Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

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

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?

Leave honest reviews (not saying you're not) and don't feel dirty. You'd actually be helping.

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.

Can I have a vacuum?

Dyson always struck me as scammy. All the way back to the 19990s. More proof.

Oooh, I had the same deal but with cameras... Maybe they should pivot into a site showing deals w/ scammers.

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..

Mozilla seems infected by corporate board members who probably have conflicts of interest including investments in Amazon, Google, etc.

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...

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.

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.

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.

I can almost assure you, the plan is to run it into the ground,

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.

I have managed some Amazon product pages, which I know have never used fake reviews. Fakespot consistently had false positives for these items

That's interesting! Did you have any guesses as to what might have been setting it off to mark those reviews as false positives?

Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil

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.

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.

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.

Yup! And today's the day.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.