How to Spot Fake Reviews on Amazon (wired.com)

I knew about reading most recent reviews and reading the three star reviews. My trump card was searching Reddit for what they thought. But now Reddit is dead I don’t know where to read real reviews from actual persons.

I just assume that they are all fake. Along with most of the products.

It's really simple, the fake review bots only operate at certain times.

Just look when the review was made and if the day it was posted on contains an "a" then it's fake.

I'm surprised the article included ReviewMeta. It was a useful site but I think about a year ago the site owner said they wanted to stop running it, and for a while it was timing out. Now it appears to be up superficially, but it's afaict broken - every time I've tried to have it check a product, it comes back with "the data didn't look right."

Amazon's incentives lie in their buyers buying a product, and not in their buyers buying "good" products. That's why they are not motivated to guide the consumers towards better products by sorting out this mess of a review system. Now a fun little exercise would be to consider what if Amazon indeed cared it? I'd imagine that it'd:

1. Post statistic of how much that product was bought vs how often it was returned within a timeframe.

2. Put greater emphasis on the reviews of longterm accounts with significant purchase history.

3. Not allow any accounts that have not bought the product to post a review at all.

4. Punish products heavily if evidences of review tampering were found.

And so forth

Whenever i'm unsure about a product, i only read (filter for) all critical reviews, that tells me enough.

Of course, there's the occasional disgruntled reviewer ranting about how the goods where received (or not), but other than that it is a "good enough" indicator for me...

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Step 1: is it a review?

Step 2: is it on Amazon?

Output: If Yes and Yes, over 50% probability it's fake.

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