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

(blog.truestar.pro)
406 points doppio19 | 5 comments | 01 Jul 25 20:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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1. theshackleford ◴[02 Jul 25 07:52 UTC] No.44441152[source]▶
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.

It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.

I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.

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2. gwd ◴[02 Jul 25 07:59 UTC] No.44441198[source]▶
> I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review

Uh, this is how it's supposed to work? Make a good product, get good reviews for free.

"Make a crappy / mediocre product and pay people to write good reviews" is completely different.

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3. theshackleford ◴[02 Jul 25 11:15 UTC] No.44442312[source]▶
Good product? Oh lord no. I just got to people before they could figure out it was bad.

Note: I did not last long in this business before hitting the eject button.

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4. gwd ◴[03 Jul 25 13:07 UTC] No.44454633{3}[source]▶
I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.

I wonder if reviews should have a field for "how long have I owned it" (or even "about when did I buy it", to track changes in manufacturing quality). Places like TrustPilot would probably benefit from coming back to people and saying, "Here's a review you wrote a year ago; anything you want to add?"

Manufacturers could even submit an "expected lifespan", and reviews could be marked where they were made within that lifespan. A bad review after 7 years of owning a 5-year product shouldn't count as much as a bad review 7 years after owning a 10-year product.

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5. theshackleford ◴[04 Jul 25 15:55 UTC] No.44465599{4}[source]▶
> I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.

The point remains that you don't need to "buy" reviews. You don't need to give out coupons, or gift cards, or rewards or in fact anything. Hence why I said "it's not that complicated" as per:

> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.

Why pay for what you can get for free?