[gavman]

This sort of gaming is rampant on Amazon. My own experience:

A friend of my wife introduced her to a woman who was a representative of a well known brand for home goods/kitchen gadgets. If you bought an item off Amazon of their brand, the woman would Venmo you for the value of the item provided you left a review. It went unsaid but understood anything less than five stars would mean the relationship was over. They also had a few other rules about your Amazon account to "qualify" (had to be personal, you had to review a certain number of other products, etc) to try to bypass any flags getting raised.

[tinyhouse]

That's the Internet today. All important review sites have these problems. Most businesses today live and die on customer reviews, so they do everything they can in order to maintain high rating. There's obv a lot Amazon and others can do to fight it. But it's a very hard problem, as your example suggests. The worse part is doctor reviews. Some people pick their doctor based on fake reviews.

That's why when I buy things I usually look into the negative reviews first, then the time period of the positive reviews (many reviews too close is usually a red flag), the total number of reviews a product has (e.g., some items have too many reviews), and also search the product on other sites to see maybe there's something I missed. I also rarely order something from a seller with < 90% rating on Amazon. For something like picking a doctor, I always go with recommendations from people I know. I also check online reviews, but only read the negative ones.

[tempestn]

The frustrating thing is, Amazon could do this kind of analysis themselves. I mean, it's a similar problem to what Google faces with people trying to game search results, or get spam through filters. And while they obviously struggle and it takes serious resources, they are mostly successful. Really seems like Amazon just doesn't care since they don't have enough competition to give them sufficient motive.

[ceejayoz]

Yeah, I find 2-4 star reviews to be the most illuminating.

Perhaps that'll get gamed next. Sigh.

[sundvor]

Agreed. Went on the search for knife sharpening tools on Amazon, and quickly discovered that some looked like copies of others. The copies would look identical in the pictures, and have a huge amount of 5 star reviews. Then as I drilled into it I saw a large amount of problem reports.

Decided to just not buy anything from Amazon that day.

(Have found them really useful for other things though. And Prime Shipping in Australia is great.)

[paxys]

I had the same experience with an acquaintance. Their reasoning is that given how Amazon's algorithms work (and how much they favor review count), it is impossible for any new product to get noticed at all unless you spend money to get those first set of 5-star reviews. It's basically an advertising budget.

[criddell]

I wonder if Amazon could fight this by expiring old reviews? Don't delete them, but weight them at zero.

Products change over time and I'm usually more interested in recent reviews.

[piva00]

What kind of product changes over time without changing SKU? Apart from software.

[criddell]

Products made by companies that are cutting costs.