How do you know they don't, and have via whatever mechanism decided that they make more money if they choose not to?

They might have their own issues, but feels more authentic.

I've bought a ton of stuff on Ebay, but only ever sold a laptop when I wasn't getting any bites on Craigslist. It was a limited-edition Dell laptop, so the buyer was really enthusiastic about it and you could tell he was a normal person and not a scammer.

Fortunately I live in a big city now and have never had issues selling in person via CL/Kijiji.

Amazon could easily do at least as good a job as fakespot, and then followup with consequences for review fraud. They could also implement various policies and use the huge amount of data they have available to go well beyond that level and make some headway against the problem. But they haven't done so. Because they can't be bothered. Because people being suckered into buying shitty products hasn't hurt their bottom line yet. They are complicit.

Have we mentioned we offer a Premium Seller Protection service that will ensure nothing... untoward happens to your listings?"

These were electronics, and knockoff airpods to boot. But if I 100% need the real thing, I buy else where. For example I just purchased several bottles of Vitamin D for my infant. I'm not trusting Amazon even though Amazon would have shipped faster.

Last year there was a posting on hackernews how this person lost his Amazon account as it got flagged on its first review with a long history of purchases.

Maybe that's bad for business if they did. People see a < 5 star review and may not purchase it, even if it is a lie.

Luckily, they don't appear to be of any value anyway.

Due to this inversion, it is practically intractable for Amazon to detect fake reviews in a fully automated way. They must, at some point, be human moderated.

https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html

Some years ago, there were some studies trying to estimate the percentage of fake reviews. It came out to 2% to 6%. I'm sure things have increased since then, it does look quite bad given all the anecdotes I have come across.

But unless Amazon has thrown away the bulk of the 140 million or so reviews they have between 1995-2014, I doubt there really are more fake reviews than real ones now, in total.

It would be interesting to do a follow up study to estimate the percentage, given all the blatant issues (such as reviews for other products, etc) Amazon is obviously ignoring. Given what I know, it shouldn't be that hard to process the obviously suspect things but the important question is always: how much profit is there for Amazon to do all that work, given it probably won't increase sales/revenue that much? It is not in Bezos' interest.

The easiest thing would be to block off all of China's IP addresses....

Amazon already has the number of helpful vs unhelpful votes for each review.

They could start with that voting data, and then use metadata (geoip, account usage/posting timing, client fingerprinting) to create quality metrics for each user. They could even have separate trustworthiness ratings per product category (a good book reviewer might not be so good at rating appliances). From there, they'd have a rough idea of which reviews are real and fake, and they could start training a NN on the text.

Figuring out when sellers are complicit, and when it's competitor sabotage, is more difficult, but Amazon has a ton of data about sellers and reviewers and buyers and the social/commercial graph connecting them. Amazon doesn't appear to be working on solving simpler problems, such as incorrect product/book comingling. Therefore, I have trouble giving them the benefit of the doubt that they're working on hard problems like addressing fraudulent ratings/sellers.

As for NNs, .... an ensemble of classifiers would be best (but of course I'd say that).

It's a sign amazon is not playing in good faith.

Source?

Then they would stagger the days. The issue is that human adversaries are formidable and you start approaching generalized AI to defeat them.

This is, of course, bullshit. Human moderators could defeat them, Amazon is just not willing to hire them. A seller reputation (including bans) could defeat them, Amazon is just not willing to lose the cheap knockoff stores. A listing fee would discourage a lot of the shadier stores, Amazon is just not willing to lose them.

It's not that it's an insurmountable problem, it's an insurmountable problem if you combine it with boundless greed.

We had the same problem a century ago. (Cf. the origins of the term 'snake oil salesman'). We solved the problem, through regulation. It's time we solve it again, through regulation.

I can pretty much guarantee that making Amazon liable for damage from fake reviews will solve the issue. It won't happen in the US - regulation is up for sale here - but it will happen in the EU. It might just be enough to drag Amazon into sanity, kicking and screaming.

1) open a store for online goods 2) take reviews seriously 3) profit!

You had me up until here. The last entity I would look to to solve this first-world problem is the clumsy, over-bloated arm of government.

We're heading that direction again. Our current flavor of capitalism strongly favors externalizing of all costs, and short of enforced liability for products violating standards will always opt for violating whatever low standards bar you set.

(I'd also like to point out that the part of the government that is truly over-bloated is the one that the "lean government" people oddly never want to gut, the military)

Those would be two things you could easily start with, and Amazon knows it.

Allow users to report bait and switch listings and ban repeat offenders.

Require a $1-5K USD deposit to sell on Amazon with a clear fine structure.

I think it could be a sliding scale deposit $100 to list a product, and then scale up based on amount of inventory, customer reviews, etc.

If it's a $100 initial deposit that slides up to $1,000 based on volume, that seems pretty reasonable even for something small starting out.

There are also other selling options when starting out... not everyone has to jump onto Amazon.

I was on ebay, jet.com, walmart, staples, newegg, etc. Anywhere there was a third party marketplace system I was on there.

All of the non amazon marketplaces I sold on combined were a rounding error on my Amazon sales.

However, if we're going to have deposits, there need to be absolutely clear rules on when they are forfeited, with a real, transparent dispute procedure.

Further if you spend a week selling counterfeits and as it turns out that you make 800 usd in scam sales. The 2% towards deposits might only be $16 + $200 deposit but if the seller hasn't been paid out yet its trivial to claim the entire $800 in sales as the forfeited deposit.

The seller instead of profiting $400-$600 is now out $200-$400 in inventory and $216 in deposit with nothing to show for it.

The deposit needn't be ruinous. Just enough to make being a bad actor not worth doing.

  $5k is a lot of money

  Per seller stickers

This is a beginner programming exercise. They have no excuse for not implementing basic safeguards while they spend billions on AI research.

If Amazon receives product with vendor stickers already attached, they get rejected permanently.

I find the latter hard to believe. We're not talking about a mom-and-pop shop here. This is Amazon, they employ many thousands of very smart people that could no doubt build solutions that are better than the status quo.

Are they ever!

Imagine if Amazon had a decent algo that would flag 100% of bad reviews and penalize the seller.

All of a sudden, competitors would be flooding EACH OTHER'S products with fake 5 star reviews to try and put them out of business.

Humans are very crafty when you give them a system of rules. Each twist of the rules creates new opportunities for unintended consequences.

PS: I do not think this is an excuse to give up trying

Obviously Jeff is well aware, and could do a lot more about it, but doesn't, ergo he is complicit.

Fake Reviews are 100% supported by Amazon and Bezos.

It's basically full on fraud, right out in the open.