- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
You must log in or register to comment.
It is very nice to see Mozilla doing quite useful/helpful projects from time to time.
removed by mod
The article is about a feature they’ve brought to their Firefox
Always sort by 1 star. And if the comments share similar issues. Do not buy.
No… 2 to 4 star reviews are more realistic. 5 star reviews are either fake or they got lucky and nothing bad happened. 1 star reviews usually are from people that were PISSED OFF while 2 to 4 star reviews are generally from people with more nuanced opinions than “this product cured my cancer” or “this product set fire to my cat and stole my significant other”
Good. But remember when Firefox was supposed to be a lean alternative to other browsers? I remember.
I do not, please inform me, since as far as I know Firefox was always trying to be featurefull browser.
Maybe they mean lean compared to internet explorer toolbars? But yeah, it’s never been minimal. And I doubt this would really add that much bloat memory-wise while running.
please inform me
Mozilla Application Suite contained an email client and a HTML editor, among other things. Firefox was supposed to “just a browser”, so to speak:
Firefox was created in 2002 under the code name “Phoenix” by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
According to the downvotes, hardly anyone remembers, even Mozilla is falling for feature creep again.
It was a fork off the Netscape Navigator which included a news reader, an email client, a browser and a kitchen sink, from what I remember. They took the browser part out and created Firefox, but it was called something else at first. Firebird maybe? Can’t recall.
The dedicated websites to check amazon reviews like fakespot.com have been almost completely beaten. What is Firefox going to do differently?
Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved
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.
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.
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.
I’d really prefer it stay as an extension, honestly. The whole of the userbase does not need this and I hate software bloat.
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.
Might be easier to just disable reviews on Amazon if you’re trying to block fake reviews lol.
I bought an 4.7 rated amplifier on Amazon that broke the first day. Looking at the reviews closer, I noticed they were 100% paid reviewers.
When I tried to leave a negative review, Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product. This product is still out their with a high rating and no way for actual purchasers like me to warn other customers.
Do you mean Vine? I can tell you a few things about that.
Yep vines, never paid attention to them until this happened.
Are they all fake or something?
Customers who were sent free products “to honesty review”
I’ve gotten into the habit of never buying anything from Amazon before first running it through a review analyzer. I used to use reviewmeta, but that stopped being maintained, so I had to switch over to fakespot.
it increases the hassle and amount of time to make a decision, but I’ve run into too many situations like yours. And it’s enlightening how many products get fail or bad ratings after being analyzed. I’ve just started ignoring a lot of things with more than 10k-ish reviews. even if I know the product is good despite the manipulation, I don’t want to encourage it further with a purchase
How do these analyzers determine if a review is fake?
It’s some ML/AI thing that analyzes the review content.
I honestly have no idea how accurate it is either, but I guess if it gives a strong ranking back you’d probably be best to take that into consideration.
to add to this, it uses that to check for patterns it already knows in the reviews themselves, and also goes into each account that submitted a review and checks their account history as well for recognized patterns.
there’s lots of stuff it picks up on, like one small example being if it spots a group of accounts that all reviewed only the same items around the same times, using similar sentence structures, though that’s a really obvious one
I’ve gotten into the habit of never buying anything from Amazon
FTFY. I don’t even have an account there.
I only use it for 2 dollar Amazon prime video + gaming sub that I got when Apple App Store glitched.
That’s appalling customer service.
Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product
Can you elaborate? I’ve never experienced this and would like to understand how they do it.
I’ve had this multiple times.
Tried to leave a big detailed helpful negative review and it gets flagged for being suspicious, with no copy of the review attached so I have to write it all again. And then it gets removed again.
I just looked in my emails. The exact phrasing was “We have reviewed our decisions and concluded that the product you received is authentic. As a result, we removed your review specific to this product. This ensures other customers see reviews that reflect the current shopping experience.”
Most recently it happened with a body trimmer, where I never questioned the inauthenticity, and then a zojirushi travel mug that I genuinely believe was a fake, and attached a lot of evidence.
Amazing. Thanks for the description.
Give it 2 stars instead of 1.
And never read the 5-star reviews.
They’ve blocked my review on a shower chair that was absolutely not rated for what they said. I nearly fell on my butt and my skinnier partner said it was too wobbly. They’ve blocked the negative review 5 times saying I questioned the authenticity of the product and they have confirmed it. I knew it was Medline brand. I’ve had to file a FTC complaint which I expect to be worthless.
So how much do I have to pay to boost the Fakespot rating of my product listing?
And so it begins, the marketing world has got its claws in AI.
I mean, Fakespot already does the same thing. They rate the product based on the quality of reviews (whether or not they’re fake).
Yeah sorry, I wasn’t aware the AI wars already spread into marketing-land
It’s not even just AI. It’s also real people being paid to leave fake reviews.
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
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.
There is also the question section.
“How big is the item itself”
Some idiot: I don’t know. Bought it as a gift
deleted by creator
The unfortunate thing is that the weak-minded people most likely to succumb to that pressure are also the least competent to give good answers.
No. They get an email asking “Can you answer this?” Not a product survey.
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…
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t that what Which? Magazine does?
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?
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???
Stiftung Warentest is such a thing in Germany.
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.
Yeah I think it’s pretty easy to work around fake reviews. Seems like a skill issue tbh.
Amazon’s not “in trouble” because they’re not fake reviews. They’re real reviews left by purchasers, which get bribed to leave them in most cases.
So it’s a real review when someone receives cash to say good things about the product, gotcha.
Stay in context, genius, you know exactly what I mean. Not bot or algorithm can do anything about a review, left by a real customer, with a real acct and purchase history, so yes, it’s “real”. Not being truthful is another thing.
Yeah basically if you want free stuff, then you’re incentivized to leave good reviews so that they are more likely to send you free stuff. Plus, there’s a cognitive bias where you didn’t pay for it so even if you would have been critical you’re more likely to say something positive.
That makes me want to use firefox less.
I don’t need a nanny-control to tell me what’s fake and what’s real.
This has the same energy as someone who says they want to drive a car less because it has seatbelts installed.
Like fine - its a useful tool that might prevent you being scammed which just displays information you can easily ignore- better run away.
Sifting through reviews to find real criticism is tedious. I never asked for this feature expecting it to become a reality, but I won’t turn my nose at time saved at 0 expense. As long as it isn’t used for marketing or fingerprinting, what’s the issue? Note: I might be missing your sarcasm, I’m tired.
Then you can ignore/turn it off? It’s also a function to protect users from malicious online behavior, dunno how that could be interpreted as a nanny, unless you also insist browsers shouldn’t warn you when accessing known malware links or similar. If you really insist on having the absolute freedom to not be advised about it when you’re being scammed then go off I guess.
This will work for 15 microseconds before people start deploying it as an adversarial training aid.
Guess it’ll have to be a live service that is constantly running and updating what a wonderful world
Came here to say this.
I’ve been using fakespot for a few months now and it seems hit or miss a lot of times. I’m hoping that Mozilla has been making changes to improve the implementation of how it checks reviews.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
