Frankly I have basically stopped taking reviews as reliable almost altogether. Major review aggregators like Amazon will be gamed by people who got a free thing in order to put a positive review...
Frankly I have basically stopped taking reviews as reliable almost altogether. Major review aggregators like Amazon will be gamed by people who got a free thing in order to put a positive review for it and even when you filter for negative reviews you get way too many stupid responses by people who try to use the item like a hammer and need to tell the world how upset they are at their decision. Even professional reviews have been poisoned with affiliate marketing and “sponsored reviews”.
I’ve become fairly anticonsumptive in the past few years so my solutions for finding the best deals is learning how to evaluate quality as much as I can and for things I cannot evaluate I ask people for help. A while back I needed to buy a new water heater so I asked a plumber and they recommended Bradford White - so I found a local Bradford White associated contractor and called them, and from there I negotiated a deal and now I have a very nice quality water heater that I payed comparatively little for.
The most central point for reviews and purchasing advice is trust. Reviews are not trustworthy, plain and simple, and it’s gotten so bad that I would prefer asking a stranger over them.
The weird thing I have found out doing that is that there is a weird trend of Amazon “influencers”. There was a topic I posted a while back about nose and ear shaving where someone recommended...
The weird thing I have found out doing that is that there is a weird trend of Amazon “influencers”. There was a topic I posted a while back about nose and ear shaving where someone recommended Royal brand manual trimmers and I was looking on Amazon to see their models and compare them. When I looked down at the reviews some of them are videos now, and they were all from people who had clearly never seen anything like them or read the full product description. I assume they have some way of getting kickbacks.
They do. They have this thing called Amazon Storefront where influencers can have a storefront with products on Amazon they recommend, and they get a commission if you buy from them.
They do. They have this thing called Amazon Storefront where influencers can have a storefront with products on Amazon they recommend, and they get a commission if you buy from them.
I've noticed the reviews with videos are much less trustworthy than the ones that have pictures, in general. The videos have clickbait titles ("Honest Review of X" "Watch Before You Buy X!") and...
I've noticed the reviews with videos are much less trustworthy than the ones that have pictures, in general. The videos have clickbait titles ("Honest Review of X" "Watch Before You Buy X!") and they consist of, as you say, someone just holding the item and reading off the features. They don't actually demonstrate using the item in any fashion that tells you useful information.
In contrast, I feel people who post pictures are pointing out things they wish they might have known before buying, whether good or bad. Quality of the materials, the item's scale with a measuring tape or next to objects of known size, whether the colors match the description, pictures of the item in use, etc. Some video reviews are useful this way too, but a large percentage are not, and you don't know that until you watch them.
Weirdly, I've found the reviews on amazon.de to be a lot more useful than those on the US site ever since I moved to Germany. I almost never even looked at the reviews in the US, whereas here it...
Weirdly, I've found the reviews on amazon.de to be a lot more useful than those on the US site ever since I moved to Germany. I almost never even looked at the reviews in the US, whereas here it seems like some subset of people write quite long little essay reviews -- and they err on the critical side in my experience, so I think the fake review glut isn't quite as bad in German-language reviews yet ig. Presumably less money in influencer reviews in the German market.
That said, Google maps reviews are less reliable here than in the States imo. It's extremely common for normal people to get threats of defamation suits here when they leave a negative review of a business on Google maps. So you can't trust the star ratings and you have to develop a sense for whether the ratio of complaints to positive reviews feels normal or not.
That's actually fascinating, and I think you're probably right, there's fewer German Amazon influencers than in the US, where we commoditize everything. That's why I only trust reviews with pictures.
That's actually fascinating, and I think you're probably right, there's fewer German Amazon influencers than in the US, where we commoditize everything. That's why I only trust reviews with pictures.
I’ve been seeing Mozilla mention their “FakeSpot” browser extension, and I gave it a try to combat this. Seemed like it did a decent job, although it was kinda freaky for me that it was adding...
I’ve been seeing Mozilla mention their “FakeSpot” browser extension, and I gave it a try to combat this. Seemed like it did a decent job, although it was kinda freaky for me that it was adding elements to sites like Amazon, even if they were just to explain the reviews on an item.
I've tried Fakespot too, though I didn't know Mozilla had purchased it. I tried it back in 2021 and like you mentioned, it did a decent job. Fakespot does quite a bit to determine the authenticity...
I've tried Fakespot too, though I didn't know Mozilla had purchased it. I tried it back in 2021 and like you mentioned, it did a decent job. Fakespot does quite a bit to determine the authenticity of reviews. It uses ML and NLP to analyze the language used in a review and basically rates reviews by how authentic it thinks it is. That being said, it's not that hard to trick it into thinking what you wrote is authentic. Now that we have generative AI that can change the style of a piece of text, I think Fakespot will slowly become less reliable.
I remember reading that, after Amazon started trying to crack down on review manipulation, the strategy for vendors moved from faking reviews on their own products to faking reviews on their...
I remember reading that, after Amazon started trying to crack down on review manipulation, the strategy for vendors moved from faking reviews on their own products to faking reviews on their competitors’. Amazon would then penalize the competitors, and that company’s products would look more trustworthy by comparison.
I unfortunately can’t find the link that I originally got this information from, but it does make me feel that tools like Fakespot are ultimately pretty limited.
The best way I’ve found info recently is honestly just by asking Tildes. I have more trust in the opinions of users here than anywhere else online.
Yep, I feel like fighting fake reviews on online marketplaces will always been a game of cat and mouse between the sellers and the marketplace owner. Definitely agree that asking on online forums...
Yep, I feel like fighting fake reviews on online marketplaces will always been a game of cat and mouse between the sellers and the marketplace owner. Definitely agree that asking on online forums seem to be the best course of action. I used Reddit in the past for it but I definitely imagine Tildes would be trustworthy too.
I have extensions for both Fakespot and Reviewmeta. The latter seems to be going through some struggles with their service occasionally failing or spinning, but when it works it's an interesting...
I have extensions for both Fakespot and Reviewmeta. The latter seems to be going through some struggles with their service occasionally failing or spinning, but when it works it's an interesting foil to Fakespot.
One of the more amusing/annoying vendor patterns I've seen is to recycle the entry of a highly rated item, replacing the image and description with something we entirely different, but keeping the reviews and thus the high rating. So you start reading reviews for let's say a storage box and they're describing a Taylor Swift poster or something like that.
Frankly I have basically stopped taking reviews as reliable almost altogether. Major review aggregators like Amazon will be gamed by people who got a free thing in order to put a positive review for it and even when you filter for negative reviews you get way too many stupid responses by people who try to use the item like a hammer and need to tell the world how upset they are at their decision. Even professional reviews have been poisoned with affiliate marketing and “sponsored reviews”.
I’ve become fairly anticonsumptive in the past few years so my solutions for finding the best deals is learning how to evaluate quality as much as I can and for things I cannot evaluate I ask people for help. A while back I needed to buy a new water heater so I asked a plumber and they recommended Bradford White - so I found a local Bradford White associated contractor and called them, and from there I negotiated a deal and now I have a very nice quality water heater that I payed comparatively little for.
The most central point for reviews and purchasing advice is trust. Reviews are not trustworthy, plain and simple, and it’s gotten so bad that I would prefer asking a stranger over them.
When it comes to Amazon, the only way that I can really think to combat fake reviews is to only read the reviews that have pictures in them.
The weird thing I have found out doing that is that there is a weird trend of Amazon “influencers”. There was a topic I posted a while back about nose and ear shaving where someone recommended Royal brand manual trimmers and I was looking on Amazon to see their models and compare them. When I looked down at the reviews some of them are videos now, and they were all from people who had clearly never seen anything like them or read the full product description. I assume they have some way of getting kickbacks.
They do. They have this thing called Amazon Storefront where influencers can have a storefront with products on Amazon they recommend, and they get a commission if you buy from them.
I've noticed the reviews with videos are much less trustworthy than the ones that have pictures, in general. The videos have clickbait titles ("Honest Review of X" "Watch Before You Buy X!") and they consist of, as you say, someone just holding the item and reading off the features. They don't actually demonstrate using the item in any fashion that tells you useful information.
In contrast, I feel people who post pictures are pointing out things they wish they might have known before buying, whether good or bad. Quality of the materials, the item's scale with a measuring tape or next to objects of known size, whether the colors match the description, pictures of the item in use, etc. Some video reviews are useful this way too, but a large percentage are not, and you don't know that until you watch them.
Weirdly, I've found the reviews on amazon.de to be a lot more useful than those on the US site ever since I moved to Germany. I almost never even looked at the reviews in the US, whereas here it seems like some subset of people write quite long little essay reviews -- and they err on the critical side in my experience, so I think the fake review glut isn't quite as bad in German-language reviews yet ig. Presumably less money in influencer reviews in the German market.
That said, Google maps reviews are less reliable here than in the States imo. It's extremely common for normal people to get threats of defamation suits here when they leave a negative review of a business on Google maps. So you can't trust the star ratings and you have to develop a sense for whether the ratio of complaints to positive reviews feels normal or not.
That's actually fascinating, and I think you're probably right, there's fewer German Amazon influencers than in the US, where we commoditize everything. That's why I only trust reviews with pictures.
I’ve been seeing Mozilla mention their “FakeSpot” browser extension, and I gave it a try to combat this. Seemed like it did a decent job, although it was kinda freaky for me that it was adding elements to sites like Amazon, even if they were just to explain the reviews on an item.
I've tried Fakespot too, though I didn't know Mozilla had purchased it. I tried it back in 2021 and like you mentioned, it did a decent job. Fakespot does quite a bit to determine the authenticity of reviews. It uses ML and NLP to analyze the language used in a review and basically rates reviews by how authentic it thinks it is. That being said, it's not that hard to trick it into thinking what you wrote is authentic. Now that we have generative AI that can change the style of a piece of text, I think Fakespot will slowly become less reliable.
I remember reading that, after Amazon started trying to crack down on review manipulation, the strategy for vendors moved from faking reviews on their own products to faking reviews on their competitors’. Amazon would then penalize the competitors, and that company’s products would look more trustworthy by comparison.
I unfortunately can’t find the link that I originally got this information from, but it does make me feel that tools like Fakespot are ultimately pretty limited.
The best way I’ve found info recently is honestly just by asking Tildes. I have more trust in the opinions of users here than anywhere else online.
Yep, I feel like fighting fake reviews on online marketplaces will always been a game of cat and mouse between the sellers and the marketplace owner. Definitely agree that asking on online forums seem to be the best course of action. I used Reddit in the past for it but I definitely imagine Tildes would be trustworthy too.
I have extensions for both Fakespot and Reviewmeta. The latter seems to be going through some struggles with their service occasionally failing or spinning, but when it works it's an interesting foil to Fakespot.
One of the more amusing/annoying vendor patterns I've seen is to recycle the entry of a highly rated item, replacing the image and description with something we entirely different, but keeping the reviews and thus the high rating. So you start reading reviews for let's say a storage box and they're describing a Taylor Swift poster or something like that.