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by captaindiego 3813 days ago
The amazon vine program sends people free items in exchange for reviews. I started running across absolutely crap 5 star reviews for grad level engineering and math textbooks from the vine reviewers 2-3 years ago. They would talk about how the binding seemed good, and how their was a lot of math and equations. Amazon ignored complaints at the time about these positive reviews. I'm guessing the bump in the star ratings lead to higher sales.

I haven't noticed the more organic type you are seeing, but it does not surprise me at all.
1 comments
ethbro 3812 days ago
The "best rated" sort became useless after vine reviews.

"This impartial review was delivered after I received the product free or for a discount"? Give me a break. Joe or Judy Amazon are realistically going to be perfectly happy plunking five stars down for free stuff.

If Amazon wanted to do it right, they'd set themselves up as a neutral intermediary, companies could register to get some amount of product in the review chain, then Amazon would randomly distribute it to relevant reviewers, and the resulting reviews would be posted anonymously (with a known pattern, e.g. 'TrialUser'). And drop any users from the program that consistently give five stars.

Instead, they seem to have created a star-for-stuff system.

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jazzyk 3812 days ago
For me, ratings were the most important reason why I used Amazon (plus the convenience of one-stop shopping). This is a major stumble for Amazon, IMO. Hopefully a competitor steps up - this would be good for consumers, Amazon has become too much of a monopoly.
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ethbro 3812 days ago
Sadly, at this point Amazon has the network effect of both consumers and suppliers. They've got the eyeballs, so people want to sell through them, so they've got a diversity of items and people check there to buy first, repeat repeat.

Be that what it may for the market: I think they've been a lot less mercenary than they could be (they could likely jack fees a lot higher now without much fallout), but the potential is certainly there.

Great for low cost optimization, bad for great feature development.

PS: The whole only-being-able-to-price-sort-in-a-single-category is terrible too. How do I know if Thing X is in category Y or Z? It successfully reproduces all the fun of wondering what aisle the grocery store stuck trail mix on.

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