How to sort out the sham reviews on Amazon from honest feedback
My trip into the upside-down world of Amazon reviews of cheapo electronics began because of a lost dongle. I was on an early morning flight with two chatty dudes behind me, bonding over living in Brooklyn and working in consulting. I badly wanted to drown out the conversation, but my wireless headphones were dead and I couldn’t find the 3.5 mm-to-Lightning dongle that’d let me plug my earbuds in.
Here is, as near as I can tell, the exact same cables, for about a dollar more, but with 76 customer reviews and an average of 1.1 star: I turned to two sites, Fakespot and ReviewMeta, which use publicly available review metadata and algorithms to try to suss out which reviews are “unreliable” or “unnatural.” The Samcable listing with 673 total reviews got a grade of F from Fakespot, with it declaring that 100 percent of the reviews were “low-quality.” After discarding what its algorithm determined were untrustworthy reviews, it adjusted that 4.6 average rating down to a 0.0 rating. ReviewMeta wasn’t much kinder.
In September of 2016, Noonan made a video showing that reviews with the “free or discounted” disclaimer in the text had much higher scores than reviews that didn’t. The video landed on the front page of Reddit. Within a few weeks of the video going viral, Amazon eliminated the ability for sellers to incentivize reviews through offering discounted or free products.
To my eyes, Amazon could make its reviews more reliable in several ways. For one easy thing, it could weight reviews from verified purchases more heavily in its system — if every positive review of a product isn’t a verified purchase, while every negative review is a verified purchase, that should have a much larger impact on the displayed average score.
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