It was falling behind. The dodgy stores were getting more creative and Fakespot needed to play catch up.
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review.
You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE.
Then an expensive option I was suprised happened - I bought a Dyson clone vacuum cleaner off of Amazon. A few weeks later, the company emailed me and said 'We have a new model. Buy that one, leave a review, we'll refund the purchase'. So I did it. This happened about 10 more times in 2024. My outdoor shed is entirely stick vacuums.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
I think Fakespot would have difficulty with all 3 of these scenarios.
dawnerd 6 hours ago [-]
Some company paid be 100 bucks to change my review to be positive so they sent the money via PayPal no problem then I changed the review to say they paid me to write a glowing review and of course Amazon ended up removing the review for being harmful to their customers
colonial 5 hours ago [-]
Amazon is awful when it comes to striking down accusatory customer reviews.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
grogenaut 3 hours ago [-]
you're supposed to report this to amazon customer service not via a review. just send em a photo of the bribe and they'll verify it. yes it's not as satisfying but they can't validate your review unless you also posted a photo.
fn-mote 2 hours ago [-]
Amazing BS policy, even people on Hacker Hews don’t know this approach.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1 hours ago [-]
An "Every Wrong Door" Policy
throaway920181 5 hours ago [-]
Amazon is not the place I'd go to for electronics parts. Mouser and Digikey are my go-tos.
colonial 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm generally aware of that - but I needed them fast, and decided it was worth taking a gamble. (I did at least get a return/refund, so there's that.)
aussieguy1234 4 hours ago [-]
Amazon are becoming like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but the quality is touch and go. Now with fake reviews it alot harder to tell what's good quality and what's not.
Scoundreller 3 hours ago [-]
At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.
Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.
(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)
jorvi 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.
One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
nothercastle 4 hours ago [-]
I prefer eBay at least it’s cheaper and the sellers care about reputation
consp 29 minutes ago [-]
With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.
mrweasel 2 hours ago [-]
I kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also because they can't compete anymore.
Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
pergadad 2 hours ago [-]
Much more, Amazon also loves to remove all reviews that mention that the product is counterfeit. Several times I did receive clear counterfeit goods via Amazon, but there is no way to warn others as these reviews are blocked.
gblargg 2 hours ago [-]
I do Amazon Vine reviews and we learn quickly all the things we can't say. For health products you can hardly say anything due to the legalities of appearing to make health claims. People also get their reviews removed regularly for claiming something is inauthentic. I kind of get why, because a person probably doesn't have the equipment to really determine that, and Amazon has separate channels for reporting such things. Basically reviews are just for relating your experience of a product. There are ways of communicating lack of authenticity by being more humble, as in noting that it doesn't seem like leather, or when burned it melts like plastic. I've reviewed many e.g. fake memory cards, and had no problem noting that it has less capacity than claimed, and showing some test programs' results that confirm.
pseudo0 2 hours ago [-]
Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN. So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other third-party seller without doing proper quality control. Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention to this longstanding problem.
ImHereToVote 56 minutes ago [-]
This is the real issue.
whoopdedo 2 hours ago [-]
The obvious implication being who Amazon considers to be their "customer". Hint, it's not you.
hydrogen7800 6 hours ago [-]
So they _can_ do something about fake reviews.
dawnerd 5 hours ago [-]
They can but they won’t. My original review was still there (as in was included in my updated review) saying how it was fundamentally flawed and will break. Was some video tripod with this dumb mechanism that would work itself loose by just panning. Never seen anything like it.
Plus side looks like the product doesn’t exist on Amazon so guess there’s a victory there somewhere.
jonhohle 5 hours ago [-]
Nope, only real reviews.
hopelite 1 hours ago [-]
That must explain why I’ve seen bad reviews that have 5 stars. I guess the review itself really does not matter as much as long as the stupid starts are there.
It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.
rsync 5 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing that anecdote… just terrible behavior on Amazons part.
4b11b4 4 hours ago [-]
wow, full circle.. and just.. what to even do with that
sokoloff 14 minutes ago [-]
I always wondered why Amazon would show me ads for vacuums after I just bought a vacuum from them.
This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there are avid vacuum collectors.
Retr0id 6 hours ago [-]
I can understand going for the "free upgrade" the first time around, but why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after that? Do you plan to sell them later?
lt_kernelpanic 4 hours ago [-]
Obviously, the plan is to eventually collect enough to construct a Dyson sphere.
hdevarajan 3 hours ago [-]
So good!
dankwizard 5 hours ago [-]
You sound like my wife. I don't know. I grew up kind of poor and my mindset still has a "If I can get an item typically worth $100-200 for free, TAKE IT".
The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.
29 minutes ago [-]
cjbgkagh 3 hours ago [-]
Fake reviewer vs low ballers…
whilenot-dev 3 hours ago [-]
this example suggests that you'd be happy to get paid in an alternative currency in exchange for Amazon reviews, and that currency is vacuums?! tbh I think your wife is right and you know it.
Mtinie 5 hours ago [-]
It’s the rational option if someone is giving you something for less than it costs you and the moral implications of the action is minimal (at best).
probably_wrong 2 hours ago [-]
All moral implications are minimal if your morals are flexible enough.
The OP is effectively taking thousands of dollars in bribes to erode public trust. I think even a child would see that this is wrong.
I know every man has their price, but I hope when the time comes my price will be higher than "a bunch of vacuums I don't need and I can't even be bothered to sell".
tempestn 50 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, he didn't specify that the reviews were false. Maybe he only agreed because he legitimately likes the vacuums. I think if someone offered me a product I like for free in return for a review, I'd do it. I wouldn't leave a positive review on a bad product though.
dns_snek 46 minutes ago [-]
Come on, let's be honest here, they wouldn't keep sending you products for free if you left anything less than a stellar review. That's the entire problem with incentivized reviews.
shawnz 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, but consider the costs of consuming your space with junk. Now you have less room for things you care about, there's a maintenance burden, and there's a mental burden as well
olyjohn 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, but were the vacuums actually good? He left 10 reviews for this company, which may have led other people to buy them, and made this company look better than it is... just so he could stuff his shed full of them? That's kinda fucked up. He even said he felt kinda shady about it, so my guess is that the reviews weren't honest.
themdonuts 27 minutes ago [-]
This is the best summary.
ozgrakkurt 3 hours ago [-]
Not having things and regretting passing up on something is much more real for people that had problem with money before.
Having too many things is just abstract unless you had that problem maybe
shawnz 3 hours ago [-]
Is 12 vacuums abstract?
ozgrakkurt 2 hours ago [-]
It is abstract in the sense that you might not see why that would be a problem
michaelbuckbee 6 hours ago [-]
Stocking up to give them out at Christmas?
stronglikedan 4 hours ago [-]
Leave honest reviews (not saying you're not) and don't feel dirty. You'd actually be helping.
chrischen 4 hours ago [-]
When you have extremely generous return policies then reviews matter less. They are still relevant if your'e trying to optimize for buy once for life, but in that case you should just be going for established brands instead, where their reputation is their review.
dns_snek 32 minutes ago [-]
They don't build them like they used to, in my experience most consumer electronics/appliance brands that are still considered high quality are just coasting on the reputation they built up in the 70s, 80s and 90s. In many categories it's getting almost impossible to find products that aren't just generic whitelabeled junk resold by "established brands".
solardev 3 hours ago [-]
Brands don't mean much when they're constantly bought up by other companies and then used to whitewash poorer quality products.
theshackleford 32 minutes ago [-]
> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.
I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.
gwd 25 minutes ago [-]
> I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review
Uh, this is how it's supposed to work? Make a good product, get good reviews for free.
"Make a crappy / mediocre product and pay people to write good reviews" is completely different.
veunes 1 hours ago [-]
It's one thing to detect fake language patterns; it's another when the review is technically real but incentivized into dishonesty
dfxm12 6 hours ago [-]
Can I have a vacuum?
p3rls 4 hours ago [-]
Oooh, I had the same deal but with cameras... Maybe they should pivot into a site showing deals w/ scammers.
4b11b4 4 hours ago [-]
Wait what. You have 12 vacs?
anyway,
I can imagine some small territory in time where fakespot can accurately deal with the flood. But then..
dankwizard 3 hours ago [-]
Yes.
I had to leave a video review component (No face). I wonder if any shoppers ever wondered why the same monotone man was constantly buying and reviewing vaccuum cleaners if he's always leaving positive reviews?!
throwaway843 3 hours ago [-]
Dyson always struck me as scammy. All the way back to the 19990s. More proof.
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
Because fake Dyson clones exist?
bentcorner 9 hours ago [-]
> Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity
I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.
I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?
I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.
burnt-resistor 8 hours ago [-]
Mozilla seems infected by corporate board members who probably have conflicts of interest including investments in Amazon, Google, etc.
TylerE 6 hours ago [-]
Mozilla seems to be infected by upper management that feels a need to justify ever spiraling salaries.
ethbr1 5 hours ago [-]
It's easier to justify a new thing than it is to make an improvement in an existing thing.
Why do you think VPs love new projects / products so much?
quantas 41 minutes ago [-]
Couldn't agree more. After the founder of the company itself Brendan Eich was fired it only went downhill
bbarnett 4 hours ago [-]
Are they hiring?
veunes 58 minutes ago [-]
Feels like they bought a cool tool, didn't know how to plug it into anything meaningful, and quietly sunset it when it didn’t fit the roadmap
4b11b4 4 hours ago [-]
Right, why even buy it in the first place? I can't imagine the landscape has changed much, unless the most popular comment here is all the evidence you need...
IncreasePosts 6 hours ago [-]
Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.
zdragnar 4 hours ago [-]
I think this is the real answer; they've got a vague mission statement, they saw something they wanted to support, opted to buy it, and in classic Mozilla fashion let it squander because the managers in charge moved on.
It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.
Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.
SlowTao 2 hours ago [-]
I do get the feeling that Mozilla has no idea what their goal is any more. Another one they are like is Yahoo! Just seem to be endlessly trying new things but not really committing to any of the new things one they have them.
Digory 3 hours ago [-]
I’d guess the idea was about generalizing the team’s efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But that horse has left the barn.
Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.
Workaccount2 9 hours ago [-]
They could have slid in their referral link, which would probably make them decent money, but the "ick" factor is pretty high from consumers.
I'm sure there will be a replacement though, and I'm sure they will go hard with referral links.
colinbartlett 7 hours ago [-]
I recall seeing the Mozilla Review Checker pop up on Amazon shortly after I started using it as my daily driver.
I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
drekipus 8 hours ago [-]
I can almost assure you, the plan is to run it into the ground,
kulahan 8 hours ago [-]
Why? Can’t imagine any realistic push for this when there’s theoretically much more money to be made by creating a product that people pay to use.
pogue 8 hours ago [-]
I did search around looking for alternatives and the landscape isn't great. There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.
TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.
SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for
Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs
If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!
doppio19 8 hours ago [-]
I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
Mtinie 5 hours ago [-]
Please help me understand why a subscription to your service should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend.
I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.
I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
pogue 6 hours ago [-]
I saw that actually. I mentioned in another post on here recently that I figured that the only way a Fakespot v2 could exist is with a subscription model, but on the other hand, it's probably not something I could afford. Good luck with it though! You could always try advertising & affiliate links as a test to monetize the service as well.
doppio19 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate affiliate links after the Honey scandal: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-co...
pogue 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, probably not in the extension itself. But, Fakespot, on their web based reviews, had listings to alternative or better rated products than the one you were searching for. Possibly a bit of a conflict, but as far as I'm aware, it's the only way Fakespot was monetized.
4b11b4 4 hours ago [-]
Subscription seems wrong, will prevent adoption
4b11b4 4 hours ago [-]
Should show me something instantly, I should be able to paste in a url
4b11b4 4 hours ago [-]
Hmm I can see the angle
jen729w 18 minutes ago [-]
Me and my partner just don't trust any reviews any more. Blogged about it here:
So you know what we do now? Ignore the overall rating: it's worthless. Instead, go directly to the 1*. They're the only true indicator of a product/place/service.
I'm not saying take them all at face value. You still have to put in some work. But all the data is in the one-stars.
piokoch 15 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately 1* are often bragging of some maniacs who bought a fork and they complain it is not working great as a spoon, or just black PR from the competitors. Whole reviews system is not working.
sothatsit 10 minutes ago [-]
The key is the ratio of crazy to sane 1 star reviews. Mostly crazies? Then the service is probably good. But if there are many sane 1 star reviews? Might be a bad place.
doppio19 12 hours ago [-]
For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.
rasz 10 hours ago [-]
Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil
doppio19 9 hours ago [-]
Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.
i80and 9 hours ago [-]
DeepSpeech shuttered in 2021. The repo was just made read-only the other day
ashoeafoot 9 hours ago [-]
So they wrote a ping pong shader for monetization going with the user or selling out the user.
Solomoriah 6 hours ago [-]
I sell books on Amazon.com through their KDP Direct platform, and I have one book with two different covers; each is its own "book" in their catalog. FakeSpot repeatedly marked reviews I knew were valid as fake; I knew this based on the fact that the same reviewer reviewed the "other" book and that review was NOT flagged as fake. And this happened multiple times, and sometimes the wording of the two reviews were different. Further investigation showed FakeSpot had rather a poor reputation overall due to too many false positives. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned.
veunes 55 minutes ago [-]
It's just hard to build a blunt tool that doesn't occasionally whack honest users too
kirykl 4 hours ago [-]
I have managed some Amazon product pages, which I know have never used fake reviews. Fakespot consistently had false positives for these items
doppio19 6 hours ago [-]
That's interesting! Did you have any guesses as to what might have been setting it off to mark those reviews as false positives?
Dwedit 8 hours ago [-]
With removal of reviews that the seller doesn't like, there's really no point to taking Amazon's star ratings or reviews seriously. It's all a big lie.
SamuelAdams 8 hours ago [-]
I’ve started resorting to the “x bought this month” metric instead. If a product works for thousands of people and they continue to buy 500+ units a month, clearly it is a good option.
If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.
derekp7 8 hours ago [-]
They also tell you if a product has a high return rate, which is helpful.
Loughla 7 hours ago [-]
Except with clothes and especially belts, I've noticed. It seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they buy and returns two of them. It makes it harder to identify shitty clothes.
haiku2077 2 hours ago [-]
> It seems like everybody buys three of the clothes they buy and returns two of them.
Amazon used to offer this as a service!
dylan604 8 hours ago [-]
How do you know that 500 people didn't buy a scam product this month? I put as much faith in the X people bought this as I do the X people have this in their cart. It's all a way of trying to stoke FOMO
s1mplicissimus 8 hours ago [-]
what makes you believe that the number you see in “x bought this month” is not some variant of
if (session_is_gullible_to_displayed_sales_number) {
return HIGH_SALESNUMBER;
}
?
yablak 8 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that metric can be gamed
veunes 54 minutes ago [-]
I've basically defaulted to looking for 3-star reviews with coherent complaints
aspenmayer 8 hours ago [-]
There’s also the strangely still-not-even-admitted-as-problematic Amazon item page referent shuffle, where one item is for sale on a given page, and the item sold by that page points to one item by a given seller. The reviews of this item are spammed positively, and then the item being sold on that page is changed by the seller, yet the reviews follow the page, not the item sold at the time the review was placed.
This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.
alwa 8 hours ago [-]
It sure does get there quick though. And heads back to the warehouse for free if you don’t like it.
aspenmayer 8 hours ago [-]
Counterfeit items are contraband and may not be legal to be shipped or mailed, as they are evidence that a crime may have occurred. To return counterfeit items for material benefit to the seller or agent in order to receive a refund is possibly helping the fraud to continue by allowing the destruction of property/evidence. I advise all folks who suspect counterfeit goods to report them to the FTC and their local police department to get a police report, and insist that the police take the item(s) as evidence, then provide the police report to Amazon to facilitate the refund, instead of returning the potential contraband to the contraband dealer for them to sell again or for them to destroy the insufficiently misleading fake item.
Scammers are somehow using Amazon itself as an A/B test for if your fakes pass muster, from what I can tell, and everyone loses but Amazon and the bad guys. How long must this continue?
topato 6 hours ago [-]
Is this something you've actually done? You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
aspenmayer 6 hours ago [-]
> Is this something you've actually done?
I haven’t done this myself, but I have discovered that it is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a previously working device suddenly stopped charging within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund, they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge. So Amazon said please don’t ship it, but to dispose of it according to my local disposal regulations.
In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people about this important issue at my own freebooted unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat or something caused Caesar’s to be on lockdown. At this talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X which would work when powered via USB C but would not charge or work unplugged. All features and functions still worked otherwise.
> You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
It’s funny you mention that, as I really had to almost haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message. The message is the medium. It’s the multi sensory experience of being appealed to which is the payload that runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if you ingest it in the way presented and intended.
Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!
“Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).”
This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read.
As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those reviews.
The only way to know about a product is to read about it elsewhere like New York Times which is not selling the product themselves.
quitit 4 hours ago [-]
Some online retailers (such as galaxus for those in Europe) include return statistics on the sale page against comparison brands as well as price history graphs. This helps stamp out two of the core complaints about amazon: fake reviews and fraudulent discounts.
zdragnar 4 hours ago [-]
If you look around, you'll see products on Amazon occasionally marked as "frequently returned". It has steered me away from a few purchases.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
UberFly 1 hours ago [-]
My own form of Amazon punishment for allowing fake reviews is to send back their falsely reviewed crap on their own dime. If they want to save $$ they should clean up the review process.
aucisson_masque 1 hours ago [-]
What about things that break after a while, when you can’t anymore send it back ?
alister 4 hours ago [-]
There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
irrational 1 hours ago [-]
This is so odd. Firefox is my primary browser and this is the very first time I have ever even heard the name Fakespot.
pnw 7 hours ago [-]
"Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable model" seems to be a recurring theme.
xnx 9 hours ago [-]
Did Fakespot work? I can't see how it would stand a chance against LLM generated reviews without even having the log (keystroke?) data that Amazon does.
burnt-resistor 8 hours ago [-]
Better than nothing. Not sure how well it worked or if it used any particularly advanced AI similarity checker or sentiment analysis.
It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
bb88 7 hours ago [-]
The last year it's been a mixed bag.
One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.
The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.
doppio19 9 hours ago [-]
I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100% accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
markrages 9 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of real reviews are written by ChatGPT. People are lazy!
ozgrakkurt 3 hours ago [-]
Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway.
Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable. Also can combine this with marketplace reviews considering reliability.
If there is no review than have to trust the brand and if there is no brand then it is a gamble
logifail 3 hours ago [-]
> Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway
Although at least the platform can know if the reviewer actually purchased the product(?)
> Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable
Unless they use affiliate links, which is a great big red flag that the incentives are already stacked against you.
ravenstine 9 hours ago [-]
I've never even heard of it, yet it was acquired by Mozilla? Seems like the problem is right in front of them; they didn't really try.
DrNosferatu 8 hours ago [-]
Anyone in the know care to sum up / list alternatives?
This shutdown feels like another case of "big org can't monetize, so good idea gets shelved"
Animats 8 hours ago [-]
Could you fund this via a firm that litigated under consumer protection laws?
midtake 7 hours ago [-]
9 years? I could have sworn I saw it in 2015, maybe even 2014.
hnthrowaway_423 7 hours ago [-]
I think by now I have quickly learnt that they can just read all the worst reviews and see if they can: 1. put up with the drawbacks, 2. see how frequent manufacturing defects are. 5* reviews are only useful if they upload real images.
bdcravens 9 hours ago [-]
Still working for me, but I see the notice on their page. I assume it'll go dark at the end of the day.
CommenterPerson 8 hours ago [-]
Sadly, chalk up a victory for enshittification. I was a Firefox fax, now mostly use DuckDuckGo. Doesn't most of Mozilla's funding come from Google?
fambalamboni 9 hours ago [-]
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wetpaws 9 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 08:24:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review.
You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE.
Then an expensive option I was suprised happened - I bought a Dyson clone vacuum cleaner off of Amazon. A few weeks later, the company emailed me and said 'We have a new model. Buy that one, leave a review, we'll refund the purchase'. So I did it. This happened about 10 more times in 2024. My outdoor shed is entirely stick vacuums.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
I think Fakespot would have difficulty with all 3 of these scenarios.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.
(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)
One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
Plus side looks like the product doesn’t exist on Amazon so guess there’s a victory there somewhere.
It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.
This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there are avid vacuum collectors.
The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.
The OP is effectively taking thousands of dollars in bribes to erode public trust. I think even a child would see that this is wrong.
I know every man has their price, but I hope when the time comes my price will be higher than "a bunch of vacuums I don't need and I can't even be bothered to sell".
Having too many things is just abstract unless you had that problem maybe
It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.
I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.
Uh, this is how it's supposed to work? Make a good product, get good reviews for free.
"Make a crappy / mediocre product and pay people to write good reviews" is completely different.
anyway, I can imagine some small territory in time where fakespot can accurately deal with the flood. But then..
I had to leave a video review component (No face). I wonder if any shoppers ever wondered why the same monotone man was constantly buying and reviewing vaccuum cleaners if he's always leaving positive reviews?!
I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.
I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?
I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.
Why do you think VPs love new projects / products so much?
It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.
Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.
Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.
I'm sure there will be a replacement though, and I'm sure they will go hard with referral links.
I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.
SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for
Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs
There are a few others on AlternativeTo that weren't there the last time I checked. https://alternativeto.net/software/fakespot/
On Reddit, some people were mentioning alternatives, including asking ChatGPT about the product and it might have some kinda helpful advice, but nothing like Fakespot offered. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ktm4g4/now_that_f...
If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.
I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
https://johnnydecimal.com/20-29-communication/22-blog/22.00....
So you know what we do now? Ignore the overall rating: it's worthless. Instead, go directly to the 1*. They're the only true indicator of a product/place/service.
I'm not saying take them all at face value. You still have to put in some work. But all the data is in the one-stars.
If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.
Amazon used to offer this as a service!
This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.
Scammers are somehow using Amazon itself as an A/B test for if your fakes pass muster, from what I can tell, and everyone loses but Amazon and the bad guys. How long must this continue?
I haven’t done this myself, but I have discovered that it is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a previously working device suddenly stopped charging within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund, they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge. So Amazon said please don’t ship it, but to dispose of it according to my local disposal regulations.
In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people about this important issue at my own freebooted unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat or something caused Caesar’s to be on lockdown. At this talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X which would work when powered via USB C but would not charge or work unplugged. All features and functions still worked otherwise.
> You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
It’s funny you mention that, as I really had to almost haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message. The message is the medium. It’s the multi sensory experience of being appealed to which is the payload that runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if you ingest it in the way presented and intended.
Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!
(62 points, 27 days ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184974
“Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).”
This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read.
As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those reviews.
The only way to know about a product is to read about it elsewhere like New York Times which is not selling the product themselves.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.
The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable. Also can combine this with marketplace reviews considering reliability.
If there is no review than have to trust the brand and if there is no brand then it is a gamble
Although at least the platform can know if the reviewer actually purchased the product(?)
> Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable
Unless they use affiliate links, which is a great big red flag that the incentives are already stacked against you.