"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.

I hope it's not enough to drag Amazon into sanity. I hope somebody else comes along and beats the crap out of Amazon by offering what Amazon doesn't - honest reviews and rejection of straight up junk.

And maybe that's the way that Amazon goes down; quality over quantity. Hey, this is HN and we should be able to spot a deficiency in a business plan, right?! Here's how you go about toppling Amazon and building an empire:

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

Let's expand the plans a bit: 1) open a store for online goods 2) take reviews seriously 3) profit, for a while 4) get bought out by amazon or someone else who will then proceed to kill "2" 5) if resisted, be a target of coordinated media smear campaign and/or hacking attempts, each totally not ordered and covertly backed by amazon or another player whose piece of a pie you are eating 6) crack under pressure and just give up

Or in more likely scenario, die away and do a bankcrupt since nobody gives a shit about your crappy market place/online store

Mmm... I was just hoping Amazon's competitors slowly gain an edge over Amazon and that Amazon's reputation is tarnished enough that it greatly impacts business.

> It's time we solve it again, through regulation

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.

If you think this is a first world problem, you might want to look up the history of regulations, and how many people had to die due to shitty products before we finally said "enough is enough".

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)

Per seller stickers on items in inventory so fakes in comingling can be singled out. Bad sellers perma-banned.

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 was with you up until the deposit. What about someone who is just starting their own business? $5k is a lot of money

I think a deposit is in order, just with the amount tuned.

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 other places to start off... also, it doesn't have to be $5K, just cost prohibitive to lose if a knockoff company keeps getting closed out on.

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

Can you name one?

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.

Not for running a normal business it isn't. A deposit would probably get rid of all the dropshippers, who are really just a form of arbitrage; I think that's probably necessary to get rid of the review chaos. People actually manufacturing their own goods ought to be able to find that kind of money.

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.

Keep a percentage of gross to go towards a deposit and don't remit payment immediately on new accounts. Imagine a 1K deposit wherein only $200 was paid up front and the rest was paid in terms of 2% of sales.

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

That's kinda the point of fines, isn't it?

  Per seller stickers

... which themselves would quickly be counterfeited.

Amazon could generate unique per unit tokens for vendors to sticker next to the SKU stickers they already require. Totally traceable to a vendor if there is a problem, and not easy to counterfeit.

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

Amazon applies said vendor stickers when they receive stock from a vendor for inventory.

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

If Google can stop email spam then Amazon, who has a reviewer's identity, credit card number, browsing behaviour, and purchase history should be able to spot fake reviews.

That's what I've been thinking. I get more spam than legitimate email, but over the course of a year or so Thunderbird's Bayesian classifier has gotten to probably 98% accuracy with <.1% false positives.

You're right that there is an arms race between fake reviewers and Amazon, but the conclusion - that because it's a race Amazon shouldn't try, is spurious. Amazon should pursue the race aggressively, and because they can allocate more money and software developers to the contest than any one group of fake reviewers, they should also ultimately win.

I don't think there's an arms race. Is there really evidence Amazon has even thrown any shots across any bows?

You're right. Is Amazon not applying any machine learning to their reviews? Google solved spam email and that seems similar.

Google beat email spam, but has fared much worse with fighting blackhat SEO. Email spam has evolved remarkably little in the face of spam filters, and it may be that they were able to "solve" it simply because there never was all that much money to be made from it in the first place.

The issue the tech community has is that Amazon doesn't even appear to be doing the bare minimum.

Absolutely. And note that in other areas (such as payment fraud) they put in a lot more legwork because the consequences actually hit them directly instead of just their customers.

It's either that, or they are failing really miserably at controlling the flood of bogus/fraudulent review.

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.

> The issue is that human adversaries are formidable

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