This Is Why Amazon Can’t Fix Review Spam
As we’ve noted many times , Amazon is inundated with fake reviews and it takes work (and sometimes artificial intelligence ) to view them. BuzzFeed delves deeply into the economics of these fake reviews , including the tragic subreddit / r / slavelabour . (The title sounds like a joke, but very sad and true.) The entire article is just as depressing as it mainly talks about how doomed Amazon reviews are.
Let’s draw some practical conclusions in advance:
Verified purchase reviews may be fake
Review spammers often buy a product, take a photo of it, and leave a review. This fake review is very difficult to distinguish from the real one; even artificial intelligence tools seem inadequate when the reviewer is actually a consumer. (Planet Money recently talked about a similar phenomenon on Alibaba , Amazon’s Chinese rival.)
Negative reviews can be fake too
In one post on Reddit, an Amazon seller asks for 1-star reviews, claiming that this is a payback only to competitors who passed the 1-star reviews to the seller in the first place “to make me look bad.” The seller promises $ 5 per review.
Amazon sounds completely unprepared
The company told BuzzFeed about its inadequate anti-spam policy:
Amazon said it has applied stricter criteria for leaving verified purchase reviews. US reviewers must have a password-protected account and have made at least $ 50 worth of Amazon purchases with a valid credit card.
Sorry, but what the hell does this do to fix the problem? As BuzzFeed reveals, many of these spammers are American adults writing reviews as a hobby or part-time job. An active account with $ 50 purchases is no obstacle for them.
Worst victims are cheap and niche products
Verified reviews do protect against one type of attack: since spammers have to actually buy the product, it’s harder to get a deal with something very expensive. It’s big business, not trust, so it works best when a spammer makes a small commitment: a $ 5 phone case or a $ 3 dumbass who thwarts someone’s Kickstarter project. BuzzFeed does not name a single incident involving high-end products such as laptops or Coach bags.
When in doubt, look for third-party reviews
For many products, this is not an option. But luckily, for most large purchases, you can turn to third-party sites. If you are concerned about fake or “bought” reviews, search the site for the editorial policy statement. Wirecutter , our sister site Gizmodo, and most of the major newspapers maintain (quite loudly) high standards by returning any free products to manufacturers to avoid conflicts of interest. Wirecutter, for example, has a detailed explanation of its ethics and practices , as well as recommendations from other trusted reviewers like Consumer Reports .
Some sites are slightly less black and white as they accept freebies. Some review sites have too much space to fill and can’t afford to pay for whatever they view, but we find that they can often still create ethical reviews. Fashion website Racked, which receives free gifts, decided to ethical complexity in smart package, which consists of several articles, Swag by Project .
So, if you want to know why Amazon hasn’t eliminated review spam:
This is why Amazon screwed up so much
Amazon reviews were a promising innovation, a really great idea: instead of looking for third-party product reviews and deciding whether to trust journalists and bloggers who might not even try the product, customers could communicate directly with each other. Rushing shoppers could simply check the star rating and make a decision in seconds.
This worked pretty well when Amazon was the only seller on Amazon. Product makers might try to fake reviews, but the benefits were limited, and most companies needed to maintain a reputation – if Amazon caught them and shut them down, they’d be losing too much money.
But then Amazon went from being a store to being a marketplace where anyone could become a seller. Amazon opened up to third-party sellers, so it could scale faster. Rather than carefully monitoring each product, choosing what to store, and creating a sales page with copies and photos, he can rely on other sellers to do all the work, while Amazon just takes over the logistics. Amazon gets a smaller share, but sales increase exponentially. The number of products has increased dramatically, and now Amazon can truly call itself “the store of everything.”
But it is precisely because of the incredible scale that Amazon’s rating system fails. Unlike the major manufacturers, these competing third-party sellers do not have a particular reputation to maintain with the public or even Amazon. They are not trying to build a multi-generational business with thousands of employees. They just want to make money any way they can before moving on to the next venture.
Spammers, meanwhile, are willing to work for very little pay: “Many observers,” reports BuzzFeed, “are men in their 20s and 20s who view this activity as a hobby.” Others, including an 18-year-old teenager, even ask sellers and invite them into the world of review scams. It is easy to understand that the salesperson feels obligated to join or lose. (The 18-year-old then resells things he has rated on eBay, effectively competing with his customer.) Amazon’s rating system was not built to combat these incentives, and the company cannot hire enough people to control crowds. spammers.
The company also lacks the ability to monitor third-party sellers one by one. More than a thousand spammers have sued him, but that hasn’t stopped the practice from growing. It may impose stricter requirements across the board, making it difficult for third-party sellers to access, but not without threatening its revenue: According to BuzzFeed, most Amazon purchases are made from third-party sellers.
The rating system is broken and it will get worse. If Amazon continues to rush to fill the holes instead of creating something new to replace them, it will lose and Amazon’s ratings will no longer matter.
The corruption of Amazon reviews showcases the bizarre incentive systems of modern capitalism and how they inevitably eat away at all the good things on the Internet. Amazon’s innovative, democratizing review system has turned into yet another bullshit circus for resellers to benefit from selling you non-working iPhone cases.
Deep Dive BuzzFeed is a must have in your Instapaper. It includes story after story of salespeople whose business was destroyed after someone copied their product and spammed their reviews. Survey spammer stories are sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating; on the slavelabour subreddit, which is clearly marketing itself as a place to sell labor at “well below market value,” redditors are understating each other to perform low-level fraud as a “hobby.” A cynical, soul-sucking hobby that makes the world a lot worse for some and a little worse for all of us.
Inside the ecosystem that fuels the problem of fake Amazon reviews | BuzzFeed News