The cost of fake reviews on society is subtle but may be high. And it’s too large of a scale for FTC to realistically pursue everyone. I suspect it needs to sound big and scary to work.
I think it's better to try and educate people not to rely on reviews than to make "fake" reviews illegal. Lots of wasted resources in enforcement, and tons of ways to get around it allowing scammers to take advantage of naive consumers that think a law helps them.
It's called "deceptive business practices" because you're lying, in exchange for money, and pretending to endorse a product while not declaring you've been paid to do it - which is already prohibited.
I'm amazed (or saddened) but not surprised at how averse people are to the idea of people thinking for themselves. Real life is not a computer, you can't just make rules and have them automatically work.
Nobody is 'averse to thinking for themselves'. But there are millions of scientific and economic decisions made every day and it's unrealistic to expect everyone to fully vet all of them. Additionally, stupid people are gulible and easily preyed upon by the unscrupulous. It's not unreasonable to delegate product oversight to a government commission, whose opinions consumers can choose to seek/abide by, or not.
I am amazed (or saddened) but not surprised at how averse people are to the idea of people cleaning after themselves.
Why do people expect a functioning sewage system, instead of traking their poop to the ocean themselves?
Why do they expect the beach to be free of excrement, instead of cleaning it themselves? Why do they expect a recycling dystem to actually recycle plastic instead of defrauding them and dumping it in malasia?
Well, then they also expect the reviews to be non-fraudulent?
Well, each year (in the US, at least) a fresh batch of aroun 4 million people turns 18 years old. Even if every one of them in a given year was completely convinced by this effort, that would leave the work undone for the inexorable flow of future young adult cohorts.
I reckon all you've got to do to pull this off is to commandeer one of the two dominant political parties and hoist your educational agenda to the top of its political platform. You'll need to be super diligent to ensure that this influence extends down through the state, county, and municipal governments and is effectively implemented at all the local school districts. Not quite sure how to extend this to home schools.
No it won't because Amazon doesn't write any fake reviews, to the best of our knowledge.
The article and rules make clear that this applies to the companies writing and submitting fraudulent reviews, not the platforms hosting them.
(If Amazon wrote a bunch of its own fake 5-star reviews for products under its own label, then this would apply in that case. But considering how many Amazon-brand products have terrible ratings, there's no reason to believe they've ever engaged in that practice.)
What are some of the poorly reviewed Amazon products? Anytime they show up (at the top of the search results, naturally), they are typically a high averaged score.
My prior assumption was that Amazon took a page from Walmart's playbook and would, ahem, borrow ideas for only the best/top-selling products.
I'm guessing after you hit some number of reviews and the average is less than 3, Amazon doesn't let you list it anymore. Which is funny considering Amazon lets you filter search results on 1-star or 2-star items only and up. Seems like that filter option exists just to make you feel like the higher star ratings are more meaningful.
Mattresses make me wonder if, stupidly assuming the rule is enacted and enforced, there might be knock-on effects. TVs, mattresses, electronics, etc like to sell distinguishing SKUs to different platforms. That is, Target may get to sell the Sony 59" ABC123, but Walmart only ever gets the Sony 59" ABC456. Rendering it impossible to get stores to price match products from other marketplaces.
Big if, but if these rules go into effect, I wonder if maybe reviews being harder to solicit could result in more consolidation of model numbers to concentrate the review scores?
Consumer Reports reviews mattresses. They do a decent-to-great job depending on the product. Shopping for anything they review is infinitely better than dealing with the hellscape of normal reviews.
The proposed rule prohibits disseminating or causing the dissemination of a testimonial... about the business or one of its [the business's] products or services (when the business knew or should have known that the testimonial was illegitimate).
That would catch Amazon if fake reviews were left on sold-by-Amazon products (and Amazon should have known that that was happening), but that seems unlikely unless Amazon is trying to violate the rule. Amazon disseminates a lot of fake reviews, even fake reviews that it has reason to believe are fake, but those are presumably not for Amazon's own products.
Amazon handles the customer interactions, the fulfillment at nearly every step (shipping, picking and packing, returns, etc), takes a cut per sale, etc etc etc
Under most reasonable definitions the seller of record should in fact be Amazon and not the person who amazon calls a seller....
As usual, corporations manipulate language to undermine government and citizen actions against thier misdeeds
I would not be surprised if the majority of fake reviews are coming from offshore companies. Does the FTC have jurisdiction to fine those? Otherwise this changes nothing.
I once bought socks on Amazon, which came with a note saying they would send me a free item for a good review. I then got a free electric kettle with another card. Then I got lenses which attach to a phone camera, a carjack, a foldable lawn chair, but the a raclette cheese melter didn't come with another card.
Honestly, all fine products, nothing's broken etc. and I was very happy with such an amazing value for under $10. Werw they even fake reviews?
Were yours in particular fake? Maybe not. Does this cause people who might've given a four start review to bump it up to five? Probably. Does it mask the company later subbing in a cheapened, shittier version a few months later to float on the large number of five star reviews? Yes.
> Does it mask the company later subbing in a cheapened, shittier version a few months later to float on the large number of five star reviews? Yes.
What does that have to do with the proposed rule? There is a rule against substituting in an unrelated product to get credit for reviews that were originally written for something else. Making a new batch of your product that is cheaper and worse than the old batch is allowed.
> The Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule to stop marketers from using illicit review and endorsement practices such as using fake reviews, suppressing honest negative reviews, and paying for positive reviews, which deceive consumers looking for real feedback on a product or service and undercut honest businesses.
> Review Hijacking: Businesses would be prohibited from using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product. The FTC recently brought its first review hijacking enforcement action.
The scenario is explicitly part of the new rule, even if you'd otherwise have given it a five star review.
They're not giving you free products just for fun. One of the reasons is to get hundreds or thousands of good reviews
The scenario is not part of the new rule. Review Hijacking refers to transferring reviews from one product to an unrelated product, not transferring reviews from one product to the same product assembled on a different manufacturing line. The new version of the product may be obviously worse, but it is not a substantially different product.
The last time I got one of those cards I wrote a 1-star review of the product for that reason. Amazon refused to publish the review citing their policy that product reviews aren’t meant to be reviews of the seller (even in this case when the seller is also the manufacturer and doing shady review manipulation). Sellers only play those games because Amazon is on their side.
And the process of “reviewing the seller” (IE reporting them for bribing you) is made extremely difficult by Amazon. It’s nice that Amazon has gotten the government to enforce policy for them in their platform, it must be a lot cheaper to pay lobbyists than to make their platform work.
A trick on Amazon, which I have no idea how it's allowed, is to create a listing for a product like detergent or soap, get tons of reviews that are 4.5 stars+ then change the listing to something else entirely, like supplements or anything. Something high margin that is being drop shipped. Suddenly all the reviews are mixed between this new product and the old one, but you have 4-5 people go in and create reviews for the new product the listing has been replaced with, and have accounts just mark those as the most helpful, so they rise to the top (most people don't go through more than 5-10 reviews.) It's such a scam. It's very common too.
This infuriates me and I know Amazon could fix this with like five minutes of trying on their part. It seems like such an obvious engineering fix that it must be intentional that it remains as-is.
Yes and we have to set those incentivization right, so they don't see fraud as profitable anymore. Which is what this law is about and it comes way too late.
That is addressed by § 465.3, "Consumer Review Repurposing".
> It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this Rule for a business to use or repurpose a consumer review written or created for one product so that it appears to have been written or created for a substantially different product, or to cause such use or repurposing.
A good starting lower bound would be the number of purchases after the fraudulent review had been left. If Amazon gets control of the content they host, they really don't have much to worry about.
Not sure that's in the FTC's wheelhouse, but at least the New York Attorney General's office said they're worth $615K in fines to the firms that actually generated the comments (and not a cent from the megacorps that almost certainly hired them...) [1].
Real reviewers also write fake-ish reviews. It's often sufficient to criticize minor points and rate it "not recommended for publication" to get a paper rejected. The more prestigious journals get so many submissions that a paper with one bad review doesn't stand a chance. It's a way to keep the competition down.
What about corporate advertising? Where a celebrity is hired to promote product X which he never uses but still endorses it and even gives it a "fake review" in an ad? What's the difference between an ad and a fake review?
You mean George Clooney doesn't really drink Nespresso?!
That's part of the point I made below, these kind of rules are so easy to skirt as to render them irrelevant. The law just becomes one more way that scammers can claim legitimacy.
So how are they going to enforce this? The FTC says codifying rules can help it be much more efficient in court — but it isn’t actually getting any additional enforcement resources. It could also still face hurdles trying to go after offending businesses that are based overseas, if they’re in countries that don’t have a history of working with the FTC
What _effective_ means has the FTC exercised to regulate any dishonest behaviors, considering (wire fraud?) phone solicitor and text message spam is rampant in the US and has been supposedly regulated by FTC for years now?
I would think Amazon would have more of an incentive to purge their site of counterfeits, fake reviews, etc., because training customers to not trust their site is going to hurt sales. And it'll be very hard to regain that trust.
I'm still wondering when that tipping point will happen. I've personally stopped using Amazon years ago for all those reasons and more. Somehow they still keep making more money than God.
I buy stuff from Amazon all the time. Some products I won't buy from them. Sometimes I get something bad, and I just return it. Amazon is pretty good about accepting returns.
Amazon saves me a great deal of time. Before Amazon, I'd have to spend 2 hours going to the mall and back, and face a very limited selection there. Now I spend 5 minutes and it drops on my doorstep, sometimes even that evening.
Time means a lot to me. I'll put up with a lot to save time.
This is a weird comparison, there are other online vendors except for Amazon. In fact, one of the reasons I don't use Amazon is because I value my time, if I search for something specific e.g. a particular phone model, I don't want to wade through several pages of results with screen protectors. Amazon has the worst search of all online shops I know, by a huge margin.
You kinda glossed over "it drops on my doorstep, sometimes even that evening". Only a few other sites (Costco+Instacart, Walmart, Apple, etc) offer same day delivery. Their search engines are almost as bad as Amazon's.
There are, once I tried a trusted shop I've used a couple of years ago.
They made me wait one week to dispatch the item. Instead of using allegro.pl (aka amazon for Poland) which had the next day delivery for the same item.
The platforms make the sellers to dispatch stuff in the time period they've listed in the description.
> I've personally stopped using Amazon years ago for all those reasons and more. Somehow they still keep making more money than God.
Sorry, I'm trying to figure this out and have been having a hard day on this forum with all the subtext. Was your personal expenditure on Amazon enough to impact their revenue to the point where it would be noticeable?
No. I'm a raindrop in an ocean. But given how terrible my overall experience with them has been, and the issues brought up in Walter's original post, I'm surprised that my not-shopping there has been more of a personal thing and less of a trend.
Every time I try to intentionally not buy something from Amazon, I find no store in town has it and every other online store is more expensive when you include shipping.
You could consider intentionally paying a somewhat higher price in order not to support Amazon's practices with your money.
I'd imagine some of the price difference is attributable to the kind of conduct you may find objectionable - assuming this is the reason why you're looking for alternatives.
UK, still many retailers do just fine - I just bough 2 portable AC's to compare, returned 1, and got a discount for damage in transit. Appliances Direct
Buy only "shipped by amazon", better yet "sold by amazon". I buy from amazon because I know that if I don't like it I can send it back for free. For any reason. Maybe that's a US only thing?
"As many as 30 percent to 40 percent of online reviews are fabricated or otherwise not genuine,"
LOL. Put a decent or at least nearly decent product on sale on Amazon. Accrue positive reviews. Switch product to pile of cac. Positive reviews sell pile of shite.
I do occasionally bother to leave a review for a product I have bought and I always specify it. Otherwise I am allowing Amazon to treat me and their other customers like a twat, which they do, with monotonous regularity.
It would be nice if Amazon didn't treat me and everyone else as twats. They will continue to manage to make more money than pure avarice in its wildest dreams could contemplate. You do have to wonder what on earth happens at a board meeting in these monsters.
Amazon typically shows the review date, which helps with that sort of thing. I usually pay more attention to more recent reviews when assessing an item's quality.
Also, just don't read five-star reviews. Whether fake or not, they won't contain any interesting information. The important insight is invariably in the "negative" one-to-four star range.
Find products I'm interested in using their search. This is harder than it sounds, because Amazon's search is horrible.
Filter results by aggregate user ratings. Only consider anything 4.5 stars or higher. In rare cases when product is more niche or I know people have unrealistic expectations and leave reviews like: "coffee maker didn't brush my teeth, 1 star" I make an exception.
Filter remaining products by number of orders. Products with high aggregate rating and lots of orders are far more likely to be better.
Then after all that read a few of the negative reviews to see if there are any systemic flaws, e.g. poor hinges that give out quickly.
Then I pick the cheapest product out of the remaining ones. Usually...unless, like a good consumer, I'm addicted to a particular brand.
The rules also forbid a few more shady tactics such as review “hijacking.” That’s when a merchant takes a product listing page filled with legitimate reviews and swaps in a different product that those customers never actually used. (Earlier this year, the FTC made its first enforcement action for this practice, fining a supplement maker $600,000 for doing this on Amazon.)
Well the product title and pictures change, don't they? If your semantic meaning of the product change significantly and/or your images do, then it gets automatically flagged. Seems like not too difficult of a machine learning problem. Hell, you could do a lot of it without ML.
It would make sense to go after the seller for that but when the product is obviously changed it is much more effective to go after the platform.
Something simple like either you delete the reviews or you pay to have your changes reviewed. If it is important to you to change everything it must be worth something.
How could you possibly expect the mest technologocally advanced retsiler on earth, that has invesntwd cloud services and sells machine learning, to match the benchmark set for grandpa's old store, to be aware of what is it theybare selling?
Yeah, my question was more rhetorical though. Amazon could know for the same reasons. Except they make submitting any sort of complaint like that very difficult. If you want to report a review you can't even select a reason for why.
It’s weird that you can change a product after it’s been sold, and especially after it’s received reviews. The only reason I can think of is to keep your reviews.
Regardless, simply version the product on change and only show reviews for the current version would do the trick.
> Just because something is difficult to automate doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Sometimes it does mean that.
The number of updates to product listings is large and the proportion of updates that are scams is low. That means you need to be thorough enough to not have false positives or your false positives will outweigh actual scams by a big margin. Which means high cost per inspection. But then you have to apply the high cost inspection to all the updates that aren't scams.
It's completely plausible that the cost of doing this could exceed the cost of the scams, i.e. doing it isn't worth it.
To prevent this you need actual criminal penalties, because going to jail is a deterrent in a way that having your account closed when you can just turn around and sign up for another one is not.
They are past the point of no return. By the time everyone realized what was going on the fraud was a critical portion of their revenue (silicon valley syndrome). The only things that could possibly stop this are competition that wins by not doing it, or government intervention (or Yellowstone blowing its top).
It doesn't really have anything to do with how long it's been going on. If having better reviews is a competitive advantage then they could do it themselves.
The problem is, there is no guarantee that it's worth more than it costs.
They built out and maintain the features that allow for this to happen. They also rake in an insane amount of revenue for allowing sellers to do this. It's part of their business model.
Amazon could automatically include the name of the product in each review (but if they haven't done that already the probably don't care)
But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name, i.e. distinguishing from a major name change from a minor rephrase of the same product
The person is asking why you can change it to a completely different product that’s in a different category. Like changing a listing for socks to a listing for a monitor stand.
It is weird on Amazon marketplace. For our own product, for which we have trademark, registered in their brand registry, etc, we often can't make our changes reflect on a live product page. But then we see clearly highjacked product pages, like a 3d printed bracket for mounting GoPro on iris quadcopter I was selling many years ago to a USB cable.... Many in sellers community believe it is inside job, where current employees of Amazon with access to making changes to the product catalog making a side income from such shenanigans.
There were cases were Amazon's own product pages were hijacked like that in the past...
As someone who is also a long time seller on Amazon, my unscientific A/B testing seems to point at greater Buy Box control being tantamount to greater control over an ASIN's product details. I work mainly in drop shipping, and it's a constant battle to even get a UPC to actually point to the correct product info. Chinese sellers love to make a product's retail UPC point match to an ASIN for an arbitrary number of that item. But it just seems like in cases like that, Amazon likes to side with whichever seller is making the most sales on that ASIN, no matter the what the facts are
Suppose you post a product initially and the listing is all messed up. Clearly the wrong dimensions etc. But some people buy it and it's a decent product so it gets good reviews. Now you notice the problems with the listing and want to correct them. Can you?
Yes, and it's a feature that most marketplace platforms specifically build out because they profit from new products being sold with glowing reviews from older unrelated products.
How can you tell the difference between the same thing but updated packaging for the companies new brand from a whole new thing unrelated to the first? And in the grey area it is this years upgrades/version (is this still the same thing?)
Don't forget that it needs to be automated as Amazon is too big to do this manually. And whatever rules you come up with can't be gamed.by creative lawyers.
There's a massive difference here between changing Widget v1 to Widget V2 and changing a pillow to an air conditioner. There are very simple things they could limit right now, like not allowing to change the listing category after N days without a review and hundreds of other things.
> as Amazon is too big to do this manually
Amazon allowed a guy to build a dick-rocket for a trip to space. They can hire a hundred people to review those requests. Don't worry about poor Amazon not coping.
I think even allowing changes from V1 to V2 while keeping reviews is pretty bad. It's not unheard of for hardware manufacturers to release a higher quality product initially and then "cost optimize" it to suck later. A good example is hard drives and SMR[1].
Why not allow linking back to the V1 version and its reviews from the V2 so shoppers can judge for themselves instead of having one take the place of the other?
This is why I think a new listing per SKU requirement would be great.
You also see this happen with retailers, where manufacturers work with retailers to build exclusive cheaper versions of existing products that use those products' names and packaging. You end up with situation where the Walmart version of your specific product is actually different than the ones sold everywhere else.
Then they just lie about the SKU. There is no rulemaking that will replace the need for more audits. Someone somewhere is accountable and if their illegal practices are made unprofitable the problem will go away.
Amazon is a company that makes a tiny amount of money a billion times a day. There is no sustainable way to increase costs without increasing prices. Regulatory overhead in competitive markets like retail gets paid for by customers, not corporations. It makes poor people have to pay more to buy stuff.
> There is no sustainable way to increase costs without increasing prices.
This is beyond ridiculous. Any company pulling in 3.2 billion in profit can easily increase costs without increasing prices just by accepting a little less profit. Hell, they could increase costs and lower prices and still be both highly profitable and sustainable by any sane definition of those words.
Their net margin over the last year was 0.82%. That's the extent of how much costs could increase before they lose their entire profit, and companies are unsustainable well before that because they become worth more to sell off for their real estate and equipment than they are as an operating company.
You might also be interested in the proportion of the operating income they do make that comes from AWS rather than retail:
Amazon generally has some of the most competitive prices and competing with them is a major factor in preventing other retailers from charging more. The evil to be prevented is poor people having to pay more for stuff, so how would that help?
But the original argument was that they're so profitable. Now you're trying to find an explanation for their lack of profit.
Free cash flow isn't profit, and the way you measure whether something is worth investing in is against the opportunity cost. If they expect to invest a dollar in X and get back $1.25 and you say they have a dollar so they could invest it in Y that gets them back $1.03, the only reason for them to do that is out of charity, and the act of doing it would cost them $0.22 on the dollar.
And you're still not solving the problem, you're just moving it somewhere else. You say they could spend money on this instead of investing in something else, like Amazon Basics. Now Amazon Basics doesn't make batteries, or USB cables, or what have you. There is less competition in that market, so people have to pay more for that stuff.
It can't come out of what they're paying to shareholders because they never pay anything to shareholders.
That sounds like an Amazon problem, they are not entitled to profit from deceiving their customers.
> It makes poor people have to pay more to buy stuff.
Poor people aren't using Amazon because Amazon hasn't had the best prices online in years. You can get the same stuff for much cheaper on AliExpress or Walmart's retail and 3rd party marketplaces, or one of the dozens of other marketplaces online.
I sometimes run into it by accident then look at the ui and the prices in disbelief. Its always a joke by comparison.
Bling has this rather weird feature that allows you to search for similar (product) imaged, I don't know how often it works but iirc it displays prices under the similar (read the same) products.
I think eventually that might become a desirable standard. A platform, interested in the long game, wouldn't want to sell the same goods for 4 to 50 times the regular price. Just like brick stores use to guarantee the lowest price.
> It makes poor people have to pay more to buy stuff.
Sam Vimes' boots:
Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
Also, lemon market:
When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
This is a silly economic theory. Rich people buy high quality goods that cost several times more money, often thousands of dollars as opposed to tens, for signaling reasons. Those products often are more durable, but not in proportion to how much more they cost. If a $1000 pair of boots lasts five times longer than a $50 pair of boots, you're still paying $750 more in the long run, and paying it as an up front cost, and taking a higher risk because anything that damages the high cost product is a bigger loss.
That isn't to say that you can never find a product which is such garbage that it costs more even though it costs less, but there is no reason to expect that to be the common case, and a big reason to expect the contrary: Sellers will try to charge more to people who can afford it even past the point that higher prices can cost-effectively improve quality, and rich people will pay those prices because they're less price-sensitive or more willing to pay for signaling.
> Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
You're making a proportionality argument here, but that's irrelevant. The question isn't what rich people do. It's if the amount it would cost to prevent fake reviews is more than the cost to ordinary people of them existing.
And the effect you're referring to only applies to a narrow range of products. If you order some paper towels and end up using napkins for a couple of days while they send some different ones, it's not a big deal. Conversely, if they send you an incompatible replacement battery for your device, you're stuck using the one that only lasts 15 minutes until you can get another one even if you make $100,000/year.
> When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
The assumption here is that Amazon reviews are the only means for people to evaluate quality. There are retailers that don't even have review systems and still don't become lemon markets because people can rely on third party reviews or brand reputation. And those systems are typically better because they're not tied to a retailer with a dominant market position, which improves competition in retail and routes around the perverse incentive of the retailer to host dishonest reviews.
> Don't forget that it needs to be automated as Amazon is too big to do this manually. And whatever rules you come up with can't be gamed.by creative lawyers.
That’s their problem if they allowed themselves to grow so big they can’t manage their own store.
If they can’t handle product updates, they shouldn’t allow it.
Easy, lol.
Add into the rules "if it is a whole new thing and we see it from the user claims, your account goes bye-bye".
But it is still profitable for Amazon to sell scam items, so they do nothing.
Also, yes, they could spend some time to review the updated pictures for the listings or make it a paid feature for the sellers. They could even use AI to compare descriptions and if USB-flash drive becomes 1TB SSD drive, they could flag that.
Don't. Just dump all reviews upon any product change (at least by default). Everything goes into a secondary bucket of "Old reviews for a previous version of this product." With a clear notice that "product features or even core functions may be different".
They love money and fees. They can offer a review process to keep reviews for a new version once manually reviewed and confirmed as substantially the same product, perhaps with new images of new packaging.
you either have enough reviews that it is worth a substantial amount of money to preserve them or you just make a new listing. Change review pricing can also scale with the number of reviews.
Examples:
A part gets obsoleted by vendor, sustaining engineering has to find a replacement. They conduct a small study to see how the new part works. The budget for conducting lengthy tests to determine if a simple change has any effect at the worst case tolerances is typically not there.
Suppliers quality changes over time. This is known as supplier quality fade. Suppliers will often underbid a part to win a contract. Then once volume ramps up they begin value engineering. Maybe they add more regrind material to an injection mold. Or they progressively begin to make the part slightly thinner on each subsequent batch. Maybe they begin to use a toxic filler material without notice.
An colleague literally had a situation in which a steel casting supplier was putting rocks in the castings.
Companies move injection mold tooling from vendor A to vendor B. The tooling might be the same but the settings are different, so the results are then different.
Without an excellent quality team that has money and time to check everything this will happen.
If you are competing in a marketplace with low margins there will never be enough money to check everything.
Perhaps part of a product, each supplier, and each changed spec should contribute to a unique fingeprint.
If you have a product which you keep calling FOO but has changed some spec in the new version (without hw change, perhaps you enabled some firmware option and now it can record 25 minutes instead of 20), it should get a new fingerprint. If it has changed a supplier for a chip, new fingerprint. And so on.
And aside from the fingerprint, you should also give all the entries that contributed to it (which when hashed in a structured function should give the same fingerprint), plus things like its production date.
I work in data management for large companies and I can promise you the problem is not a technical one. Which organization has the maturity to actually follow-through with quality data for such systems? Which legislators have the power to enforce such an approach?
Are you aware a portion of this functionality exists already, albeit implemented in a very dark pattern? Go to reviews and in the filtering options, select the variation of the product you're viewing and sort by newest. You'll be able to spot when they changed the product typically and then get a feel for how current product is being reviewed.
You shouldn't have to. If you look at the reviews for product A, you should be getting reviews for product A. If they've updated product A, it is still product A and they can let you know that it was for an old version.
Google already does this for games and apps on their play store.
You shouldn't have to sort because companies are showing you reviews for product A, but you are looking at product B. These aren't even reviewing the same product. It is dishonest, and the consumer shouldn't be the one with the responsibility here.
They don't care. In Poland we have a central internet marketplace much like Amazon. It's better to such an overwhelming extent that trying to use Amazon makes me feel sick in comparison.
Amazon feels like one of those fake garbage websites that sometimes SEO their way to the frontpage of search results. For a long time I seriously had no idea it was even a real store.
Remember illegaly selling Tibia in-game currency on Allegro. Think I was between 10 and 13 y old. Good old times.
Haven't used Allegro much since I've left the country. Heard that after they got bought by someone, they made some user hostile actions like greatly increased their comissions from each sale.
Good to hear that. they are still strong and opposing Amazon.
Places that big tech was not interested in (eastern europe - poland, czechia, slovakia) actualy have competition and while its been condensing (allegro buying lots of competition) there are still many players.
Its funny amazon has major warehouses in poland and czechia (fulfillment to germany) but they dont even have czech store. You can buy from amazon.de and have it delivered to czechia but amazon doesnt compete on the market. They try with amazon.pl but i dont think its very popular. Lots of the other companies have things like pickup at physical stores (using packeta.com) or nonstop storage boxes that are everywhere in cities. Amazon would have hard time competing there so why bother.
It might show that amazon sttopped inventing in the space. I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
The UX is overwhelmingly bad, shipping usually costs more than the free shipping threshold on allegro - it just has no value proposition.
> I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
Why do these companies even sell out to Amazon given how much higher their potential value proposition is? Without heavy antitrust monopoly bullshit, I can't imagine Amazon competing with anything that actually tries to be an usable service.
In Czechia we have Alza.cz and it works so well and is so well-established that Amazon has a hard time competing. For example I can order something 5 minutes before midnight on Saturday and it will be delivered the next day at 6 am to the AlzaBox automated box. If I don't like the thing, I can return it to the same box within 14 days and I get a refund fast. The website is well-categorized and easy to use and everyone knows the brand.
They told me my review of a fake SD card was against the community rules, though they didn't say which rule. If only they spent a little of that effort blocking fakes.
> Amazon could automatically include the name of the product in each review
And photos, the original listing ones before the user ones.
This wouldn't help for example with different revisions of the same product, but still would do wonders against sellers recycling say reviews of a cat litterbox to sell a pair of shoes.
> But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name
That could really work but the discount should be 100% on the seller, otherwise Amazon would have no incentives.
It's simpler: a listing and all the reviews attached to it ought to be for an unique and specific product. If the product changes then a brand new, clean listing should be created.
If this is not the case it's that Amazon does not care.
The rules should let them fine Amazon instead, this way law enforcement resources won't be spent going after every supplement seller that sets up shop somewhere...
It shouldn't be an either or sort of situations - it is quite possible to go after both.
If you don't go after Amazon, the issue continues. If you don't go after the supplement seller, they rebrand and/or just start selling elsewhere and keep up their deceptive practices.
This is good news. Shady tactics like these are rampant on Amazon, and I hope Amazon is held partially accountable. I get not wanting liability for third party discussion forums (eg reddit, isp, etc) because of freedom of speech. But when a good or service is literally being sold through the marketplace that marketplace should be held to higher standards than a discussion forum.
Just a note for those who didn't consider the following:
Theres likely plenty of businesses which have legitimately engaged and not pulled the switch, but you would still receive the counterfeit product due to the manner in which Amazon handles and fulfills orders (big bin of products from any vendor that labels thier product as X without any checking to validate it's legitimacy).
Worst is when they insult you by changing a legitimate name like "Polo" to the glaringly knock-off name "Pölo" after the fact, to manipulate users (this happened to me) into blame themselves for falling for such a blatant typo. Like i had to stoy using them entirely, n if they make huge piles of money, like at least they don't make that n a tiny additional amount from me. Like in many ways not crappy but very hit n miss, like too problematic.
> I do occasionally bother to leave a review for a product I have bought and I always specify it.
Thank you! There is no way of knowing otherwise. This is also true for genuine listings where multiple versions are offered.
There is also a more general problem with this because this is also true for OEMs using the same name for fastly different products (i.e. router with different SoC, TVs with different panel technologies, SSDs with different controller and/or cache). And in that case it's just hard to even leave a proper review because you might not know that other versions exist and how to distinguish.
The issue is mostly the same and the intention is often also the same (but not necessarily).
> I do occasionally bother to leave a review for a product I have bought and I always specify it. Otherwise I am allowing Amazon to treat me and their other customers like a twat, which they do, with monotonous regularity.
Amazon banned me from leaving reviews years ago because I'd leave negative reviews when I had negative experiences with the products I bought. Turns out they don't like that, and it leaves me wondering how many bad reviews go unseen because they're blocked from being written in the first place.
Sellers routinely ship large items in their original packaging. Things like air conditioners. Amazon does not allow any mention of shipping or packaging in the reviews. So consumers that continually receive damaged items can't warn other buyers about the high likelyhood of receiving the item damaged because it wasn't packaged properly. The seller knows they don't have to respond to complaints because of the enormous hurdle of sending the items back. The customers just bang the sheet metal back in place, replace any broken components, and install it to avoid anymore hassle (hey! We'll send you a new damaged one!).
Walk down a street market at night in Thailand and look at the warez on sale at the tables. Every single thing you see that looks like it's from a brand is counterfeit. Every movie or program is pirated. And the home utensils? Don't put those in the microwave, and definitely don't let your baby play with them.
I know we all think of Amazon as an American company that sells legitimate products like books, but why should we have thought it would be any different from a 2nd or 3rd world marketplace? There's no harm to it once you view it with the same level of suspicion that any average Thai person views the home goods sold on the street.
The only issue is that Americans aren't adapted to thinking critically about what they're being sold. They're adapting, and they will learn, because they're no longer a first world country.
TL;DR: It's not that you're being treated like a twat, it's that you actually are a twat if you're still trying to buy shit on Amazon.
I've increasingly wondered about counterfeit items not only from Amazon but in local stores. After someone left a tobacco vape pen at my house I decided to buy some of my own. I went to a couple local liquor stores and purchased some Elfbars. Apparently stores often ask that you sample it before leaving to make sure it works as they don't take returns. Okay. At both stores the clerk opened the box, removed the packaging and handed it to me... while throwing away the box. I realized that the boxes have holograms, QR codes and serial numbers to check authenticity. So, I bought another and asked to keep the box. Checked the QR, and sure enough it went to a dead website "e1fbar.com", obviously not legitimate. I entered the serial on the real website and it said it was not authentic, too. Word online is that a huge amount of these products are counterfeit - Elfbar says they have helped identify and shut down over 120 organizations selling fake products. So it makes me wonder, is everything else these store sell legitimate? What's to stop them from selling counterfeit liquor and cigarettes?
Hey, just from personal experience, don't smoke fake vapes. I ended up in the hospital with a golf ball sized ...thing... blocking my esophagus, which was initially thought to be cancer, and I was told I had 3 months to live, but it turned out to be a reaction to some shit in an unmarked vape from China. I lost a lot of weight. This was about 10 years ago when basically all vapes were sketchy and off-brand, and I thought it was a great idea to quit smoking and become an early adopter. I'm completely fine now and back to cigarettes. Seriously, don't inhale it if you have any doubts as to its origin.
Oh but like per your question... who's gonna defend anyone from an unscrupulous butcher selling someone cat meat, and stuff, Like, no one. That's how it is everywhere else in the world. Amazon is just a rampant zoo of it all in one place, exposing all this deadly garbage to naive first worlders for the first time... but it's just backwash.
> who's gonna defend anyone from an unscrupulous butcher selling someone cat meat, and stuff, Like, no one. That's how it is everywhere else in the world.
What? Don't you have trading standards officers (UK) or something similar in your part of the world? Or something like Mattilsynet in Norway? These organizations are responsible for exactly that kind of policing.
Oh, I was fairly offended that these stores happily sold me dangerous and fraudulent products. I certainly won't be doing that again.
Glad your problem turned out to be fairly benign, although I'm sure painful and worrisome! Who knows what they put into those products.
Customs and the FTC are the US agencies tasked with protecting consumers and the market from counterfeit products. I would imagine there are various national and local agencies for different types of products. It appears they could step up enforcement a bit.
I don't smoke, but every shop I've walked past that was targeted at vapers looked like the shadiest place imaginable. They have the same feel as those cash-only nail bars or phone repair shops. All the furniture and branding looks as temporary as possible, like they know they're probably going to get shut down in a few months so they want to be able to close up shop and ship their assets out on short notice. And they always end up in those cursed retail units which rarely manage to keep a single identity for a full year.
Vapes stores run the gamut. Some of them inherited their style from the classic head shop, which was basically as tacky as possible. The head shop scene has evolved from places selling pipes, bongs, rock posters, incense, psychadelia, sometimes porn and knives to include a type of store called a glass gallery, with higher end merchandise and a much more modern and classy sense of style. Some vape stores are actually quite nice, like one I went to in Eugene which had lounge chairs, tasting bar and was decorated like a fairly nice coffee shop. One that I go to here in Denver isn't as nice, but has a reasonably classy atmosphere compared to the type of store you describe. It likely depends on the area.
My experience with counterfeits was at average liquor stores though, not actual vape shops. 7-11 and other convenience stores also sell these disposable vape pens and from what I've gathered, most of the disposables are fraudulent. Supposedly dedicated vape stores are better about selling legitimate items, though I imagine it varies.
"Twat" is probably not something that a Yank would know they are being described as, let alone self-describing for a bit of a dramatic effect. I'm off of the UK.
I do find it comforting that a pretty niche en_GB insult has been swilled around the gobs of enough people on the planet, that it is recognisable to a Thailander (bit of an assumption). That implies to me that due to the power of the internet (anyone can talk to anyone) a lot of messages are transcending some huge boundaries. This one is a rather obscure and a rather juvenile insult, but I'm sure rather more positive messages get through too.
I should probably point out to anyone that doesn't know, that "twat" is a euphemism for female genitalia.
I will ask that you don't conflate all english speakers with the USofA, quite a few other countries speak english too as a first language. I don't take offence - they are starting to shape up quite well (bless). I'm also not too sure about trotting out the first -> third world thing is too useful these days - that's all a bit last century or earlier. I like to think we have moved on somewhat since then. However, if you think it is still a useful way to categorize parts of the planet - let's debate that.
Why I don’t disagree with these proposed rules, I find it scary that a government agency outside of our elected officials has the power to enact these rules. I see this infringing on freedom of speech, but perhaps a lawyer would disagree with my opinion.
government agency outside of our elected officials
The FTC commissioners are appointed by the President, an elected official. Congress creates government bodies as departments or commissions depending on whether it wants them to directly report to the executive or have some independence from it.
e.g. does selective review farming qualify? I can't count the number of apps that ask something to the effect of "do you like this app Yes/No" where "No" funnels to an internal feedback form and "Yes" to the play store review page. Including to my recollection first party google apps and other big name publishers/companies.
To my opinion, 'of course' this should be illegal -- and I try and rate the apps that pull this crap a 1/5 when I stumble on to it.
I'm aware of the legal distinctions (I'm an attorney)... it was my lament that America in 2023 protects commercial enterprise against false reviews while the very foundations of American democracy are crushed by coordinated lies by politicians.
Can someone please change the title? It's not present tense, but future tense, with a big IF. The rules are no in place yet and it's not 100% that the rules will be put in place.
2-4 star reviews is what I usually look for. 1 and 5 star reviews are typically fake or made by someone not properly evaluating all aspects of product and instead reacting to a bad/good experience.
To reach moderators, send email to hn@ycombintor.com
Reference this post by URL or ID (36556228) in the subject line for faster processing, and the alternate URL you're suggesting in the body of your email along with a brief rationale, e.g., "link disambiguation".
I usually do this myself, though in this case arguably WaPo are adding relevant commentary and analysis. That said the direct FTC link is useful to have in this thread.
There could be a simple reporting function with a click of a button, type what's needed, then admin checks these reports from a simple page and take action. Way faster than sending an email from an email client, then opening it in another client, then going back to the website, login, check that specific issue with the copy/pasted links because it is in the email not in the reporting system.
This is not 1990. All forum platforms have this function. (bb, vbulletin, discourse, etc.) I can't even understand why this is being discussed. :)
Throwing more messages (not necessarily signal) onto the queue likely won't help that. Keep in mind that spurious or abusive reports are frequent characteristics of such systems.
Who precisely is being "gatekept" through a reliance on email? Even this highly-pseudonymous space alien cat replying to you now manages to get through that particular hurdle, and in fact, anyone, whether they have an HN account or not, who does have an email account (much of the online public) can at least in theory reach HN mods.
So, say, if you happen to be some third party who's being affected, abused, misrepresented, etc., on HN, it's possible to reach moderators directly with no further site interactions required.
Contrast with virtually all online ticketing or contact systems which otherwise mandate a site-specific account or profile.
- There's already a click-based interaction mechanism, the "flag" link. That's non-specific ("here be problems"), but also means that any type of issue can be reported with only a single mechanism and reporting flow.
- Yes, a more complex workflow for issue reporting could be constructed. Those ... tend to be complicated, not be especially useful, often omit the specific concern the reporter has in mind, and if overly arduous, result in people simply selecting the first option and moving on. Such systems can also become ossified and/or brittle over time, where an email-based system is inherently flexible and adaptable.
- Reporting links can also be abused by bots, web scrapers, and the rest, which means limiting them to registered members, and perhaps a subset of those (as is the case with HN's "flag" link). Email is the Universal Reporting Mechanism as I've noted in another comment on this thread.
- Email is sufficiently non-structured to address a wide range of issues. The one standardisation I've been asked to provide is to include the specific item ID in the subject of the email. This lets mods pull up the item directly using macros written for that purpose. I suspect that often the issue is reasonably apparent on doing so.
- I make extreme efforts to keep my standard-issue emails brief, clearly identify the post and source link, and suggest a remedy, all in consideration of moderator time. I suspect many other frequent reporters do likewise. Mods do respond typically within an hour to a day, and will often fix issues well before responding.
Doesn’t this section make it contradictory for Amazon to sell their own products or would this section only apply to dedicated review/opinion websites?
Maybe companies should be required to version prouducts a bit more carefully. As I understand it, it's possible to continue selling under the same product even after making changes to manufacturing techniques or materials. If you get a bunch of good reviews because you're using high quality materials, you can't just start selling a cheaper version under the same listing. I'm not sure how frequently this actually happens, but I've heard it claimed that it does happen.
The "disappearing reviews" issue might be mitigated by versioning the product entry, and preserving the old reviews for the old version of the listing.
What about showing a thumbnail next to the review of how the product looked for the purchaser submitting a review? Break out averages per version. Show a diff between the total and the latest version.
> Overall 4.7 stars:
> [Photo of sock] 4.9 stars from 17,000 reviews "very comfy!"
> [Photo of expensive electronics] 1.3 stars from 13 reviews "this garbage lit itself on fire."
278 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadWhy do people expect a functioning sewage system, instead of traking their poop to the ocean themselves?
Why do they expect the beach to be free of excrement, instead of cleaning it themselves? Why do they expect a recycling dystem to actually recycle plastic instead of defrauding them and dumping it in malasia?
Well, then they also expect the reviews to be non-fraudulent?
Well, each year (in the US, at least) a fresh batch of aroun 4 million people turns 18 years old. Even if every one of them in a given year was completely convinced by this effort, that would leave the work undone for the inexorable flow of future young adult cohorts.
I reckon all you've got to do to pull this off is to commandeer one of the two dominant political parties and hoist your educational agenda to the top of its political platform. You'll need to be super diligent to ensure that this influence extends down through the state, county, and municipal governments and is effectively implemented at all the local school districts. Not quite sure how to extend this to home schools.
But otherwise, this is a splendid idea.
Amazon may owe the FTC more money than the world's annual GDP.
The article and rules make clear that this applies to the companies writing and submitting fraudulent reviews, not the platforms hosting them.
(If Amazon wrote a bunch of its own fake 5-star reviews for products under its own label, then this would apply in that case. But considering how many Amazon-brand products have terrible ratings, there's no reason to believe they've ever engaged in that practice.)
My prior assumption was that Amazon took a page from Walmart's playbook and would, ahem, borrow ideas for only the best/top-selling products.
And here's a 1 star item but it only has 1 review: https://www.amazon.com/low-rated-item-varenc-found2/dp/B09Z6...
I'm guessing after you hit some number of reviews and the average is less than 3, Amazon doesn't let you list it anymore. Which is funny considering Amazon lets you filter search results on 1-star or 2-star items only and up. Seems like that filter option exists just to make you feel like the higher star ratings are more meaningful.
Big if, but if these rules go into effect, I wonder if maybe reviews being harder to solicit could result in more consolidation of model numbers to concentrate the review scores?
That would catch Amazon if fake reviews were left on sold-by-Amazon products (and Amazon should have known that that was happening), but that seems unlikely unless Amazon is trying to violate the rule. Amazon disseminates a lot of fake reviews, even fake reviews that it has reason to believe are fake, but those are presumably not for Amazon's own products.
Under most reasonable definitions the seller of record should in fact be Amazon and not the person who amazon calls a seller....
As usual, corporations manipulate language to undermine government and citizen actions against thier misdeeds
Honestly, all fine products, nothing's broken etc. and I was very happy with such an amazing value for under $10. Werw they even fake reviews?
What does that have to do with the proposed rule? There is a rule against substituting in an unrelated product to get credit for reviews that were originally written for something else. Making a new batch of your product that is cheaper and worse than the old batch is allowed.
> Review Hijacking: Businesses would be prohibited from using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product. The FTC recently brought its first review hijacking enforcement action.
The scenario is explicitly part of the new rule, even if you'd otherwise have given it a five star review.
They're not giving you free products just for fun. One of the reasons is to get hundreds or thousands of good reviews
The parent poster describes a chain of six free products. They're clearly not doing this as a charity exercise.
This is like claiming that a kingpin could shutdown crime on his street - why would he, he gets a cut
> It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this Rule for a business to use or repurpose a consumer review written or created for one product so that it appears to have been written or created for a substantially different product, or to cause such use or repurposing.
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/05/15/fake_net_neutrali...
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/12/ny-ag-doles-out-wrist-sl...
That's part of the point I made below, these kind of rules are so easy to skirt as to render them irrelevant. The law just becomes one more way that scammers can claim legitimacy.
So how are they going to enforce this? The FTC says codifying rules can help it be much more efficient in court — but it isn’t actually getting any additional enforcement resources. It could also still face hurdles trying to go after offending businesses that are based overseas, if they’re in countries that don’t have a history of working with the FTC
Amazon saves me a great deal of time. Before Amazon, I'd have to spend 2 hours going to the mall and back, and face a very limited selection there. Now I spend 5 minutes and it drops on my doorstep, sometimes even that evening.
Time means a lot to me. I'll put up with a lot to save time.
I used to pay $60 per order for overnight delivery from electronics distributors. Same-day is faster and almost free. Life is good :)
The platforms make the sellers to dispatch stuff in the time period they've listed in the description.
It’s AWS
Sorry, I'm trying to figure this out and have been having a hard day on this forum with all the subtext. Was your personal expenditure on Amazon enough to impact their revenue to the point where it would be noticeable?
I'd imagine some of the price difference is attributable to the kind of conduct you may find objectionable - assuming this is the reason why you're looking for alternatives.
-- H.L. Mencken
Sometimes rendered as "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Provenance: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/03/01/underestimate/>.
LOL. Put a decent or at least nearly decent product on sale on Amazon. Accrue positive reviews. Switch product to pile of cac. Positive reviews sell pile of shite.
I do occasionally bother to leave a review for a product I have bought and I always specify it. Otherwise I am allowing Amazon to treat me and their other customers like a twat, which they do, with monotonous regularity.
It would be nice if Amazon didn't treat me and everyone else as twats. They will continue to manage to make more money than pure avarice in its wildest dreams could contemplate. You do have to wonder what on earth happens at a board meeting in these monsters.
specify what? that you bought it?
Find products I'm interested in using their search. This is harder than it sounds, because Amazon's search is horrible.
Filter results by aggregate user ratings. Only consider anything 4.5 stars or higher. In rare cases when product is more niche or I know people have unrealistic expectations and leave reviews like: "coffee maker didn't brush my teeth, 1 star" I make an exception.
Filter remaining products by number of orders. Products with high aggregate rating and lots of orders are far more likely to be better.
Then after all that read a few of the negative reviews to see if there are any systemic flaws, e.g. poor hinges that give out quickly.
Then I pick the cheapest product out of the remaining ones. Usually...unless, like a good consumer, I'm addicted to a particular brand.
The rules also forbid a few more shady tactics such as review “hijacking.” That’s when a merchant takes a product listing page filled with legitimate reviews and swaps in a different product that those customers never actually used. (Earlier this year, the FTC made its first enforcement action for this practice, fining a supplement maker $600,000 for doing this on Amazon.)
Something simple like either you delete the reviews or you pay to have your changes reviewed. If it is important to you to change everything it must be worth something.
Regardless, simply version the product on change and only show reviews for the current version would do the trick.
Just because something is difficult to automate doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Sometimes it does mean that.
The number of updates to product listings is large and the proportion of updates that are scams is low. That means you need to be thorough enough to not have false positives or your false positives will outweigh actual scams by a big margin. Which means high cost per inspection. But then you have to apply the high cost inspection to all the updates that aren't scams.
It's completely plausible that the cost of doing this could exceed the cost of the scams, i.e. doing it isn't worth it.
To prevent this you need actual criminal penalties, because going to jail is a deterrent in a way that having your account closed when you can just turn around and sign up for another one is not.
The problem is, there is no guarantee that it's worth more than it costs.
But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name, i.e. distinguishing from a major name change from a minor rephrase of the same product
Not sure how reliable ML is in that scenario
There were cases were Amazon's own product pages were hijacked like that in the past...
Try browsing through your oldest Amazon orders--you may very well see something you didn't buy at those links now.
If you don't, how do you fix a listing error?
This feature exists on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc.
Don't forget that it needs to be automated as Amazon is too big to do this manually. And whatever rules you come up with can't be gamed.by creative lawyers.
> as Amazon is too big to do this manually
Amazon allowed a guy to build a dick-rocket for a trip to space. They can hire a hundred people to review those requests. Don't worry about poor Amazon not coping.
Why not allow linking back to the V1 version and its reviews from the V2 so shoppers can judge for themselves instead of having one take the place of the other?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
You also see this happen with retailers, where manufacturers work with retailers to build exclusive cheaper versions of existing products that use those products' names and packaging. You end up with situation where the Walmart version of your specific product is actually different than the ones sold everywhere else.
Amazon is allowed to be smaller if it can't figure out how to do it profitably.
This is beyond ridiculous. Any company pulling in 3.2 billion in profit can easily increase costs without increasing prices just by accepting a little less profit. Hell, they could increase costs and lower prices and still be both highly profitable and sustainable by any sane definition of those words.
You might also be interested in the proportion of the operating income they do make that comes from AWS rather than retail:
https://www.investopedia.com/how-amazon-makes-money-4587523
Amazon choose to make investments which skew the profit margin.
They definitely have money to improve things like reviews, however they choose to invest it in other areas.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/21/20826405/amazons-profit...
Free cash flow isn't profit, and the way you measure whether something is worth investing in is against the opportunity cost. If they expect to invest a dollar in X and get back $1.25 and you say they have a dollar so they could invest it in Y that gets them back $1.03, the only reason for them to do that is out of charity, and the act of doing it would cost them $0.22 on the dollar.
And you're still not solving the problem, you're just moving it somewhere else. You say they could spend money on this instead of investing in something else, like Amazon Basics. Now Amazon Basics doesn't make batteries, or USB cables, or what have you. There is less competition in that market, so people have to pay more for that stuff.
It can't come out of what they're paying to shareholders because they never pay anything to shareholders.
> It makes poor people have to pay more to buy stuff.
Poor people aren't using Amazon because Amazon hasn't had the best prices online in years. You can get the same stuff for much cheaper on AliExpress or Walmart's retail and 3rd party marketplaces, or one of the dozens of other marketplaces online.
Bling has this rather weird feature that allows you to search for similar (product) imaged, I don't know how often it works but iirc it displays prices under the similar (read the same) products.
I think eventually that might become a desirable standard. A platform, interested in the long game, wouldn't want to sell the same goods for 4 to 50 times the regular price. Just like brick stores use to guarantee the lowest price.
Sam Vimes' boots:
Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
Also, lemon market:
When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
This is a silly economic theory. Rich people buy high quality goods that cost several times more money, often thousands of dollars as opposed to tens, for signaling reasons. Those products often are more durable, but not in proportion to how much more they cost. If a $1000 pair of boots lasts five times longer than a $50 pair of boots, you're still paying $750 more in the long run, and paying it as an up front cost, and taking a higher risk because anything that damages the high cost product is a bigger loss.
That isn't to say that you can never find a product which is such garbage that it costs more even though it costs less, but there is no reason to expect that to be the common case, and a big reason to expect the contrary: Sellers will try to charge more to people who can afford it even past the point that higher prices can cost-effectively improve quality, and rich people will pay those prices because they're less price-sensitive or more willing to pay for signaling.
> Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
You're making a proportionality argument here, but that's irrelevant. The question isn't what rich people do. It's if the amount it would cost to prevent fake reviews is more than the cost to ordinary people of them existing.
And the effect you're referring to only applies to a narrow range of products. If you order some paper towels and end up using napkins for a couple of days while they send some different ones, it's not a big deal. Conversely, if they send you an incompatible replacement battery for your device, you're stuck using the one that only lasts 15 minutes until you can get another one even if you make $100,000/year.
> When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
The assumption here is that Amazon reviews are the only means for people to evaluate quality. There are retailers that don't even have review systems and still don't become lemon markets because people can rely on third party reviews or brand reputation. And those systems are typically better because they're not tied to a retailer with a dominant market position, which improves competition in retail and routes around the perverse incentive of the retailer to host dishonest reviews.
Sprinkle some AI to it, and it becomes manageable.
That’s their problem if they allowed themselves to grow so big they can’t manage their own store.
If they can’t handle product updates, they shouldn’t allow it.
Also, yes, they could spend some time to review the updated pictures for the listings or make it a paid feature for the sellers. They could even use AI to compare descriptions and if USB-flash drive becomes 1TB SSD drive, they could flag that.
They love money and fees. They can offer a review process to keep reviews for a new version once manually reviewed and confirmed as substantially the same product, perhaps with new images of new packaging.
Examples: A part gets obsoleted by vendor, sustaining engineering has to find a replacement. They conduct a small study to see how the new part works. The budget for conducting lengthy tests to determine if a simple change has any effect at the worst case tolerances is typically not there.
Suppliers quality changes over time. This is known as supplier quality fade. Suppliers will often underbid a part to win a contract. Then once volume ramps up they begin value engineering. Maybe they add more regrind material to an injection mold. Or they progressively begin to make the part slightly thinner on each subsequent batch. Maybe they begin to use a toxic filler material without notice.
An colleague literally had a situation in which a steel casting supplier was putting rocks in the castings.
Companies move injection mold tooling from vendor A to vendor B. The tooling might be the same but the settings are different, so the results are then different.
Without an excellent quality team that has money and time to check everything this will happen.
If you are competing in a marketplace with low margins there will never be enough money to check everything.
If you have a product which you keep calling FOO but has changed some spec in the new version (without hw change, perhaps you enabled some firmware option and now it can record 25 minutes instead of 20), it should get a new fingerprint. If it has changed a supplier for a chip, new fingerprint. And so on.
And aside from the fingerprint, you should also give all the entries that contributed to it (which when hashed in a structured function should give the same fingerprint), plus things like its production date.
Name="FOO", cpu.model="x-dragon-v5", cpu.supplier="Fukimata Japan", ..., fan.supplier="Fans-R-Us",...
Reviews then are tied to the product+fingerprint instead of just the product.
Google already does this for games and apps on their play store.
You shouldn't have to sort because companies are showing you reviews for product A, but you are looking at product B. These aren't even reviewing the same product. It is dishonest, and the consumer shouldn't be the one with the responsibility here.
Amazon feels like one of those fake garbage websites that sometimes SEO their way to the frontpage of search results. For a long time I seriously had no idea it was even a real store.
Haven't used Allegro much since I've left the country. Heard that after they got bought by someone, they made some user hostile actions like greatly increased their comissions from each sale. Good to hear that. they are still strong and opposing Amazon.
Its funny amazon has major warehouses in poland and czechia (fulfillment to germany) but they dont even have czech store. You can buy from amazon.de and have it delivered to czechia but amazon doesnt compete on the market. They try with amazon.pl but i dont think its very popular. Lots of the other companies have things like pickup at physical stores (using packeta.com) or nonstop storage boxes that are everywhere in cities. Amazon would have hard time competing there so why bother.
It might show that amazon sttopped inventing in the space. I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
The UX is overwhelmingly bad, shipping usually costs more than the free shipping threshold on allegro - it just has no value proposition.
> I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
Why do these companies even sell out to Amazon given how much higher their potential value proposition is? Without heavy antitrust monopoly bullshit, I can't imagine Amazon competing with anything that actually tries to be an usable service.
And photos, the original listing ones before the user ones.
This wouldn't help for example with different revisions of the same product, but still would do wonders against sellers recycling say reviews of a cat litterbox to sell a pair of shoes.
> But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name
That could really work but the discount should be 100% on the seller, otherwise Amazon would have no incentives.
If this is not the case it's that Amazon does not care.
If you don't go after Amazon, the issue continues. If you don't go after the supplement seller, they rebrand and/or just start selling elsewhere and keep up their deceptive practices.
Theres likely plenty of businesses which have legitimately engaged and not pulled the switch, but you would still receive the counterfeit product due to the manner in which Amazon handles and fulfills orders (big bin of products from any vendor that labels thier product as X without any checking to validate it's legitimacy).
Though I guess they don’t care because they get their cut. I don’t even think they pay for the returns as they’d pass that on to the seller.
Thank you! There is no way of knowing otherwise. This is also true for genuine listings where multiple versions are offered.
There is also a more general problem with this because this is also true for OEMs using the same name for fastly different products (i.e. router with different SoC, TVs with different panel technologies, SSDs with different controller and/or cache). And in that case it's just hard to even leave a proper review because you might not know that other versions exist and how to distinguish.
The issue is mostly the same and the intention is often also the same (but not necessarily).
Amazon banned me from leaving reviews years ago because I'd leave negative reviews when I had negative experiences with the products I bought. Turns out they don't like that, and it leaves me wondering how many bad reviews go unseen because they're blocked from being written in the first place.
I know we all think of Amazon as an American company that sells legitimate products like books, but why should we have thought it would be any different from a 2nd or 3rd world marketplace? There's no harm to it once you view it with the same level of suspicion that any average Thai person views the home goods sold on the street.
The only issue is that Americans aren't adapted to thinking critically about what they're being sold. They're adapting, and they will learn, because they're no longer a first world country.
TL;DR: It's not that you're being treated like a twat, it's that you actually are a twat if you're still trying to buy shit on Amazon.
Oh but like per your question... who's gonna defend anyone from an unscrupulous butcher selling someone cat meat, and stuff, Like, no one. That's how it is everywhere else in the world. Amazon is just a rampant zoo of it all in one place, exposing all this deadly garbage to naive first worlders for the first time... but it's just backwash.
What? Don't you have trading standards officers (UK) or something similar in your part of the world? Or something like Mattilsynet in Norway? These organizations are responsible for exactly that kind of policing.
Glad your problem turned out to be fairly benign, although I'm sure painful and worrisome! Who knows what they put into those products.
Customs and the FTC are the US agencies tasked with protecting consumers and the market from counterfeit products. I would imagine there are various national and local agencies for different types of products. It appears they could step up enforcement a bit.
My experience with counterfeits was at average liquor stores though, not actual vape shops. 7-11 and other convenience stores also sell these disposable vape pens and from what I've gathered, most of the disposables are fraudulent. Supposedly dedicated vape stores are better about selling legitimate items, though I imagine it varies.
I do find it comforting that a pretty niche en_GB insult has been swilled around the gobs of enough people on the planet, that it is recognisable to a Thailander (bit of an assumption). That implies to me that due to the power of the internet (anyone can talk to anyone) a lot of messages are transcending some huge boundaries. This one is a rather obscure and a rather juvenile insult, but I'm sure rather more positive messages get through too.
I should probably point out to anyone that doesn't know, that "twat" is a euphemism for female genitalia.
I will ask that you don't conflate all english speakers with the USofA, quite a few other countries speak english too as a first language. I don't take offence - they are starting to shape up quite well (bless). I'm also not too sure about trotting out the first -> third world thing is too useful these days - that's all a bit last century or earlier. I like to think we have moved on somewhat since then. However, if you think it is still a useful way to categorize parts of the planet - let's debate that.
'Dogma', board meeting scene.
The FTC commissioners are appointed by the President, an elected official. Congress creates government bodies as departments or commissions depending on whether it wants them to directly report to the executive or have some independence from it.
e.g. does selective review farming qualify? I can't count the number of apps that ask something to the effect of "do you like this app Yes/No" where "No" funnels to an internal feedback form and "Yes" to the play store review page. Including to my recollection first party google apps and other big name publishers/companies.
To my opinion, 'of course' this should be illegal -- and I try and rate the apps that pull this crap a 1/5 when I stumble on to it.
- Abraham Lincoln
Brazil standing in marked contrast.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/...
"Federal Trade Commission Announces Proposed Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials"
To reach moderators, send email to hn@ycombintor.com
Reference this post by URL or ID (36556228) in the subject line for faster processing, and the alternate URL you're suggesting in the body of your email along with a brief rationale, e.g., "link disambiguation".
I usually do this myself, though in this case arguably WaPo are adding relevant commentary and analysis. That said the direct FTC link is useful to have in this thread.
What is your proposed alternative?
How would that impact upon HN's own operations and resource demands?
This is not 1990. All forum platforms have this function. (bb, vbulletin, discourse, etc.) I can't even understand why this is being discussed. :)
Moderator time is a capacity limitation: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725>
Throwing more messages (not necessarily signal) onto the queue likely won't help that. Keep in mind that spurious or abusive reports are frequent characteristics of such systems.
Who precisely is being "gatekept" through a reliance on email? Even this highly-pseudonymous space alien cat replying to you now manages to get through that particular hurdle, and in fact, anyone, whether they have an HN account or not, who does have an email account (much of the online public) can at least in theory reach HN mods.
So, say, if you happen to be some third party who's being affected, abused, misrepresented, etc., on HN, it's possible to reach moderators directly with no further site interactions required.
Contrast with virtually all online ticketing or contact systems which otherwise mandate a site-specific account or profile.
- There's already a click-based interaction mechanism, the "flag" link. That's non-specific ("here be problems"), but also means that any type of issue can be reported with only a single mechanism and reporting flow.
- Yes, a more complex workflow for issue reporting could be constructed. Those ... tend to be complicated, not be especially useful, often omit the specific concern the reporter has in mind, and if overly arduous, result in people simply selecting the first option and moving on. Such systems can also become ossified and/or brittle over time, where an email-based system is inherently flexible and adaptable.
- Reporting links can also be abused by bots, web scrapers, and the rest, which means limiting them to registered members, and perhaps a subset of those (as is the case with HN's "flag" link). Email is the Universal Reporting Mechanism as I've noted in another comment on this thread.
- Email is sufficiently non-structured to address a wide range of issues. The one standardisation I've been asked to provide is to include the specific item ID in the subject of the email. This lets mods pull up the item directly using macros written for that purpose. I suspect that often the issue is reasonably apparent on doing so.
- I make extreme efforts to keep my standard-issue emails brief, clearly identify the post and source link, and suggest a remedy, all in consideration of moderator time. I suspect many other frequent reporters do likewise. Mods do respond typically within an hour to a day, and will often fix issues well before responding.
FTC announces proposed rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (211 points, 84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542500
Doesn’t this section make it contradictory for Amazon to sell their own products or would this section only apply to dedicated review/opinion websites?
Everything should have a semver and reviews should be attached to a revision number.
That will probably also disincentivise users from leaving reviews because users will see their reviews disappear.
And actually what's to stop people changing a listing if they're not happy with the current set of reviews?
Some kind of slick UI to highlight differences from current listing to previous listing for a review might be a solid scalable compromise
> Overall 4.7 stars:
> [Photo of sock] 4.9 stars from 17,000 reviews "very comfy!"
> [Photo of expensive electronics] 1.3 stars from 13 reviews "this garbage lit itself on fire."
Say, Pyrex's gradual substitution of less-durable materials in its baking and cooking glassware. That won't appear in a simple photo.