[xeromal]

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.

[pogue]

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by the people who ran the site supplementreviews.com, but the owner of Fakespot would always mention they were very out of date.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.