[HN Gopher] Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting...
___________________________________________________________________
Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product
reviews
Author : doppio19
Score : 384 points
Date : 2025-07-01 20:26 UTC (1 days 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
| rasz wrote:
| April 12 2021
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-partners-with-
| nv...
|
| https://venturebeat.com/business/mozilla-winds-down-
| deepspee...
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| Indeed. You would need a plugin running on user computers,
| or maybe even control over User Agent. Insurmountable
| blocker for Mozilla.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| So they wrote a ping pong shader for monetization going with
| the user or selling out the user.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion (1222 points, 1 month ago, 761 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662
|
| (62 points, 27 days ago, 15 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184974
| doppio19 wrote:
| Yup! And today's the day.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Still working for me, but I see the notice on their page. I
| assume it'll go dark at the end of the day.
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| doppio19 wrote:
| I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100%
| accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a
| closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.
|
| I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns
| become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews
| on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of
| these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
| markrages wrote:
| I think a lot of real reviews are written by ChatGPT. People
| are lazy!
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Better than nothing. Not sure how well it worked or if it used
| any particularly advanced AI similarity checker or sentiment
| analysis.
|
| It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk
| about or include pictures of completely different products.
| What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or
| people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar
| language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
| bb88 wrote:
| The last year it's been a mixed bag.
|
| One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime
| delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty
| much zero for the buyer.
|
| The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I
| bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
|
| Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also
| has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned
| items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And
| then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue
| for me then.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| They could have slid in their referral link, which would
| probably make them decent money, but the "ick" factor is pretty
| high from consumers.
|
| I'm sure there will be a replacement though, and I'm sure they
| will go hard with referral links.
| guappa wrote:
| Just make it opt in
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Mozilla seems infected by corporate board members who probably
| have conflicts of interest including investments in Amazon,
| Google, etc.
| TylerE wrote:
| Mozilla seems to be infected by upper management that feels a
| need to justify ever spiraling salaries.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's easier to justify a new thing than it is to make an
| improvement in an existing thing.
|
| Why do you think VPs love new projects / products so much?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Are they hiring?
| quantas wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. After the founder of the company
| itself Brendan Eich was fired it only went downhill
| mcpar-land wrote:
| Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage, then
| went on to create Brave, which is yet another Chromium
| wrapper just with bad crypto monetization and other
| scummy practices.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| Couldn't imagine what Mozilla would be like today if he
| stayed around and tried to integrate crypto. At the end
| of the day, main post shows Firefox engineering is
| keeping up with Chrome which is a feat no other browser
| has accomplished.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| For the record I also dislike the top brass at Mozilla
| for the same reasons I dislike Eich - trendchasing
| instead of making a good browser. Firefox is succeeding
| because of the engineers and despite the c-suite.
| gkbrk wrote:
| > Firefox is succeeding because of the engineers
|
| By what metric is Firefox succeeding?
| drekipus wrote:
| I can almost assure you, the plan is to run it into the ground,
| kulahan wrote:
| Why? Can't imagine any realistic push for this when there's
| theoretically much more money to be made by creating a
| product that people pay to use.
| colinbartlett wrote:
| I recall seeing the Mozilla Review Checker pop up on Amazon
| shortly after I started using it as my daily driver.
|
| I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I
| have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon
| but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which
| involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from
| the rougher sides of the internet.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I think this is the real answer; they've got a vague mission
| statement, they saw something they wanted to support, opted
| to buy it, and in classic Mozilla fashion let it squander
| because the managers in charge moved on.
|
| It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the
| glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base
| likes them for not being Google.
|
| Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up
| believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they
| keep missing the mark.
| Digory wrote:
| I'd guess the idea was about generalizing the team's
| efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But
| that horse has left the barn.
|
| Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more
| like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past
| "humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters
| on a website." The tools don't generalize anymore.
| SlowTao wrote:
| I do get the feeling that Mozilla has no idea what their
| goal is any more. Another one they are like is Yahoo! Just
| seem to be endlessly trying new things but not really
| committing to any of the new things one they have them.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which
| involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people
| from the rougher sides of the internet.
|
| And also, apparently, selling your data. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612, and
| particularly move-on's comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213945.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Right, why even buy it in the first place? I can't imagine the
| landscape has changed much, unless the most popular comment
| here is all the evidence you need...
| veunes wrote:
| Feels like they bought a cool tool, didn't know how to plug it
| into anything meaningful, and quietly sunset it when it didn't
| fit the roadmap
| benchly wrote:
| 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.
| bjord wrote:
| 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.
| okanat wrote:
| Mozilla Corp is a for profit organization owned by a non-
| profit foundation.
| bjord wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily change the overall mission of the
| organization, but definitely _does_ give them more
| flexibility to offer paid options to help sustain
| development, should they see an opening in the future.
|
| This is more or less taken directly from Thunderbird's
| website (which I think is a fair comparison): "Thunderbird
| operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the
| Mozilla Foundation. This structure gives us the flexibility
| to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird's
| development far into the future."
|
| https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/about/
| account42 wrote:
| 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.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Similar feelings about Pocket too. Mozilla seems to be on a
| cleaning spree
| ravenstine wrote:
| I've never even heard of it, yet it was acquired by Mozilla?
| Seems like the problem is right in front of them; they didn't
| really try.
| pogue wrote:
| 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
|
| 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!
| doppio19 wrote:
| I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly
| what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to
| Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML
| techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews.
| I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial"
| route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.
|
| I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at
| https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when
| I launch.
| pogue wrote:
| I saw that actually. I mentioned in another post on here
| recently that I figured that the only way a Fakespot v2 could
| exist is with a subscription model, but on the other hand,
| it's probably not something I could afford. Good luck with it
| though! You could always try advertising & affiliate links as
| a test to monetize the service as well.
| doppio19 wrote:
| Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm
| not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension
| itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed
| their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate
| affiliate links after the Honey scandal:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-
| co...
| pogue wrote:
| Yeah, probably not in the extension itself. But,
| Fakespot, on their web based reviews, had listings to
| alternative or better rated products than the one you
| were searching for. Possibly a bit of a conflict, but as
| far as I'm aware, it's the only way Fakespot was
| monetized.
| Mtinie wrote:
| Please help me understand why a subscription to your service
| should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend.
|
| I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product
| categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as
| 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things
| in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account).
| During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the
| number of products I ordered which weren't legitimate,
| matched my--admittedly moderate expectations for any
| commercial product--or included overhyped reviews.
|
| I'd be interested in a service like yours if I could
| understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
| Syntaf wrote:
| Attribution revenue is what I would consider the gold
| standard for these types of services.
|
| It makes sense on paper, if the service helps confirm
| legitimate reviews for you and convinces you to purchase
| said product, they should receive attribution revenue for
| helping generate the purchase.
|
| The reality is much much messier though, because often
| times the people who award attribution revenue have a
| conflict of interest against any service that could even
| potentially expose bad practices happening on their
| marketplace.
|
| I once worked for a popular deal site that developed a
| price tracking extension, a certain marketplace threatened
| to completely ban us from attribution revenue and we had to
| kill the extension over night despite our users loving it.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Hmm I can see the angle
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Subscription seems wrong, will prevent adoption
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Should show me something instantly, I should be able to
| paste in a url
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| I really don't think this is going to work well, like how is
| an LLM going to know someone paid me for my review?
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| Yeah same here. The sad thing is that even with this Amazon
| is still better than most of the competition.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| >I've basically settled on only buying major brands that I
| already know from Amazon
|
| I wouldn't even do that, unless you can't find it anywhere
| else. Amazon commingles their returns form 3rd party sellers
| and Amazon direct. So you might order an item, find out it
| was actually a broken returned item, and then have Amazon
| call you a liar.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I've started resorting to the "x bought this month" metric
| instead. If a product works for thousands of people and they
| continue to buy 500+ units a month, clearly it is a good
| option.
|
| If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30
| day return policy for most items. Use that and get something
| else.
| derekp7 wrote:
| They also tell you if a product has a high return rate, which
| is helpful.
| Loughla wrote:
| Except with clothes and especially belts, I've noticed. It
| seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they buy and
| returns two of them. It makes it harder to identify shitty
| clothes.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| > It seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they
| buy and returns two of them.
|
| Amazon used to offer this as a service!
| yablak wrote:
| Pretty sure that metric can be gamed
| dylan604 wrote:
| How do you know that 500 people didn't buy a scam product
| this month? I put as much faith in the X people bought this
| as I do the X people have this in their cart. It's all a way
| of trying to stoke FOMO
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| You don't. However, that risk is mitigated with a simple,
| easy to use return policy, where you actually get your cash
| back (not airline vouchers or points or made-up things to
| keep you in the ecosystem).
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| what makes you believe that the number you see in "x bought
| this month" is not some variant of if
| (session_is_gullible_to_displayed_sales_number) { return
| HIGH_SALESNUMBER; } ?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| There's also the strangely still-not-even-admitted-as-
| problematic Amazon item page referent shuffle, where one item
| is for sale on a given page, and the item sold by that page
| points to one item by a given seller. The reviews of this item
| are spammed positively, and then the item being sold on that
| page is changed by the seller, yet the reviews follow the page,
| not the item sold at the time the review was placed.
|
| This combined with Amazon's commingling of inventory of Amazon
| corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in
| a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page
| operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party
| supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill
| that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by
| Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling
| counterfeit products. You never know what you're going to get
| with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party
| sellers. It's insane.
| alwa wrote:
| It sure does get there quick though. And heads back to the
| warehouse for free if you don't like it.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Counterfeit items are contraband and may not be legal to be
| shipped or mailed, as they are evidence that a crime may
| have occurred. To return counterfeit items for material
| benefit to the seller or agent in order to receive a refund
| is possibly helping the fraud to continue by allowing the
| destruction of property/evidence. I advise all folks who
| suspect counterfeit goods to report them to the FTC and
| their local police department to get a police report, and
| insist that the police take the item(s) as evidence, then
| provide the police report to Amazon to facilitate the
| refund, instead of returning the potential contraband to
| the contraband dealer for them to sell again or for them to
| destroy the insufficiently misleading fake item.
|
| Scammers are somehow using Amazon itself as an A/B test for
| if your fakes pass muster, from what I can tell, and
| everyone loses but Amazon and the bad guys. How long must
| this continue?
| topato wrote:
| Is this something you've actually done? You might want to
| work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy
| haha
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Is this something you've actually done?
|
| I haven't done this myself, but I have discovered that it
| is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion
| batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually
| are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a
| previously working device suddenly stopped charging
| within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with
| the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when
| they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund,
| they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue
| to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I
| was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not
| attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had
| a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge.
| So Amazon said please don't ship it, but to dispose of it
| according to my local disposal regulations.
|
| In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people
| about this important issue at my own freebooted
| unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat
| or something caused Caesar's to be on lockdown. At this
| talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X
| which would work when powered via USB C but would not
| charge or work unplugged. All features and functions
| still worked otherwise.
|
| > You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across
| as a little crazy haha
|
| It's funny you mention that, as I really had to almost
| haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy
| routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was
| hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam
| emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a
| way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message.
| The message is the medium. It's the multi sensory
| experience of being appealed to which is the payload that
| runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if
| you ingest it in the way presented and intended.
|
| Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk
| re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be
| going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!
| veunes wrote:
| I've basically defaulted to looking for 3-star reviews with
| coherent complaints
| Animats wrote:
| Could you fund this via a firm that litigated under consumer
| protection laws?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Anyone in the know care to sum up / list alternatives?
| doppio19 wrote:
| I'm actively working on one at https://www.truestar.pro because
| I couldn't find a drop-in alternative to Fakespot. I also wrote
| a blog post last week about the state of alternatives:
| https://blog.truestar.pro/fakespot-alternatives/ (spoiler:
| there's not much)
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Sadly, chalk up a victory for enshittification. I was a Firefox
| fax, now mostly use DuckDuckGo. Doesn't most of Mozilla's funding
| come from Google?
| midtake wrote:
| 9 years? I could have sworn I saw it in 2015, maybe even 2014.
| pnw wrote:
| "Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable model" seems to be a
| recurring theme.
| hnthrowaway_423 wrote:
| 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.
| Solomoriah wrote:
| 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.
| doppio19 wrote:
| That's interesting! Did you have any guesses as to what might
| have been setting it off to mark those reviews as false
| positives?
| kirykl wrote:
| I have managed some Amazon product pages, which I know have
| never used fake reviews. Fakespot consistently had false
| positives for these items
| veunes wrote:
| It's just hard to build a blunt tool that doesn't occasionally
| whack honest users too
| advisedwang wrote:
| It is possible that that reviewer writes diverse reviews on
| random books so that the paid reviews it leaves have some
| cover.
| dankwizard wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Some company paid be 100 bucks to change my review to be
| positive so they sent the money via PayPal no problem then I
| changed the review to say they paid me to write a glowing
| review and of course Amazon ended up removing the review for
| being harmful to their customers
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| So they _can_ do something about fake reviews.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Nope, only real reviews.
| dawnerd wrote:
| They can but they won't. My original review was still there
| (as in was included in my updated review) saying how it was
| fundamentally flawed and will break. Was some video tripod
| with this dumb mechanism that would work itself loose by
| just panning. Never seen anything like it.
|
| Plus side looks like the product doesn't exist on Amazon so
| guess there's a victory there somewhere.
| brookst wrote:
| Sure, just like the highway patrol can do something about
| speeding. Note that "do something" does not convey
| "completely eliminate with perfect fairness and accuracy".
| rsync wrote:
| Thank you for sharing that anecdote... just terrible behavior
| on Amazons part.
| colonial wrote:
| Amazon is _awful_ when it comes to striking down accusatory
| customer reviews.
|
| Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole
| MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets
| promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few
| milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I
| tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took
| down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
| throaway920181 wrote:
| Amazon is not the place I'd go to for electronics parts.
| Mouser and Digikey are my go-tos.
| colonial wrote:
| Yeah, I'm generally aware of that - but I needed them
| fast, and decided it was worth taking a gamble. (I did at
| least get a return/refund, so there's that.)
| amelius wrote:
| Lcsc is cheap and ok.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can
| always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now
| with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good
| quality and what's not.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I prefer eBay at least it's cheaper and the sellers care
| about reputation
| consp wrote:
| With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured
| in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either
| have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or
| with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably
| only worth it if you live in the US.
| varjag wrote:
| Ebay is not the best for dropshipped Chinese crap. It's
| markedly better for about anything else.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| If you buy from china, it's going to take weeks. If you
| buy from US and live in Canada, you're going to pay a lot
| of customs.
|
| In 2007, I bought a used MacBook on Ebay for $870, with
| shipping it was about $900. That was back when the
| currency was on parity.
|
| It arrived with $300 custom fees. I could have bought a
| new one at that price.
| nothercastle wrote:
| If you pay about 5-10% more you can get it from a us
| based drop shipper. Obviously if you buy it from china
| you might as well get it from aliexpress
| Scoundreller wrote:
| At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn't been
| infiltrated by fake reviews.
|
| Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.
|
| (And bad machine translations by aliexpress...)
| jorvi wrote:
| The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip
| about time X, you click the link and the link is dead.
| You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results
| of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations
| and some of them even from stores that copy the name of
| former store of product X. All of the product pages look
| identical.
|
| One of these Results of X is still selling the actual
| quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain
| it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold
| amount because they might as well just be good at
| tricking people.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Amusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western
| knives, all these problems go away because those
| duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and
| there's even premium cloning brands which have duplicate
| store fronts
| mh- wrote:
| This is true of a lot of product types, but there is
| often a QC process that happens for the "premier" name
| brand that they were manufactured for. And these
| "duplicates" are frequently the irregulars that didn't
| make the cut.
|
| In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or
| QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects
| in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter
| unexpectedly.
|
| This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from
| AliExpress et al., and not others.
| jorvi wrote:
| What kind of knives are we talking about?
|
| I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and
| both are such high quality for what feels like a
| reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I
| just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know
| Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's
| gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on
| quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can
| have serious consequences.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn't been
| infiltrated by fake reviews.
|
| Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything,
| sort by the number of orders, open the product page for
| the first result.
|
| Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip
| saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all
| identical products from the platform."
|
| Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The
| reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar
| product in AliExpress."
|
| In other words, they might as well say that these numbers
| and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific
| product you're thinking about buying, they're just there
| to increase your confidence.
| _thisdot wrote:
| I've never bought from AliExpress, but I'm pretty sure
| everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for
| product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example,
| take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the
| product, it's better to show product reviews for every
| item. Isn't that so?
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I've never bought from AliExpress, but I'm pretty sure
| everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for
| product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example,
| take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the
| product, it's better to show product reviews for every
| item. Isn't that so?
|
| I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and,
| unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-
| and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it
| doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to
| be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if
| the platform _can_ identify the counterfeits, then it
| should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly
| mingled reviews.)
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| "It's great! Haven't tried it yet, but it looks nice"
|
| (average aliexpress review on many tech items)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| "Item received, will update later when I try it" = it
| killed them
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I've been playing with cssbuy (there is pandabuy too)
| lately. Aliexpress range at temu prices basically.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also
| because they can't compete anymore.
|
| Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when
| you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful,
| typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews.
| They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can
| bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense.
| The problem is that you can't really find anything
| anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can
| only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
| Piosky wrote:
| >typically a week or more
|
| I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as
| it depends massively on how close you live to one of
| their distribution centres. I can get most shit from
| Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I
| pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Yeah my partner and I quit using them because we'd buy
| like 5-10 things and return them all because of issues
| like not matching the product listing or being garbage
| quality. The last straw was when they clawed back a
| return refund 4 times on the same return. Each time she
| would have to call them to get it reinstated.
| varispeed wrote:
| If something is not remotely up to standard, do a return.
| I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful
| for them and probably only stick there is.
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep
| flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority
| of people become accustomed to low quality and short
| replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about
| quality and product safety has to go through the returns
| process today but has no high quality options left
| anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.
| pkolaczk wrote:
| The stuff on aliexpress is not low quality. I mean, some
| for sure is if you look for the cheapest items, but there
| is plenty of solid quality stuff there as well.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Amazon is great for returns.
|
| Buy $50 something from aliexpress, doesn't work, you
| can't do anything. Seller wont refund directly, you need
| to send the item back... to china... and fill out export
| forms and pay more than $50 for registered mail.
|
| Amazon? Doesn't work? Doesn't matter why, here's the
| return label, we'll refund you the moment we get the
| return.
| Washuu wrote:
| I just returned something on AliExpress last week.(Wrong
| items sent.) Sagawa showed up at my door to collect the
| package, I paid nothing, and AliExpress refunded me
| before it even left the country once Sagawa notified them
| that the package was collected.
|
| So it really depends where you live.
| ljf wrote:
| I've never had to return to AliExpress - if I've had an
| issue they (AliExpress) have just instantly refunded me
| without having to go through the seller(admittedly this
| is maybe 2 items in nearly 10 years).
|
| Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that
| was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu
| provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the
| rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.
|
| I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar)
| again same - she kept some, but most of it needed
| retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please
| keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many
| UK companies returns policies.
| pkolaczk wrote:
| The thing is, you paid for that in the price which is
| often 3x more for the same thing you could get on
| Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I
| had issue only once when I got something different than I
| ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a
| bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they
| have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere.
| Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those
| must be really good counterfeits, because they measure
| fine.
| driverdan wrote:
| Most of the Chinese crap sold on Amazon is identical to
| what you find on AliExpress and Temu marked up 50-200%.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yeah but honestly unless it's a repeat purchase, I'll pay
| it for the customer service (and ordering experience
| frankly) being similarly up 5,000-20,000%.
| grogenaut wrote:
| you're supposed to report this to amazon customer service
| not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and
| they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they
| can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Amazing BS policy, even people on Hacker Hews don't know
| this approach.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| An "Every Wrong Door" Policy
| DragonStrength wrote:
| Well, last week Amazon customer support flow routed me to
| an LLM chat bot which hallucinated a 1-800 number to call
| which was most definitely not Amazon on the other end.
| That's the real usefulness of LLMs: blackhole any dissent
| now that your monopoly is fully operational.
| malfist wrote:
| Internally we brag about how our LLM black hole "delights
| our customers"
| willis936 wrote:
| It was always free to ignore customers. A thin layer of
| AI slop doesn't change the behavior. Competition should
| close the loop here, but free markets don't exist and
| power has marketshare has been consolidated.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Do you believe this?
| like_any_other wrote:
| So Amazon is complicit in fraud.
| bsenftner wrote:
| What I don't understand is why some law firm, heavy with
| Ivy league predators, does not eye Amazon's fraud engine
| as a pot of generational gold to be taken? Sure, it will
| take some effort, but that's a huge pot of gold just
| sitting in the open with this blatant fraud in broad
| daylight.
| soderfoo wrote:
| There's an old law school adage that A students become
| professors, B students go to work for C students.
|
| It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically
| hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive
| hustlers.
| hattar wrote:
| > There's an old law school adage that A students become
| professors
|
| If I were a law school professor, I'd probably also say
| that.
| csa wrote:
| > If I were a law school professor, I'd probably also say
| that.
|
| Or more likely a jaded B-student who has been around the
| block a few times.
|
| The reason this works is that the C-students include
| students who have always known that their social network
| would facilitate them being rainmakers, while B-students
| are often middle-class try-hards who don't have the right
| social network and don't have the social skills to
| develop the right one.
| brookst wrote:
| It's fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that
| Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be
| hard to differentiate. They also have a massive problem
| with fake _bad_ reviews where a competitor spams
| competing products to try to increase sales of their own.
|
| They have so many flavors of fraud that it's very hard to
| get it right consistently at scale.
|
| Not am Amazon fan, and please let's not do the Reddit
| "understanding something is the same as excusing it"
| thing.
| ziml77 wrote:
| > Not am Amazon fan, and please let's not do the Reddit
| "understanding something is the same as excusing it"
| thing.
|
| That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as
| hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and
| misconceptions against something that you yourself don't
| like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't
| actually like it.
| like_any_other wrote:
| You make good points, but I'm not convinced this isn't
| deliberate on the part of Amazon. First, Amazon
| deliberately keeps buyers in the dark - e.g. sellers can
| pay extra to avoid comingling, but Amazon gives buyers no
| way to find this out. Second, this kind of reckless
| approach to fakes is what enabled Amazon's rapid growth
| over traditional retailers with hand-picked, verified
| goods. It's not surprising they try to sweep problems
| with their approach under the rug.
|
| Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard
| towards fraud.
| kevincox wrote:
| The problem is that they have an obvious incentive to err
| on the side of positive reviews. Because if every product
| on the site has a 1 star review few people will buy
| anything. But if most of them have 5 stars people will be
| much more eager to purchase.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Not only that, but if you get people buying lemons from
| scammers, some percentage will forgo the refund process
| and re-engage with Amazon to buy something else: Amazon
| gets a cut of that too, plus more eyes on other products
| during that process. And even if there is refund, the
| platform will get that money back from the seller anyway.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can
| be hard to differentiate
|
| They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their
| platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo,
| information from caching servers at ISPs, device
| fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences,
| mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs
| reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer
| reviews, description text and image analysis, product
| change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking
| details, registration and tax documents, all of it and
| more. They are one of the biggest data processing
| technology companies in the world (various flavours of
| "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs
| for using PII for fraud prevention.
|
| I am completely sure you could shine a great big data
| science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number
| of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit
| like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that
| they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the
| data for _that_ is carefully monitored) or attract
| regulatory attention they can 't lobby away.
|
| Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI
| company or the word "without":
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that
| Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be
| hard to differentiate.
|
| Well that's on Amazon then. They _could_ go the Walmart
| route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff
| they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get,
| Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they _all_ have very strict and
| extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and
| will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.
|
| But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest
| men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast
| for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah, they can't always get it right but something that
| would go a long way towards combatting it: Reputation
| scores on reporting. Accounts that have spent a fair
| amount of money over a fair amount of time and which do
| not have a track record of making false reports should be
| allowed to flag things. And if a product gets enough
| flags a human looks into it. The more times you flag
| something that is deemed wrong the more your vote counts
| in the future. The more times they decide it's clearly
| legit the less your vote counts. (And there would be a
| not sure range in the middle that produces no change.)
|
| And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported
| a search that returned three pages of results for _one_
| product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last
| I looked it was still three pages.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| Amazon does have the Vine program so if companies want to
| have a legitimate free product review program they can
| opt in. I'm in Vine and we're supposed to leave a review
| based on using the product, take photos, etc. If anything
| goes wrong we are not supposed to send the product back,
| return it, etc. The sellers can't contact us and if we do
| we're supposed to report it. The automated "did you get
| the product" are fine but it's not ok for them to bribe
| us.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Facilitating fraud.
|
| Didn't Napster get buttfucked for "facilitating" piracy?
|
| Should have been owned by Bezos so they'd be immune from
| laws that affect only mere mortals.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You can't use the word "counterfeit" or suggest that. But
| you can absolutely give 1 star and explain you only got
| milliamps. I have a bunch of 1 star reviews. I've never had
| anything taken down except when I used the word
| "counterfeit". Also, I get it -- how do you know if it's
| actually counterfeit, or genuine but low-quality? There are
| a bunch of things I've bought that I suspected were
| counterfeit, then went to my local store and discovered no,
| the authentic item is just crap.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Silk is particularly bad. Order anything "silk" from
| amazon and you are almost certainly getting satin. Put up
| a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will
| take it down.
|
| Amazon should be busted for false advertising. Millions
| of products filled with lies and amazon does absolutely
| nothing to curate (other than removing comments warning
| others that a product is fake).
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and
| amazon will take it down._
|
| Do they? I have seen _tons_ of reviews complaining that
| it 's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is
| polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something
| is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And
| I've left my fair share myself, and _never_ had one taken
| down. I 've avoided buying many products precisely based
| on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong
| material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing
| does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one
| of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough
| reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other
| sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run
| by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it
| wants.
| cogman10 wrote:
| It's happened to my reviews. The seller contested it and
| got Amazon to remove my review.
|
| I have no way to get the review back up or to contest the
| action.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| But sometimes you know it's counterfeit.
|
| I've had one taken down. I pointed out the deception in
| the naming and that the product looked nothing like the
| real thing, nor did it fit. Only later did I realize they
| were selling it as "Genuine Beam", not that it was
| genuine "Beam"--I thought they were just making clear
| that it wasn't a knockoff. (Beam is the actual company
| name.)
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| wow, full circle.. and just.. what to even do with that
| ManlyBread wrote:
| Just buy from anywhere else? It's not like there aren't
| plenty of other stores on the internet selling whatever
| garbage you need.
| pergadad wrote:
| Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that
| mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did
| receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no
| way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.
| gblargg wrote:
| I do Amazon Vine reviews and we learn quickly all the
| things we can't say. For health products you can hardly say
| anything due to the legalities of appearing to make health
| claims. People also get their reviews removed regularly for
| claiming something is inauthentic. I kind of get why,
| because a person probably doesn't have the equipment to
| really determine that, and Amazon has separate channels for
| reporting such things. Basically reviews are just for
| relating your experience of a product. There are ways of
| communicating lack of authenticity by being more humble, as
| in noting that it doesn't seem like leather, or when burned
| it melts like plastic. I've reviewed many e.g. fake memory
| cards, and had no problem noting that it has less capacity
| than claimed, and showing some test programs' results that
| confirm.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their
| warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN.
| So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of
| the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's
| fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other
| third-party seller without doing proper quality control.
| Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention
| to this longstanding problem.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| This is the real issue.
| calibas wrote:
| If Amazon put out the effort to actually combat all the
| shady things their marketplace helps facilitate, they
| wouldn't make nearly as much money.
|
| Much cheaper to just buy out the governments
| (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-
| com/summary?id=D0000...) that could make legal trouble for
| you.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| The obvious implication being who Amazon considers to be
| their "customer". Hint, it's not you.
| hopelite wrote:
| That must explain why I've seen bad reviews that have 5
| stars. I guess the review itself really does not matter as
| much as long as the stupid starts are there.
|
| It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex
| management companies, Graystar using a similar method by
| bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5
| star review on Google maps.
| varispeed wrote:
| Some company said they know where I live and they will pay me
| a visit if I don't remove the bad review (product was
| dangerous). That was on Amazon.
| _thisdot wrote:
| Do they know where we live? Aren't orders fulfilled by
| Amazon?
| account42 wrote:
| Amazon also has sellers that do their own fulfillment.
| account42 wrote:
| Did you report this to the police?
| varispeed wrote:
| No, because we have mickey mouse police here in the UK. I
| deleted the review.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| I bought a light fixture that had a design flaw that turned
| it into a fire hazard. I contacted Amazon and provided proof,
| hoping they'd take the product down and prevent harm to
| others. They did initially but within a few days the same
| exact item with matching SKU and photos was listed.
|
| I have an entire category of items I will never buy from
| Amazon. They don't look out for customers ahead of time, only
| on the backend when you complain.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| My wife has bought a handful of flat-pack cabinets and
| shelves over the last year, and it has been an experience
| in frustration, and furniture half assembled for weeks
| while we wait on a weirdly sized bolt to arrive from china
| because it was missing, or in one case, an entire door, or
| in another case a handle had been tapped to the wrong size
| (too big) for the bolts.
|
| The crazy thing is these $100-250 products ship with
| instructions on getting 100% of your purchase back if you
| leave a 5-star review and email them proof you did.
| fencepost wrote:
| At least IKEA has a specific way to handle that,
| including IIRC a dedicated area at their stores.
|
| https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/spare-parts/
| neilv wrote:
| I had one do something that presented a different angle for a
| complaint...
|
| Some Amazon seller included some US postage stamps as a gift,
| along with a glossy full-color printed offer to pay me cash
| or more stamps for a positive review.
|
| So I took the stamps to a post office, some kind of manager
| looked at them, said they'd almost guarantee that the stamps
| were counterfeit. So I left the stamps and the glossy offer
| (with the sellers's contact info) with them, to refer higher
| up to some kind of investigation.
|
| I'd guess probably it will only lead back to some overseas
| seller who is untraceable, and who just pops back up under 10
| new different names. But maybe someday Amazon will be under
| some kind of KYC-like obligation, to only permit sellers and
| other supply chain that can be held accountable for
| illegal/counterfeit/dangerous/stolen/etc. products.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Can I have a vacuum?
| Retr0id wrote:
| I can understand going for the "free upgrade" the first time
| around, but why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after
| that? Do you plan to sell them later?
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Stocking up to give them out at Christmas?
| Mtinie wrote:
| It's the rational option if someone is giving you something
| for less than it costs you and the moral implications of the
| action is minimal (at best).
| shawnz wrote:
| Sure, but consider the costs of consuming your space with
| junk. Now you have less room for things you care about,
| there's a maintenance burden, and there's a mental burden
| as well
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Not having things and regretting passing up on something
| is much more real for people that had problem with money
| before.
|
| Having too many things is just abstract unless you had
| that problem maybe
| shawnz wrote:
| Is 12 vacuums abstract?
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| It is abstract in the sense that you might not see why
| that would be a problem
| olyjohn wrote:
| Yes, but were the vacuums actually good? He left 10
| reviews for this company, which may have led other people
| to buy them, and made this company look better than it
| is... just so he could stuff his shed full of them?
| That's kinda fucked up. He even said he felt kinda shady
| about it, so my guess is that the reviews weren't honest.
| themdonuts wrote:
| This is the best summary.
| beAbU wrote:
| What is the difference between doing this, and any
| product review currently available on youtube?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| All moral implications are minimal if your morals are
| flexible enough.
|
| The OP is effectively taking thousands of dollars in bribes
| to erode public trust. I think even a child would see that
| this is wrong.
|
| I know every man has their price, but I hope when the time
| comes my price will be higher than "a bunch of vacuums I
| don't need and I can't even be bothered to sell".
| tempestn wrote:
| To be fair, he didn't specify that the reviews were
| false. Maybe he only agreed because he legitimately likes
| the vacuums. I think if someone offered me a product I
| like for free in return for a review, I'd do it. I
| wouldn't leave a positive review on a bad product though.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Come on, let's be honest here, they wouldn't keep sending
| you products for free if you left anything less than a
| stellar review. That's the entire problem with
| incentivized reviews.
| dsign wrote:
| I see where you are coming from, but this is Amazon, a
| juggernaut which is impossible to render accountable. So,
| OP is effectively filling their shed space with things
| which are useless to them and whose monetary value they
| won't realize. They are also tainting their soul. But by
| posting fake reviews, they erode trust on Amazon and
| cause it (some) financial harm. OP is, thus, doing a
| public service at some personal expense.
|
| I often buy products from Amazon based on how fast they
| can deliver, with the soonest being approximately five
| days where I live. They routinely advertise one delivery
| time and deliver three or four days later, which
| essentially is false advertising and harmful to local
| businesses who could easily compete on delivery time. And
| this is Amazon fulfillment.
| km144 wrote:
| Probably the most HN-coded response I can imagine to
| someone asking why you would possibly want 12 vacuum
| cleaners.
| dankwizard wrote:
| You sound like my wife. I don't know. I grew up kind of poor
| and my mindset still has a "If I can get an item typically
| worth $100-200 for free, TAKE IT".
|
| The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just
| hoarded them.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Fake reviewer vs low ballers...
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| this example suggests that you'd be happy to get paid in an
| alternative currency in exchange for Amazon reviews, and
| that currency is vacuums?! tbh I think your wife is right
| and you know it.
| yard2010 wrote:
| It's a waste of internet space writing tautologies. The
| wife is always right.
| malfist wrote:
| Good thing the Internet isn't almost out of space
| wildzzz wrote:
| Just hand them out as gifts to friends and family. Stick
| vacs for Christmas. Maybe keep a spare handy when the first
| one eventually breaks.
| lt_kernelpanic wrote:
| Obviously, the plan is to eventually collect enough to
| construct a Dyson sphere.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Christmas gifts for the whole family.
| triceratops wrote:
| > why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after that?
|
| This guy took bribes to leave fake reviews. He obviously
| sucks. /s
| chrischen wrote:
| When you have extremely generous return policies then reviews
| matter less. They are still relevant if your'e trying to
| optimize for buy once for life, but in that case you should
| just be going for established brands instead, where their
| reputation is their review.
| solardev wrote:
| Brands don't mean much when they're constantly bought up by
| other companies and then used to whitewash poorer quality
| products.
| account42 wrote:
| Yes, trademarks don't make sense when the entity behind
| them can change completely. The whole point was to protect
| consumers.
| dns_snek wrote:
| They don't build them like they used to, in my experience
| most consumer electronics/appliance brands that are still
| considered high quality are just coasting on the reputation
| they built up in the 70s, 80s and 90s. In many categories
| it's getting almost impossible to find products that aren't
| just generic whitelabeled junk resold by "established
| brands".
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Very true. Two other things are happening.
|
| 1. The whitelabeled junk is getting very good. In some
| categories, the brand name stuff has degraded to the point
| that the aliexpress version is better _and_ cheaper.
|
| 2. The IoTification of everything means that a lot of
| traditionally long lasting items are as durable as their
| WiFi board - i.e. not very. This also plays into number (1)
| - where cheap, Chinese, items either lack IoT features or
| provide them only locally instead of requiring an online
| account.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Wait what. You have 12 vacs?
|
| anyway, I can imagine some small territory in time where
| fakespot can accurately deal with the flood. But then..
| dankwizard wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I had to leave a video review component (No face). I wonder
| if any shoppers ever wondered why the same monotone man was
| constantly buying and reviewing vaccuum cleaners if he's
| always leaving positive reviews?!
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Leave honest reviews (not saying you're not) and don't feel
| dirty. You'd actually be helping.
| dankwizard wrote:
| They were mostly honest - I just always included something
| like 'an upgrade from my last one' but these clones are all
| so similar and all effective. Can do the whole house on a
| single charge, strong enough, has the low projecting light to
| highlight dust, high number of attachments.
|
| Does the job. I'm no vacuum connoisseur (Which you think I'd
| be after all of these) but none were scammy products.
| p3rls wrote:
| Oooh, I had the same deal but with cameras... Maybe they should
| pivot into a site showing deals w/ scammers.
| throwaway843 wrote:
| Dyson always struck me as scammy. All the way back to the
| 19990s. More proof.
| defrost wrote:
| Because fake Dyson clones exist?
| veunes wrote:
| It's one thing to detect fake language patterns; it's another
| when the review is technically real but incentivized into
| dishonesty
| theshackleford wrote:
| > 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.
| gwd wrote:
| > I literally asked very politely against a random sampling
| of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review
|
| Uh, this is how it's _supposed_ to work? Make a good product,
| get good reviews for free.
|
| "Make a crappy / mediocre product and pay people to write
| good reviews" is completely different.
| theshackleford wrote:
| Good product? Oh lord no. I just got to people before they
| could figure out it was bad.
|
| Note: I did not last long in this business before hitting
| the eject button.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I always wondered why Amazon would show me ads for vacuums
| after I just bought a vacuum from them.
|
| This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there
| are avid vacuum collectors.
| bsdz wrote:
| 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?
| dankwizard wrote:
| Sure. It's cold, rainy, and midnight but here's what came up
| in my email when searching "vacuum". It's not all, and you
| can see some I didn't reply to but -
|
| https://imgur.com/a/F0u9xVM
| dankwizard wrote:
| Example of the contents of an offer:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/q634ty4
| bsdz wrote:
| I was looking forward to seeing 12 neatly stacked & boxed
| vacuum cleaners in a dimly lit corner of your shed ;-)
|
| That said, thanks for sharing the emails/headers.
|
| It's curious that Amazon hasn't flagged you for purchasing
| & reviewing multiple similar items in such a short span of
| time. I would imagine it would be quite easy to spot
| someone who's bought and reviewed 12 vacuum cleaners in a 2
| or 3 year window.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Why did they choose you for vacuum pimp? You got high "consumer
| rating" or something?
| latexr wrote:
| > Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums
| that can clean my conscience.
|
| Thank you for the laugh.
|
| But why keep them all? Why not give some away to friends or
| neighbours, or even sell them?
| timcobb wrote:
| > 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?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >Don't you want room for other things in your shed?
|
| To be fair, it's vacuum so it doesn't occupy space.
| immibis wrote:
| But space is _entirely_ occupied by vacuum.
| alpineman wrote:
| Horrible for the environment
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums
| that can clean my conscience.
|
| All it takes to lose civilisation is for everyone to think as
| selfishly as this.
| spicyusername wrote:
| Nah, civilizations been running on this attitude since it's
| inception, and here we are.
|
| There's never been a magical golden age where people were any
| different than they are.
| yifanl wrote:
| The difference is mostly that people with this mindset were
| less empowered to enact upon it.
|
| But we've democratized fraud now.
| bluedino wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Helps me learn which companies not to trust.
| kouru225 wrote:
| ... Wanna send me a vacuum?
| quitit wrote:
| 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| If you look around, you'll see products on Amazon occasionally
| marked as "frequently returned". It has steered me away from a
| few purchases.
|
| Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating
| new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad
| about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it
| in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't
| be around by the time you want another.
| zulban wrote:
| If you have to buy a back massage in bulk as backups, doesn't
| that means it's crap quality? Are your standards that low?
| alister wrote:
| 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).
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| 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
| logifail wrote:
| > Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform
| that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway
|
| Although at least the platform can know if the reviewer
| actually purchased the product(?)
|
| > Searching the product and reading about it from different
| review sites seems more reliable
|
| Unless they use affiliate links, which is a great big red flag
| that the incentives are already stacked against you.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| mshkh an st khh khwd bbwyd nh ankhh `Tr bgwyd
|
| "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.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| 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".
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Of course. But they have a reputational stake in their
| recommendation as well.
|
| I take a Wirecutter top pick as meaning something very
| different from Bobby123's glowing review. Wirecutter may have
| been influenced by ad money a bit. Bobby123 may not even
| exist or may be entirely driven by seller compensation. And
| I'll never see Bobby123 again.
| UberFly wrote:
| 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.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| What about things that break after a while, when you can't
| anymore send it back ?
| account42 wrote:
| Reviews don't work well for those anyway since the product
| will have been discontinued by then and replaced with a
| slightly different one.
| veunes wrote:
| This shutdown feels like another case of "big org can't monetize,
| so good idea gets shelved"
| irrational wrote:
| This is so odd. Firefox is my primary browser and this is the
| very first time I have ever even heard the name Fakespot.
| jen729w wrote:
| Me and my partner just don't trust any reviews any more. Blogged
| about it here:
|
| https://johnnydecimal.com/20-29-communication/22-blog/22.00....
|
| So you know what we do now? Ignore the overall rating: it's
| worthless. Instead, go directly to the 1*. They're the only true
| indicator of a product/place/service.
|
| I'm not saying take them all at face value. You still have to put
| in some work. But all the data is in the one-stars.
| piokoch wrote:
| Unfortunately 1* are often bragging of some maniacs who bought
| a fork and they complain it is not working great as a spoon, or
| just black PR from the competitors. Whole reviews system is not
| working.
| sothatsit wrote:
| The key is the ratio of crazy to sane 1 star reviews. Mostly
| crazies? Then the service is probably good. But if there are
| many sane 1 star reviews? Might be a bad place.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| 2 and 3 star reviews as well. If 5 of them mention the
| battery went out, amazon is denying service and the company
| is non-responsive? Next.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Their privacy policy / licence allowed collection of passwords
| and whatnot. Copying from older comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38204923
|
| https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
|
| Look at Section 2B B. Personal Information
| Collected Automatically We may collect personal information
| automatically when you use our Services. Automatic
| Collection of Personal Information. We may collect the
| following information automatically when you use our Services:
| Contact Information: Your email address Identifiers:
| User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user-
| or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular
| user or account. This information could be provided via your
| Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you
| may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account
| password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation
| codes. Device ID: Your device information which
| includes, but is not limited to, information about your web
| browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are
| installed on your device. Usage Data: Product
| Interaction: How you interact with our Services and what features
| you use within the Services, including Fakespot's sort bar,
| highlights, review grade, seller ratings, alternative sellers,
| settings and popups. Other Usage Data: Individual web
| pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms
| referred you to the Service, and other information about how you
| interact with the Service. Browser Information:
| Information your internet browser provides when you access and
| use our Services. Application Search History:
| Information you provide when you perform searches in our
| Services. Purchase Information: Your purchase history
| or purchase tendencies which we may use to recommend better
| products and sellers. Location Information. We may
| collect your location information, such as geolocation based on
| your IP address in connection with your use of our Services.
| Publicly Available Information. In providing our Services we may
| collect data (including personal information such as profile
| names of reviewers) that is made publicly available via the
| internet on the websites analyzed and crawled by our Services.
| gadders wrote:
| I saw an instagram ad the other day offering to buy established
| Reddit accounts, presumably so that can post fake reviews.
|
| I also got offered some money over telegram to review a hotel
| from a large chain and leave a positive review.
| is_true wrote:
| Governments should block Instagram and Facebook until they
| start doing something about ads about ilegal offerings.
|
| I've seen ads selling fake clothes, real clothes but with a
| fake store, money exchange scams, and a few others.
| immibis wrote:
| Governments should block Instagram and Facebook. Period. No
| takesie backsides. And Google, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube,
| Hacker News, ....
| z3t4 wrote:
| As most humans are afraid to be against the consensus of the
| room, fake reviews and sentiment seeding is extremely effective
| against the general population. Also note that bad actors use it
| to create bad sentiment to it's competitors.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Amazon is pretty much Aliexpress now (and Temu in some cases).
| With bit of a markup on the price.
| account42 wrote:
| Do we need to start a killedbymozilla.com?
| johncole wrote:
| I really loved their plugin.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| AI has made it completely impossible to detect fake reviews now,
| so it would have died naturally. Amazon (and other retailers) has
| the access to heuristics on their end that could help with fake
| review detection that fakespot doesn't, but it's likely a very
| low priority for them (if it is one at all)
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| There is one clear route to solving this problem and I already
| pay money to get it, it's an independent third party consumer
| review site.
|
| They are good at objectively evaluating consumer products, they
| simply buy all the main models of a thing and review them all. I
| trust them (which is very important in this space). I happily pay
| for this service.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Do you even need Fakespot anymore for Amazon? I think we can
| fairly assume that whatever is purchased on that platform will be
| junk. I rarely purchase anything from Amazon these days except
| protein bars or items I treat as disposable. More often than not,
| when I order legitimate items, I get either counterfeit items or
| previously refunded items that are certainly not in "new"
| condition. I go into actual stores these days for any serious
| purchases.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-02 23:01 UTC)