<story><title>Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes</title><url>http://thewirecutter.com/2016/05/lets-talk-about-amazon-reviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonstokes</author><text>I actually know people whose job it is to write these things, and to create and maintain sock puppet personas on forums for the purpose of subtly promoting clients&amp;#x27; products and disparaging those of competitors.&lt;p&gt;Then there are the professional reviews, which are all conflicted because most reviewers either get to keep the gear or the gear maker is a sponsor of the site&amp;#x2F;publication and the reviewer knows it. I say this as a person who&amp;#x27;s still involved in publishing reviews (of outdoor gear, mostly), and who most of the time gets to keep whatever some company sends me.&lt;p&gt;However rotten you think the adtech industry is, the state of product reviews online -- user generated, casual forum reviews, professional reviews, etc. -- is worse.&lt;p&gt;I have a standard rant about the current state of the web that I give all my family and friends, and it always ends with: &amp;quot;if you didn&amp;#x27;t pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonaf</author><text>The FTC requires disclosure for reviews that were written by individuals who were given a product for the purpose of reviewing it. It is considered anticompetitive and illegal to forego disclosing this about a review.&lt;p&gt;As an engineer at perhaps the largest ratings and reviews company worldwide, I would love to hear your standard rant in long form. Please pm me if you feel up to that conversation. Ideally the result would be an improvement in the quality of the content of billions of reviews.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes</title><url>http://thewirecutter.com/2016/05/lets-talk-about-amazon-reviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonstokes</author><text>I actually know people whose job it is to write these things, and to create and maintain sock puppet personas on forums for the purpose of subtly promoting clients&amp;#x27; products and disparaging those of competitors.&lt;p&gt;Then there are the professional reviews, which are all conflicted because most reviewers either get to keep the gear or the gear maker is a sponsor of the site&amp;#x2F;publication and the reviewer knows it. I say this as a person who&amp;#x27;s still involved in publishing reviews (of outdoor gear, mostly), and who most of the time gets to keep whatever some company sends me.&lt;p&gt;However rotten you think the adtech industry is, the state of product reviews online -- user generated, casual forum reviews, professional reviews, etc. -- is worse.&lt;p&gt;I have a standard rant about the current state of the web that I give all my family and friends, and it always ends with: &amp;quot;if you didn&amp;#x27;t pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>logicallee</author><text>&amp;gt;if you didn&amp;#x27;t pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement.&lt;p&gt;But your own comment (that I&amp;#x27;m replying to) isn&amp;#x27;t one, and we&amp;#x27;re  not paying for it - you&amp;#x27;re speaking to us frankly and off the cuff (and if anything, &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; your own interests on those other sites) because of the informal club-like forum that this is.  In the end I and any other readers here are giving you all due weight.  in exchange everyone else speaks frankly about stuff they know about.  You can read stuff here that probably posters are explicitly prohibited by their employers from posting.  some guy from (insert whatever state agency here) can probably post from a throwaway but still waaaaaaaaaaay in contravention of whatever their policies are, and with only a little bit of indirection.&lt;p&gt;So it&amp;#x27;s hardly as simple as you suggest.  yeah you have to read through the bullshit, but this has always been true everywhere.  caveat emptor.</text></comment>