• lloram239@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with? The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. “Thing arrived and box looked pretty” is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn’t make a difference. Even a review that puts effort into itself, is largely useless when the writer didn’t have multiple competing products at hand to compare. And on top of that you have the issue that products will frequently change under the hood, so even if the product was good a year ago, there is no guarantee you are getting the same thing when you order it today.

    The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.

    • ka-chow@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      My favourite is someone who rates it 1 star because they got it late.

      You’re reviewing the item you wet wipe, not Katie who works for Evri/Hermes…

      • ggppjj@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If Amazon had visible seller reviews, I would be more inclined to agree.

        Then again, if people would actually say who their sellers were, I would be less inclined to agree.

    • Snapz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Of course they are a problem? The real issue is the star ratings in aggregate of course, but the value in individual reviews is detecting patterns - “didn’t like the lock thing” “latch was loose” “maybe it’s just me, but the latch didn’t feel solid” “the lock broke off within a week”. You start to see trouble spots if you know how to skim actual reviews.

      So to get that value, you don’t restrict input, you leave it open, the “pretty box” people aren’t ideal, but it’s fine because it allows for the breadcrumbs that tell the larger truth. It’s ridiculous to expect normal, busy people to do “consumer reports” style reviews for every small kitchen sponge and packet of stickers sold online?

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      With Amazon there’s also the problem of them combining reviews of entirely different products into a single product’s page. I have no idea why they do this. There are also sellers who switch the product on the page while keeping the positive reviews for an earlier product.

      • PutangInaMo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This right here. It should be illegal to do this. I discovered this I think last year and it blew my mind, it’s straight up misleading the consumer.

        • LostWon@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          I avoid those as soon as I notice the signs, but I’ve found less and less instances over time (which is a relief since there used to be loads of pages like that). I thought I read somewhere it’s against Amazon’s own rules to do this. Not 100% sure though.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with?

      For me, the answer is mostly “no” because I just assume everything (except certain name-brand items that I did my homework on elsewhere) on Amazon/Ebay/Aliexpress/etc. is marginally-functional crap and adjust my expectations accordingly.

      If anything, the only signals I go by on those sites are the number of ratings and reviews (not their content) as indications of popularity, following the “wisdom of crowds.”

    • ???@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with?

      I feel like this is the case. Whenever I have a new hobby and need to make a purchase, I rely a lot on reviews of others because it’s impossible to guarantee the quality of anything. Look at Doc Marten’s today, they fucking suck, and this is a “known” brand. Now how about buying all sorts of weird shit from other countries or small companies that aren’t well known enough.

      Yes for consumers this is a problem.

      The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.

      This would be a welcome solution.

    • IverCoder@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. “Thing arrived and box looked pretty” is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn’t make a difference.

      But-But how are we supposed to know how handsome/beautiful the delivery rider who delivered the parcel is???

    • ByGourou@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Photos from people who received the product are useful, you never know with the marketting bs. And I would argue that random people review are important, but they are so bad right now that you got used not to look at them. Of course some will be stupid (1/5, came late), you just have to read them. Which is impossible with the 50.000 fake on every product.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I like the reviews that say “I’ve owned this for 20 minutes and it works great!” I assume most reviews are from people who just received the product (because that’s when they’ll think to write a review) and are therefore pretty useless as a guide to quality.

        • ByGourou@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Yeah if you want in depth review it’s not the way to go for sure. Independant reviewer on youtube or, if you’re really desperate, reddit are better.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I love the reviews that say “I haven’t gotten it yet but I’m sure it is good” or they review UPS instead “Package arrived damaged”. They are as useful as those idiotic unpacking videos.

      If I use reviews I look for ones with specific information and what the general range of negative ones are. If there are a mess of negatives ones and they are recent with details included then I pay attention.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    Amazon is in trouble

    I don’t see why. Fake reviews don’t benefit Amazon. The review information is a value-add for them, and fake reviews detract from that.

    Hell, if it actually is able to reliably detect fake reviews on Amazon – which I doubt, but let’s roll with it – Amazon might buy the company that does the fake review detection to get it so that they can filter it.

    • isles@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t agree with the assertion that fake reviews don’t benefit them, but I may be missing something. Reviews help drive consumer behavior and more reviews lead to more sales from those who are unable or unwilling to be more discerning. (Amazon takes a cut)

      For others, it the idea or presence of fake reviews might drive them to a “trusted” Amazon Basics alternative, also leading to sales with a higher margin for Amazon.

      Additionally, recycling listing ASINs is a common tactic that Amazon could stop and is a source of “fake” (or at least, irrelevant in content and misleading in score) reviews. There’s minimal enforcement of rules for review integrity, such as verified purchases or quid pro quo “warranties” and “free gifts” for 5 star reviews.

      All the evidence I see points to Amazon preferring the status quo.

      • Dagrothus@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        I tried posting a negative review that mentioned a quid pro quo (offered a gift card in exchange for a 5 star review) and Amazon removed it for not being relevant to the product. So baseless 5 star reviews are allowed but not 1 star reviews.

        • random65837@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’ve had that happen as well, but technically they’re right, bitching about the seller isn’t relevant to the end product. That’s why there needs to be a seller rating section for them, with independent reviews / scores based on them as sellers which shows next to their seller names, same idea as eBay feedback.

    • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “Brushing” scams seem way too common and easily executed through Amazon in order for them to not be turning a blind eye about it, imo. My mom was sent random LED lights for months through their return program despite never ordering them or hardly using amazon at all before she figured out what was happening. It feels like at least 5% of all my purchases come with a policy breaking email from the seller contacting me asking me for a five-star review in exchange for a free gift. Or even just contacting me 6 months later from a totally unrelated purchase and offering me a gift for no reason in exchange for a five-star review. Oh, they’ll sure reimburse the money it costs to buy it! Because they really just want that five-star review! And Amazon seems to be happy allowing five-star reviews for products that are given away for free and even has a tag to let other users know, but just this method is frowned upon? I doubt it.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    This will work for 15 microseconds before people start deploying it as an adversarial training aid.

    • Jtskywalker@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Yeah. Fakespot is no better at all. The best thing to do right now is know if a product has only been listed for less than a couple months and has hundreds of reviews, it’s BS.

        Next up; go to the review section, sort by newest, and read those reviews. Usually the fake reviews are flooded in early and you get more real ones in later. I’ve seen things rated at like 4.5 stars with 500 reviews, but then half of the 10 most recent reviews will rate it 1 star.

        • Jtskywalker@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yeah it doesn’t seem too difficult to me to see when reviews seem fishy. I have never tried fakespot myself.

          Another thing to check is that the reviews match what the product is for - I have seen a lot of Amazon listings where the seller will have a product up for a long time, get a lot of positive reviews, then change the listing to something else. So it looks like the listing has been up for a long time with good reviews but it’s really a different item. Then note the seller and don’t buy anything from them lol.

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I have a Firefox extension from this website, and another one… So I’ve had this all along. I guess it’s great to hear they are building something into the product itself, though.

      • isles@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’d really prefer it stay as an extension, honestly. The whole of the userbase does not need this and I hate software bloat.

        • random65837@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Given the amount of malicious extensions that have slips through the cracks over the years, I’d rather it baked in. Something like that is very much inline with what Mozilla is all about in the end. Useful features that many would want isn’t bloat.

        • yiliu@informis.land
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          1 year ago

          They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account…

          Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.

      • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It could be something like that (hint: they already deployed an offline neural network in Firefox with which you can translate web pages), and the idea would be to detect AI-generated content.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Elsewhere in this thread someone explained that its just integrating FakeSpot into the browser, which uses basic email spam detection techniques to detect fake reviews by analyzing how the reviewer posts. Is there a set schedule they post reviews by, what else have they reviewed, how new is the account, etc. A 2 day old account with 20 reviews would be an obvious source of fake reviews for example

        • ubermeisters@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Well I hope they’re going to do better at detecting AI content than anyone ever has before because nobody’s done it well at all so far.

          There’s an inherent problem here that AI produces results similar to what it’s trained on and it was not trained on robotic input it was trained on natural human language online.

  • simon574@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    So how much do I have to pay to boost the Fakespot rating of my product listing?

  • fiveoar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    I must admit that I do like the built in page translation, which I guess was made by a similar team using ML and all. Maybe I will like this too? Feels a bit… niche. Maybe it’s a stepping stone to any misinformation at some point?

    Edit This actually might not be coming as a browser feature at all. Mozilla is trying to increase the size of their Mozilla.ai team, so perhaps it’s really looking for people with AI knowledge with web tech and a track record of using it for a ethical purpose. This team would be well placed to build pretty much any AI based tool for the firefox ecosystem.

  • yiliu@informis.land
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    1 year ago

    Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It’s manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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      Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.

      Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        That was my understanding of why Amazon Basics was started, cheap not garbage to set a floor for prices and try to stop the race to the bottom

    • Daisyifyoudo@lemmy.world
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      It won’t. It’s clickbait. It’s dumb.

      Edit- tHeY’rE iN TrOuBle isn’t clickbait? Fuck off. This might dip into their profits, slightly, but Amazon is hardly in trouble. FFS.

  • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m curious to see what Mozilla will do with the shopping assistant portion. Lots of browser extensions, and potentially even some of the Mozilla sponsors offer these types of features, and if Mozilla just stamps them out all at once by integrating that feature, it might lose them some financial support.

    On the other hand, I do hope they don’t start amassing huge amounts of training data from their uses. It would be a real bummer to not have a decent browser option anymore.

    • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve already been using the fakespot extension for a few years, and honestly, it feels pretty useless. I’ve seen it give A and B scores for products that I know have fake reviews. And on Amazon or Walmart and similar sites, we already know that the reviews are bullshit, so what difference does it really make for it to tell me that? It’s not like I have any better option in most cases.

      • HidingCat@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Eh, Fakespot has been decent enough for me. I think it works best when there are a lot of reviews, it’s not very helpful when it’s like 5-10 reviews on a product.

    • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      LibreWolf will probably have us covered.

      It’s a fork of Firefox without Mozilla telemetry, and defaults set to “privacy on” basically.

      I switched a couple months ago and am perfectly happy with it after well over a decade with Firefox.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Does anyone know the split of Amazon’s mobile app versus mobile web and desktop use? This won’t have an impact on their proprietary app and that’s a shame.

  • spiderkle@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    firefox hitting homeruns on user-friendliness with actually useful features that protect you online, while all other browser just wanna put more ads in front of your face.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I mean, Fakespot already does the same thing. They rate the product based on the quality of reviews (whether or not they’re fake).

      • ptrck@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah sorry, I wasn’t aware the AI wars already spread into marketing-land

        • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          It’s not even just AI. It’s also real people being paid to leave fake reviews.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            Plenty of fake reviews are AI written now too. For a while you could go on any product page and Ctrl+F for “as a large language model” and spot several copy/pasted reviews with no proofreading that out themselves

  • crossfadedragon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If there’s anything I’d want built in more than anything it would be vertical tabs like what the existing sideberry extension provides. I also use Vivaldi which has it native, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

    Edit: and tab manager plus. Same functionality and interface but native.

    The existing extensions are fine, but if they are wanting to add things already provided by a third party, those two are my must haves for a modern browsing experience.

      • Mossheart@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Cause after I have 60 tabs open I can still tell what they are cause I can read the title, not just see the fav icon.

        Praise Vivaldi

      • Vii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        easier to scroll and read and works good in wider monitors plus tabs don’t get so small you can’t read the title anymore cause its just a fixed space

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        For people who always right click and select “open in new tab” like myself vertical tabs make my 10s or hundreds of tabs manageable

      • crossfadedragon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        These two pretty much explained my reasons for switching to vertical. It did take a day or so to become accustomed to it, but now it feels pretty natural.

        Vertical tabs to me are perfect next step in browser gui, just like when tabs became a thing to begin with.

    • timicin@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Vivaldi browser is known to collect and sell your data on your usage like everything else except Firefox and chromium (not chrome); in case you didn’t already know

      • crossfadedragon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I disagree wholeheartedly.

        https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/62387/data-collection?lang=en-US&page=1

        A web search shows others showing concerns on various sites, and dev/staff responses.

        I’d be more concerned about brave, your own isp, tiktok. Then the whole deal with backdoors in Intel chips and running minix. Don’t remember if amd has the same deal.

        Vivaldi is fine. From what I’ve seen they mainly check out things like what os I am running, things of that nature. I can live with that. Steam from valve knows my hardware too. Heck the oil shop knows my vin, mileage, make, and model, as far as my car goes. I can live with that as well.

        The only knock against Vivaldi is it being closed source.

    • Matt@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      In this case, I would check out the Floorp browser. It is a Firefox fork that plans to be more like Vivaldi and have lots of features, including vertical tabs.