Inside the Business of Online Reviews For Hire 121
Rick Zeman writes "Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service. The New York Times tells of the rise and fall of the founder of one such hired third party service who had has been so successful planting paid fake reviews that he no longer trusts any online review. He should know. Because of him and his kind, it's estimated that one third of online reviews are fake."
this is what died with internet mass popularity (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the 1980's, if you read a review on the internet (usenet at the time, there was no web yet), you could be sure it was from a "real person", and was a real opinion, not a paid shill or something written by a marketer. You could be sure the resulting discussion was being engaged in by real people as well.
That culture has been lost from the entire internet, and it is increasingly hard to sort out what's real from what's not. Some of them are obvious, but the better shills are increasingly sophisticated. This is one of the many prices paid for the eternal september. It was overrun by the marketeers and the ad men, who ruined the commons for the rest of us.
Captcha: throngs
Reviews, forum comments, etc. (Score:4, Interesting)
It has long been known that many companies hire "armies" of reviewers and commentators to promote their product and hide any negative information under a ton of PR releases. Waggener Edstrom and a few others advertise their purpose and MO.
In the beginning, it was easy to pinpoint shills and marketeers; the word astroturf entered the English language after one of the first of such campaigns was identified. Now, they have become smarter; they use several accounts, with some doing "normal" comments and reviews to be seen as reliable and to be able to vote the more strident accounts up. These last accounts are either just spewing the PR garbage directly, and get created and abandoned very quickly, or they create a "personality", almost always biased towards a single company or product, but always somewhat discrete, trying to appear as genuine fans, upbeat about a product. These are harder to identify, as sometimes a blind fan might not be different from one of these shills; but usually blind fans don't get up voted as quickly as these are by the other company accounts.
Slashdot has been resisting these tactics, but they are pervasive, and there is money in this kind of trolling, so it is always a difficult battle...
My heart *bleeds* for him... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mr. Todd Jason Rutherford went into the business of poisoning the well, making the internet a worse and less reliable place, and now he just can't trust online reviews... Poor fellow, a dear innocent lamb in a cruel world.
Seriously, fuck this guy and the horse he rode in on. He poisoned the well, let him drink deeply. The only unfortunate part of his sordid story is that he helped impose the same lowered quality on the rest of us. Ah well, at least his business collapsed, ironically thanks to a bad review...
Bloggers are contacted constantly (Score:4, Interesting)
Bloggers are contacted constantly to write reviews.
I've been blogging since the 1990s. A few times a year, I'll write an article about some software and a few months later someone with a competing product will contact me asking me to review their software. Most of the time, they are pushing an open-core system and I reviewed a 100% F/LOSS package.
There has never been any suggestion that I do more than an honest review, but they have offered to help get the system up and working should I run into any issues.
I've never done any of those _requested_ reviews. It doesn't interest me and I don't blog for profit. I blog as a way to
a) help others
b) help me remember key steps
Based on my online searches, it appears that commercial video codec transcoders are the worst at this. They build hundreds of websites around a single stolen transcoder with slightly different GUIs - usually just to make ffmpeg have a GUI on Windows or OSX. Crazy.
Any of the mpg2avi, mpg2h264, mpgtomp4, ipad/ipod-video-converter and hundreds of similar tools are just like that - stolen code they try to repackage for $19.99 with a GUI. I've never seen a valid review for these online.
BTW, use the FLOSS tool handbrake for these converstions. If you need an output format that handbrake doesn't support, use ffmpeg or avconv directly. Those really are easy-to-use tools.
Crowdsourcing FAIL - crowds can be sourced. (Score:5, Interesting)
The trouble with crowdsourcing is that crowds can be sourced. I've been pointing this out for several years now. My "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" [sitetruth.com] paper covers this. Some review spam is remarkably inept. My favorite, in the paper, is a set of three restaurant reviews that were clearly scraped from reviews of a car wash. Carpet cleaning reviews on Yelp tend to be amusing. The same phrases reappear in many reviews. Many reviews mention a company different than the one being reviewed. We know, of course, that over 80 million Facebook accounts are fake. [cnn.com] Many of those fake accounts are being driven by 'bots posting fake reviews and social stats.
Social spam has been around for years, but went big-time in 2010. In Q4 2010, Google merged Google Places results into main web search. Google Places results could be easily spammed with fake reviews before that, but few people had bothered until those results boosted rankings in web search. Then the spam floodgates opened. Google was so heavily spammed that the mainstream press noticed. Google had to back off a bit on using Places results in web search to get their search quality back up.
The legacy of that debacle is that it became widely known that social spam was a safe, almost respectable SEO activity. Link farms, the previous way to spam Google, are expensive to run, and when Google detects one and blacklists it, an entire server farm suddenly becomes useless. Social spam doesn't put SEO operators at risk. The social networks even host the spam for free!
There's a potential winner in this - Amazon. Amazon knows if you actually paid money for the thing. They have identity data from credit cards. Amazon can still be spammed [amazon.com], but the spammer has to spend money, so the cost per spam is high.
Re:2-4 stars (Score:5, Interesting)
I look for medium length reviews that are 2-4 stars.
You are naive if you think these are not fake. This is a standard fake review strategy: As soon as a product is available put up three reviews: 5, 5 and 4. This gives an average of 4.7, which works better than a perfect 5.0. After a few more days, put up a few more 5s, another 4, and a 2. The 2 says something like this: "This looks like a great product, but it didn't work for me because I needed compatibility with CP/M v0.8 (or some other problem that applies to absolutely nobody). But they refunded my money with no hassle at all, so I would be very happy to buy some of their other products such as (link) or (link)."
Marketers are well aware that people tend to discount perfect reviews, and tend to read the low reviews more carefully. So they adjust their marketing accordingly.