Bummed about this. I know some people didn't like it but it never hurts to have extra signals about the quality of the product even if it falls short. My typical research path was looking for legit amazon reviews, fakespot highlights, and reddit comments. Using vetted.ai to replace fakespot but it's pretty mid in what I've seen so far.
I used it all the time as well. I used to keep up with them on Twitter prior to Mozilla buying them. Shame I never caught the original owners name. I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to create a Fakespot clone using the Amazon API. They scanned the pages repeatedly for deleted reviews and that would give it an idea whether or not there was any type of deception going on.
MetaReview was started by the people who ran the site supplementreviews.com, but the owner of Fakespot would always mention they were very out of date. I don't know if they were just throwing shade at them or legitimately knew more about it. I thought their interface was much better and had way more information.
The thing about running a service like Fakespot is it would be difficult to make money. As far as I can tell, they primarily made income by including affiliate links to other products in their reviews. But who's going to click on a link for a similar product if they already have one picked out? It almost would need to be a subscription service to be profitable.
Is there a post somewhere explaining why they are shutting down? Did they just run out of money? Was it being run by a single guy who is tired of maintaining it?
A lot of people liked it but I thought it was "thoroughly pizzled" [1] and I was resentful about yet another unwanted product shoved down my throat. I guess I'm used to it when Microsoft is doing it but it just seemed Firefox should have done better.
Good riddance. Their privacy policy / licence allowed collection of passwords and whatnot. We should not be sad about it. Copied my older comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38204923
B. Personal Information Collected Automatically
We may collect personal information automatically when you use our Services.
Automatic Collection of Personal Information.
We may collect the following information automatically when you use our Services:
Contact Information:
Your email address
Identifiers:
User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. This information could be provided via your Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation codes.
Device ID: Your device information which includes, but is not limited to, information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device.
Usage Data:
Product Interaction: How you interact with our Services and what features you use within the Services, including Fakespot’s sort bar, highlights, review grade, seller ratings, alternative sellers, settings and popups.
Other Usage Data: Individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Service, and other information about how you interact with the Service.
Browser Information: Information your internet browser provides when you access and use our Services.
Application Search History: Information you provide when you perform searches in our Services.
Purchase Information: Your purchase history or purchase tendencies which we may use to recommend better products and sellers.
Location Information. We may collect your location information, such as geolocation based on your IP address in connection with your use of our Services.
Publicly Available Information. In providing our Services we may collect data (including personal information such as profile names of reviewers) that is made publicly available via the internet on the websites analyzed and crawled by our Services.
ReviewMeta worked great while it did, but I've had a ton of problems using it in the last 1-2 years. IIRC the site creator was going to shut it down then but didn't. It very often seems overloaded or has problems finding the product at the URL it's given. I don't think I've been able to get any results at all from it in the past few months.