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

(blog.truestar.pro)
406 points doppio19 | 4 comments | 01 Jul 25 20:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.665s | source
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dankwizard ◴[02 Jul 25 02:16 UTC] No.44439699[source]▶
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.

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dawnerd ◴[02 Jul 25 02:18 UTC] No.44439710[source]▶
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
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1. hydrogen7800 ◴[02 Jul 25 02:38 UTC] No.44439780[source]▶
So they _can_ do something about fake reviews.
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2. jonhohle ◴[02 Jul 25 03:39 UTC] No.44440063[source]▶
Nope, only real reviews.
3. dawnerd ◴[02 Jul 25 03:41 UTC] No.44440073[source]▶
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.

4. brookst ◴[02 Jul 25 12:06 UTC] No.44442726[source]▶
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”.