Author Topic: theHustle Article: 5-star phonies: Inside the fake Amazon review complex  (Read 1233 times)

Tom Wood

https://thehustle.co/amazon-fake-reviews

Romance books appear in the top list.
 

lea_owens

On a couple of the book pages on Facebook, I've had authors approach me for a 'review for a review'... they were all from non-English speaking countries and a quick look at their books was mind blowing. They had quite a few five star reviews but the books were unreadable tripe - rubbish cover and blurb, bad formatting, total garbage writing with sentences that didn't even make sense. They were so addicted to the notion of greed and making money at any cost, that they saw nothing wrong with cheating to get good reviews for rubbish, with the expectation that good reviews equalled sales. It was sad - the art and craft of writing reduced to a sick by-product of greed.

I was polite. I reported the books... nothing was done. They're still on Amazon for sale. I wish all those rubbish books that clearly have fake reviews and which are garbled rubbish were removed from Amazon. That extends to the products that have spawned this industry of paying for reviews.
 

David VanDyke

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So Amazon can hire thousands (!!!) of people to listen to Alexa recordings, but a bare handful (of any) to work on the scamming and fake review problem.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/tech/amazon-alexa-listening/index.html
Never listen to people with no skin in the game.

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Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

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Bill Hiatt

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While I'm skeptical of using programs to determine whether or not a review is fake--Fakespot in particular has a very high rate of false positives--the evidence of review-selling accumulated by the author of the article is certainly persuasive. I think it's also true that Amazon is reactive, particularly to media embarrassment. This is another area when putting a few more live people on monitoring certain kinds of problems would be productive.


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