[HN Gopher] Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting...
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Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product
reviews
Author : doppio19
Score : 5 points
Date : 2025-07-01 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.truestar.pro)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.truestar.pro)
| doppio19 wrote:
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by
| any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day
| NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil
| i80and wrote:
| DeepSpeech shuttered in 2021. The repo was just made read-
| only the other day
| doppio19 wrote:
| Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024,
| Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to
| view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first
| page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot
| scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so
| that simple change would have pretty much killed its current
| implementation.
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(page generated 2025-07-01 23:01 UTC)