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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: 0.609s | 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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colonial ◴[02 Jul 25 03:30 UTC] No.44440026[source]▶
Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews.

Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.

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aussieguy1234 ◴[02 Jul 25 04:07 UTC] No.44440161[source]▶
Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.
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Scoundreller ◴[02 Jul 25 05:31 UTC] No.44440511[source]▶
At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.

Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.

(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)

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1. jorvi ◴[02 Jul 25 06:21 UTC] No.44440729[source]▶
The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.

One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.

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2. carterschonwald ◴[02 Jul 25 09:19 UTC] No.44441603[source]▶
Amusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western knives, all these problems go away because those duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and there’s even premium cloning brands which have duplicate store fronts
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3. mh- ◴[02 Jul 25 17:38 UTC] No.44446589[source]▶
This is true of a lot of product types, but there is often a QC process that happens for the "premier" name brand that they were manufactured for. And these "duplicates" are frequently the irregulars that didn't make the cut.

In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly.

This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.

4. jorvi ◴[02 Jul 25 17:54 UTC] No.44446789[source]▶
What kind of knives are we talking about?

I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.