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 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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 There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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'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?
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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
“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".
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.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] thread(62 points, 27 days ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184974
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.
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.
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!
IMHO judging these random Chinese products with the nonsense capital letter brands by actual reviews is a lost cause.
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.
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.
This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there are avid vacuum collectors.
Thank you for the laugh.
But why keep them all? Why not give some away to friends or neighbours, or even sell them?
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?
All it takes to lose civilisation is for everyone to think as selfishly as this.
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.
> 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).
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
“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.