Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

I had no confidence in fakespot's ratings.

I was always suspicious of Fakespot's ratings and had very little ways to properly A/B test. I would see products on Amazon - both with 4.5 stars - but one would have a Fakespot score of 1 star and the other would be 4 stars.

After that Honey expose I started to wonder if Fakespot was simply trying to steal the last click referrer and using its "we filter fake reviews" as a cover/lure to get people to use it.

I thought Fakespot was an interesting premise for using LLMs in a vaguely legitimate way, but I did get the sensation that by using it, it would eventually come out years later that it was doing something nefarious, similar to Honey.

My assumption was that it would either teach fake reviews to get much better to be harder to identify...or it'd get sold off to some company that had a vested interest in keeping fake reviews around. I suppose this second possibility could still be the case! :)

I can see why it needs to be shut down: I think that Amazon has almost certainly worked to limit the usability and usefulness of such an app.

Plus, sellers have more tools than ever at their disposal to generate "real" reviews, including plain and simple bribes to real customers to make them, completely unenforceable by Amazon.