Any website that has a ranking based on reviews or even votes has a fraud problem. This is Goodharts law in action. Glassdoor, Amazon, Yelp, Google, you name it. This is the "game". Heck, I am sure there are even some people who game HN votes.
What's going to stop people from gaming this by doing things like adding fake 5-star reviews to their website? (especially brick and mortar stores that show up in google maps/places)
There are also fake reviews purchased by competition to lower the score of their competitors. I can't trust anything in form of a comment that I see on the internet anymore (oh the irony).
It's safe and uncontroversial to assume that every site and business that "rates" products is gamed by money, and it's naive to think otherwise. There's just too much at stake. The raters that have the best reputations are most suspect as there's more value in manipulating those ratings.
Doubly so for the ratings that simply crowdsource ratings from "everyday people" (which this particular article is not about). Those "everyday people" are surely 90% controlled by product marketing teams.
Also, even if AI/ML are not being used to generate fake reviews, they sure as heck are being used to determine the search ranking of products stuffed with fake reviews. Amazon has created a game for less-scrupulous sellers to play, and even they don't know the rules.
I would imagine any sort of product review classification system would be exploitable for abuse.
Anecdotal evidence: when my mother and her team were running for student council (in college), the opposing team introduced blatantly fake votes (photocopied) in favor of her team; my mother's team got disqualified for cheating, and the opposing team won.
So I could certainly picture a way in which a mischievous seller could submit fake-looking reviews for another product and get it taken down.
I never said anything about a crime. Reviews are only worthwhile if they are honest. I believe that any site caught soliciting pay to play for positive reviews should be called out. Not sued, just publicly shamed.
It goes both ways, Belkin caught tons of flack for soliciting positive reviews on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
It's also that fake reviewers probably don't try to game 3rd party sites rating systems. It seems plausible that if you implemented the same algo that some spotting-fake-reviews site uses on Amazon, sellers would quickly find a way around it.
Some people are trying to battle against negative fake reviews by posting positive fake reviews. It's not clear to me that they are as morally superior as they evidently believe.
Edit: The solution is to fix the voting system, not to abuse it further because you believe you are virtuous.
Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. There's no way to stop someone from gaming the system though. If the economic incentive is to cheat, cheaters gonna cheat. Eventually plugins like FakeSpot will become as common as ad blockers, imo.
I'd agree if they're was any oversight of the review process. Instead, they have the same score gaming problem as app stores. There are literally sellers that send competing products and their own products to random people so they (the sellers' themselves) can post fake reviews as verified purchases. Hell, even having to mark reviews as verified should be enough to make people doubt the legitimacy of all reviews on the store.
Unless the product is failing in catastrophic ways that inspire loads of pissed off customers, 3 stars is the new 0 stars and be suspicious of anything with a high number of reviews. High review count means the seller had to stuff the ballot box to make up for lower score real reviews or a fake review battle with a competitor.
My latest way of weeding out the more egregious fakes (in addition to ReviewMeta and FakeSpot) is to look for customer pics that are either just pictures of the box, item not being used, or, to a lesser extent, promo styled (nice lighting and odd angles). Also, a quick scan of early reviews to see if there were more low ratings or mentions of a completely different product. Some sellers will pay for or get legit good reviews on an item, then swap the item number to a new item in the same category. Same goes for having multiple very different items in one listing as purchase options (4 options for a keyboard - red color, blue color, travel mouse, fishing lure set).
All review sites can be purchased, it doesn't matter what it is. Any platform where there is an up or down vote by Internet users is almost certainly, if not mostly, disingenuous. No review site should be trusted.
Sometimes bad reviews are not fair or heavily exaggerated, sometimes bad reviews are from competitors. Bad reviews cannot be removed. Sometimes, faked good reviews is the only way to bring back a balanced view.
So, this seems to happen everywhere and to be the natural response of a self-regulating market. Means that we should be careful with user generated content in general, also users might have an hidden agenda.
Edit: Why the downvote? I am not saying that I like this, I just tried to find an explanation for a market behavior.
Aren’t all the Yelps, Glassdoors and Trustpilots of the world all accepting money from companies to take down bad reviews and/or promote good-looking content? To the point of that being the main business model? I remember there used to be a lot of those claims coming up a few years ago, from credible sources.
I don’t trust any review sites these days, especially star ratings. At most I’ll skim through and look for what appears to be authentic reviews with quirky writing, shitty photos and such. However, that’s going away soon too, thanks to AI.
The issue isn't that they're fake but that positive reviews end up hidden as 'not recommended' and negative ones suddenly float to the top once the protection money stops.
It looks like there's manipulation of the algorithm that determines what reviews are legitimate on a per client basis. The 'free' package is pretty unforgiving, but if you pay then its tweaked more towards your favor. Nothing about this would be illegal. Its how Yelp manages their site and I believe have already won a lawsuit against this.
Consumers need to be taught that Yelp isn't trustworthy. Sadly, it seems to have a Facebook-like network effect that'll be tough to beat. On the plus side Google reviews are the default on Google maps and other Google services and they seem to not play these games.
Fake reviews can be seen as an instance of Goodhart's law, where the metric is the rating or score of the business. Initially those ratings may have high correlation with something real, let's say the "quality" of the business. But the more people rely on those scores and the reviews underlying them, the more incentive businesses have to game the system— which destroys the original correlation between ratings and quality.
A big part of the problem with review systems is the one-to-many nature of nearly all of them: when a person posts a review, that review and its score can be seen by everyone. This leverage makes it very efficient for businesses to game the system, as a small amount of fake information can "infect" the purchasing decisions of a large number of users.
So, one alternative might be a many-to-many review system where you only see reviews and ratings from your network of friends/follows (and maybe friends-of-friends, to increase coverage). So essentially Twitter, but with tools and UI that focus on reviews and ratings. That way, fake reviews could only affect a limited number of people, making the cost/benefit calculus much less attractive for would-be astroturfers and shills.
It’s a decade+ long problem asking for a solution.
Not just this one site, Amazon, Google etc are littered with fake reviews and none of those companies are concerned.
If these companies don’t get their act together soon, I’m sure the Govt of various countries will compel them to do so.
My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.
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