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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: 0.967s | source
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pogue ◴[01 Jul 25 23:55 UTC] No.44439038[source]▶
I did search around looking for alternatives and the landscape isn't great. There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.

TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.

SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for

Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs

There are a few others on AlternativeTo that weren't there the last time I checked. https://alternativeto.net/software/fakespot/

On Reddit, some people were mentioning alternatives, including asking ChatGPT about the product and it might have some kinda helpful advice, but nothing like Fakespot offered. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ktm4g4/now_that_f...

If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!

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doppio19 ◴[02 Jul 25 00:08 UTC] No.44439104[source]▶
I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.

I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.

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1. Mtinie ◴[02 Jul 25 03:11 UTC] No.44439948[source]▶
Please help me understand why a subscription to your service should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend.

I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.

I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.

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2. Syntaf ◴[02 Jul 25 10:23 UTC] No.44441978[source]▶
Attribution revenue is what I would consider the gold standard for these types of services.

It makes sense on paper, if the service helps confirm legitimate reviews for you and convinces you to purchase said product, they should receive attribution revenue for helping generate the purchase.

The reality is much much messier though, because often times the people who award attribution revenue have a conflict of interest against any service that could even potentially expose bad practices happening on their marketplace.

I once worked for a popular deal site that developed a price tracking extension, a certain marketplace threatened to completely ban us from attribution revenue and we had to kill the extension over night despite our users loving it.