[guyht]

Reviews are a tough spot. On the one hand, reviews can be very damaging to businesses, so it is important that some measures are in place to ensure that the review is honest and genuine, and on the other hand its important that consumers can openly review a product/company without being scared of reprisals.

Clearly, in this case, KlearGear are in the wrong, but I also think that there are cases where legitimate businesses have been seriously damaged by competitors, or just difficult customers writing unfair bad reviews.

Unfortunately the only solution to this I can think of would be a review of reviewers, which would just confound the problem.

[throwaway420]

> I also think that there are cases where legitimate businesses have been seriously damaged by competitors, or just difficult customers writing unfair bad reviews.

This is a big problem for small businesses and people alike, but the actual solution to this is the opposite of what most people's first instincts would be. Ironically, it's the existence of laws against libel/slander that makes fake reviews and false negative content online such a big deal for people going forward.

Because these laws exist, people are conditioned to believe that most of what they read online is true because otherwise legal action would be taken and it would get removed. But few people and small companies have the resources to track down every false review or fake negative comment and find out who did it and make legal challenges.

If you're an average small business, you don't have an easy way to mount a serious challenge against a site like RipOffReport when an unknown competitor starts writing nasty fake reviews about you online that you never shipped a product or whatever. If you're an average person, you have very little recourse if somebody goes and falsely writes that you have an STD on a site like Dirtyphonebook or whatever. People and companies with large amounts of resources are protected by libel/slander laws, but the average person or small company isn't really.

In a society with no laws against libel and slander, people would be a lot more skeptical about the veracity of negative comments that they see online and do a lot more research before buying a product or believing some negative comment was false.

We can talk a lot about better reviews and reviews of reviews but all of these are susceptible to the same issues.

[maxerickson]

My instinct is that online reviews are wildly unreliable and suspect. I certainly don't think they enjoy any sort of legal oversight.

I will take a large plurality as reliable, and someone able to write in the correct tone could certainly mislead me (that is, I will look at an individual review on its apparent merits), but I sure don't expect a couple of good or bad reviews to mean anything.

Also, the encyclopedia I ordered did not contain any murder mysteries, one star because I can't put no stars.

[yesiamyourdad]

"But few people and small companies have the resources"

And that's the key phrase in this entire thing. For everyone who says, "oh, they're in the right, they should hire an attorney", they're either more naturally litigious than I am or have never actually had to hire an attorney and prosecute a case in court. The name of the game is intimidation and harassment. KlearGear is absolutely betting that their customers don't have the resources to combat their meritless lawsuits.

[tlrobinson]

I don't think explicit "reviews of reviewers" is necessary, with enough data you can compute a trustworthiness score based on how their past reviews match up against other reviewers, or an Amazon style "Was this review helpful?" poll (which I suppose is a review of reviewers).

I assume this is how Yelp and others do it.

[Zigurd]

I find Amazon works pretty well. When you have tens of thousands of customers of a product not everyone is going to grok, some are going to call you a poopy head.

If me and my co-authors cultivate a critical mass of reviewers, respond to the bad reviews that genuinely misunderstood something, and have enough traffic on the pages to generate enough "useful" scores on reviews, it all works out in the end.

[im3w1l]

Sounds vulnerable to a sybil attack.

[twelvechairs]

we already have laws that deal with this sort of thing (which has been going on in print media for hundreds of years). online reviews are no different

[guyht]

Yes, but anonymity on the web makes it much harder enforce these laws online.

[jlgreco]

Computer printers enabling home publishing might make it harder to enforce libel laws, but a shift in enforcement difficulty need not require new laws.

If I invented a new sort of zip-lock baggy that was completely impermeable to smell, that would make the enforcement of several laws more difficult, but should my invention prompt new laws? No, that would be an overreaction.

[seagreen]

Review of reviewers is totally the way to go! It sounds like a "now you have two problems" situation, but it really isn't. Starting from the one reviewer of reviewers you know you can trust (yourself) you can build out to a network of trusted reviewers.

If anyone's interested in working on open source solutions to this problem, feel free to email me. It's kind of my thing:)

[peacemaker]

Funny you mention this because a friend and I were sick of video game review sites leaving obviously paid for 10/10 reviews (here's looking at you, Eurogamer). So we put together plans to build a "review the reviewers" website where people could leave feedback on a particular reviewers integrity, honesty, trends and so on.

We never did finish it but I have lots of code, docs, ideas and research from that time and I'd be happy to help with your idea if you pursue it.

[TillE]

Yeah, a web of trust style weighting of friends-of-friends-of-friends isn't a bad idea at all. Current social networks doing that sort of thing tend to only care about immediate friends, which is only very narrowly useful. Good luck with your project.