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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: 0.449s | 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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pergadad ◴[02 Jul 25 05:58 UTC] No.44440629[source]▶
Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.
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1. pseudo0 ◴[02 Jul 25 06:12 UTC] No.44440696[source]▶
Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN. So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other third-party seller without doing proper quality control. Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention to this longstanding problem.
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2. ImHereToVote ◴[02 Jul 25 07:28 UTC] No.44441051[source]▶
This is the real issue.