I was expecting a big, tearful "OMG I did it and I am sad, forgive me" or something, but actually, there was nobody confessing to anything. It was a story about how a fake reviewer was found out, no more.
The reviewer's techniques aren't even particularly interesting. It's no surprise that she (presumably) was caught out, since anyone could have verified that bias with a quick glance. I'm more interested in learning about people who do this for profit, how many of them there really are, and how they manage to stay hidden.
Might be an interesting strategy - write bad reviews of the products you are interest in, and see where the rejection of your trolling is the fiercest. Might be the most passionate users there :-)
I gave up on Amazon reviews years ago when I noticed that almost everything had 10 5-star reviews the first couple of days. Mom, dad, brothers, sisters, aunt, uncle, secretary, mailman, bartender, yea - that oughta do it.
Even a negative review can be spun to make the product seem more positive.
Ex: "Two stars. Works great and beats the other XYZ brand by a mile, but it doesn't have [random obscure feature that no one else would ever care about], so I'll stick with the XYZ brand."
(see what I did there?)
The other problem is that negative reviews are an open mic for people to complain about whatever, and they tend toward the extreme. Ex "One star: Mine broke, and only a few months out of warranty. Piece of junk."
How many people (what %) ever leave comments when the product is just mediocre?
I'll only use amazon reviews for books, but for that I found them to be great. I don't think I've ever bought a book the turned out to be very different from how I expected it to be based on the amazon book reviews. The thing I've found is to read the 1-3 star reviews. For some reason they tend to go into more detail about the book than the 5 star reviews.
18 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadMisleading title.
This brought a completely different scenario to mind from that which the writer intended :)
This also shows that Amazon doesn't even do the most basic of automated checks for fakes.
http://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Short-Sleeve-Black/dp/B...
The other problem is that negative reviews are an open mic for people to complain about whatever, and they tend toward the extreme. Ex "One star: Mine broke, and only a few months out of warranty. Piece of junk."
How many people (what %) ever leave comments when the product is just mediocre?
http://www.consumersearch.com/