[bduerst]

Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move.

Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy.

If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn't be there as a constant reminder.

[benologist]

They do this - Was this comment helpful? Click no and you can report it along with a brief message. It's either ineffective or doesn't do anything at all, can't tell.

[FilterJoe]

"not helpful" and "looks fake" are not the same. A review can be not helpful for many reasons, including:

* one or more incorrect facts

* goes on and on about one minor point while ignoring major stuff

* too brief

* reveals spoiler without a warning

Etc.

[emodendroket]

Reviews are sorted, by default, by how helpful they are rated.

[wiredfool]

The effectiveness of reviews is predicated on the population of 'helpful' reviewers being greater than the population of spam reviewers after some level of filtering.

It's unclear if a crowdsourced flag would tip the balance of helpful vs spam in any useful way for categories where there's already a unhelpful level of spam.

[Super_Jambo]

You could have a reputation system where vote weight is gained for correct identification of upvoted bogus reviews. Then your spammers are forced to fight each other in order to upvote their own spam. Start everyones voting weight at zero until they've spent $x.

[dasil003]

Would it really reveal the existence of fake reviews? How many people are unaware of them? Sure non tech-savvy people maybe, but those people are aging rapidly. Amazon needs to get ahead of this problem, because if the end result is that their rankings are shit, that will be much much worse for them in the long run.