Alternatively, users will notice sooner or later that Vine is less about trusted reviews than 'Actual customer testimonials!!1!' and ignore or even avoid such products. Now maybe it's just me and the mass of people are gullible morons after all, but these kind of initiatives have a poor history on the internet compared to tabloids and TV.
Or so I thought until I discovered the secret to making REAL money - and now I'm going to share it with YOU.
It's somewhat of a recursive lemon problem. We (potential review purchasers) have no way to assure ourselves that we'd be paying for quality reviews and not some sort of fakes, in no small part because of the profusion of ever more convincing fake everything on the internet.
Social proof via reviews (of products, restaurants, anything) is a great idea if you can assume good intent. Back in the good ol' days of the Internet this seemed plausible for some reason, but now there's real money to be made and that's out the window.
Amazon and Yelp and the like may be better or worse at stemming the tide of fakery, but asking them to be better isn't going to fundamentally help. The whole idea is broken.
Unethical Life Pro Tip (takeaway): Pay people to submit five star reviews about your competitor’s product that obviously look fake. Bonus points if they're all submitted on the same day.
A useful heuristic that I also use, but it's good to be aware that fake reviews go in the other direction, too, of sabotaging competitors' product reviews.
I do the same, but it seems that more and more reddit comments are also astroturfed so my faith in them is faltering. Finding authentic recommendations at this point is extremely tiring because I have to constantly be gauging a user's sincerity.
There are too many benefits to fake reviews and few downsides. And it's easy to spam these fake comments and reviews especially if you have the budget for a dedicated marketing team.
As a German, don't trust the reviews, they're heavily manipulated. I guess at some point (e.g. top seller with thousands of reviews) manipulation doesn't move the needle as much, but for plenty of products with < 100 reviews, there's often dozens that are likely fakes (even without counting the paid Vine reviews).
Social Proof [1] in action. I'm always shocked at how much faith people put into anonymous review sites. Really? You're going to believe a bunch of strangers on how good something is, and actually spend money based on this belief? It's a marketer's wet dream. You don't need to actually prove a claim anymore: You only need to spin up enough sock puppets shouting about it, and people will substitute that for proof.
Or so I thought until I discovered the secret to making REAL money - and now I'm going to share it with YOU.
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