FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect

This is an extremely hard problem to solve. What degree of change makes it a different product? And that doesn't even touch the problem that products can look identical on the outside and use cheap crap on the inside. Amazon is not a bad actor here. They have every incentive to solve this problem. But they won't, not because they don't try, but because this is a problem as old as commerce.

It's a hard problem for a computer to solve - a computer shouldn't be used to solve it... computers were never used to solve it before Amazon because it's clearly a hard problem (and it scales really well with human labor).

Amazon are being a bunch of cheap bastards and skimping on human moderation of product listings - we, as a society, don't need to give them a free pass for trying to make an even more enormous profit. This is only deeply unprofitable to moderate if you have a lot of products listed you're never going to sell any of.

This is 100% the problem.

Suddenly we now have a ton of "new" issues cropping up everywhere. Suddenly being last 20-ish years. These aren't "new". They're just difficult to automate with a computer program, and every company is cheapo now and tries to automate everything with a computer program.

This problem doesn't exist at, say, Walmart. Presumably they physically vet products to at least some degree.

Users need more ability to intelligently contribute. I just hit this yesterday. 2-star review that was actually entirely about the third party that shipped expired stock, not about the product itself. All I could do is flag the review as "other", no text. (As it was the only review I also reported it under the something wrong with the product which does allow text.) And specifically give us "wrong version", "wrong product" and "seller, not product" flags. And don't reject my review that clearly called out that this isn't the real thing. I didn't simply get a counterfeit, the whole listing was counterfeit.

Abuse problems? Give more weight to squawks by people with a lot of purchases and not a lot of what are found to be bogus gripes.

Walmart shuffles parts the other way - the barcode will change every year or so or whatever so they can be sure to clearance out the old.

Walmart’s online store has some similar problems. But you maybe it $5 to lost a product, $10 to change it, problem solved. Now you can hire real humans.

It's not hard at all, it just needs moderation. Amazon is absolutely the bad actor because they allow sellers to edit their listings to utterly unrelated items, rather than having moderators reject those changes. It's not hard to prevent a cheap kitchen utensil with 2,000 positive reviews from being edited into an expensive drone.

And while moderating things like social media at scale has a lot of challenges, moderating product pages does not. There are orders of magnitude less of them, and they don't need to change that often.