review process.
What about things that break after a while, when you can’t anymore send it back ?
Reviews don't work well for those anyway since the product will have been discontinued by then and replaced with a slightly different one.
Their privacy policy / licence allowed collection of passwords and whatnot. Copying from older comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38204923
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
Look at Section 2B
There is one clear route to solving this problem and I already pay money to get it, it's an independent third party consumer review site.
They are good at objectively evaluating consumer products, they simply buy all the main models of a thing and review them all. I trust them (which is very important in this space). I happily pay for this service.
AI has made it completely impossible to detect fake reviews now, so it would have died naturally. Amazon (and other retailers) has the access to heuristics on their end that could help with fake review detection that fakespot doesn't, but it's likely a very low priority for them (if it is one at all)
I've never even heard of it, yet it was acquired by Mozilla? Seems like the problem is right in front of them; they didn't really try.
This is so odd. Firefox is my primary browser and this is the very first time I have ever even heard the name Fakespot.
Amazon is pretty much Aliexpress now (and Temu in some cases). With bit of a markup on the price.
As most humans are afraid to be against the consensus of the room, fake reviews and sentiment seeding is extremely effective against the general population. Also note that bad actors use it to create bad sentiment to it's competitors.
Anyone in the know care to sum up / list alternatives?
I'm actively working on one at https://www.truestar.pro because I couldn't find a drop-in alternative to Fakespot. I also wrote a blog post last week about the state of alternatives: https://blog.truestar.pro/fakespot-alternatives/ (spoiler: there's not much)
Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway.
Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable. Also can combine this with marketplace reviews considering reliability.
If there is no review than have to trust the brand and if there is no brand then it is a gamble
> Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway
Although at least the platform can know if the reviewer actually purchased the product(?)
> Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable
Unless they use affiliate links, which is a great big red flag that the incentives are already stacked against you.
Could you fund this via a firm that litigated under consumer protection laws?
Do you even need Fakespot anymore for Amazon? I think we can fairly assume that whatever is purchased on that platform will be junk. I rarely purchase anything from Amazon these days except protein bars or items I treat as disposable. More often than not, when I order legitimate items, I get either counterfeit items or previously refunded items that are certainly not in "new" condition. I go into actual stores these days for any serious purchases.
I really loved their plugin.
9 years? I could have sworn I saw it in 2015, maybe even 2014.
I think by now I have quickly learnt that they can just read all the worst reviews and see if they can: 1. put up with the drawbacks, 2. see how frequent manufacturing defects are. 5* reviews are only useful if they upload real images.
Still working for me, but I see the notice on their page. I assume it'll go dark at the end of the day.
Do we need to start a killedbymozilla.com?
This shutdown feels like another case of "big org can't monetize, so good idea gets shelved"
Sadly, chalk up a victory for enshittification. I was a Firefox fax, now mostly use DuckDuckGo. Doesn't most of Mozilla's funding come from Google?
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