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A comment on Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products. Parent comment

Re:Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discount... by hga on Monday October 03, 2016 @08:00PM (#12632369)
The flip side is that I'd started using these as a metric of products to avoid; if a retailer is playing this game, while they might be legit like flavor8 claims in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631810 it's just safer to avoid if at all possible.

Although in general spending a bit of time looking at the reviews, 1 start, recent ones, etc., with a finely honed for decades BS detector is what allows me to continue buying a lot of stuff from them.

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Re:Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discount... by flavor8 on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @06:33AM (#12634500)
I can't _stand_ the reviewkick sourced reviews, and there is a substantive difference between those and those from "product niche experts". The person who subscribes to reviewkick to "get free stuff" is building a profile to increase their value, so that they can get more expensive free stuff which they can in turn sell on ebay (or, I guess, hoard.) The reviewer who actually _uses_ the product, on the other hand...

Personally, given the choice between products I'll definitely avoid those with obvious fake reviews. I bet it's common behavior to do so among those who actually take the time to consult reviews, and I bet Amazon saw the writing on the wall via their analytics.

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