←back to thread

Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

(blog.truestar.pro)
406 points doppio19 | 2 comments | 01 Jul 25 20:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.402s | source
Show context
doppio19 ◴[01 Jul 25 20:26 UTC] No.44437713[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>44438602 #
rasz ◴[01 Jul 25 22:39 UTC] No.44438602[source]▶
Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil
replies(3): >>44438706 #>>44438738 #>>44438841 #
1. doppio19 ◴[01 Jul 25 23:00 UTC] No.44438738[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>44443117 #
2. rasz ◴[02 Jul 25 12:49 UTC] No.44443117[source]▶
Indeed. You would need a plugin running on user computers, or maybe even control over User Agent. Insurmountable blocker for Mozilla.