1. The number of people who read reviews are a small, small, fraction of total buyers. Most people look at review count and the star rating (not the number, the image).
But more importantly,
2. Ranking in search results is the #1 factor in driving sales. Everything else is a distant #3. Search engines will reduce rankings of products with negative reviews.
(This my anecdotal experience after 2+ years of being an Amazon 3P seller)
As those machines look for signals of "authenticity," review factories learn to manufacture reviews that fake those signals. If adding a small mix of two-star reviews helps with search rankings, the review factories will start doing it in a heartbeat.
describing tradeoffs that would seem reasonable to most people
(Transcript...)
Cueball: Spammers are breaking traditional Captchas with AI, so I've built a new system. It asks users to rate a slate of comments as "Constructive" or "Not constructive."
Cueball: Then it has them reply with comments of their own, which are later rated by other users.
Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?
Cueball: Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.
(from https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/810:_Constructive)
Unfortunately, the endgame for bot spam indistinguishable from humans isn't some benign silicon intelligence, but an epistemic war for attention, spending, manipulation, and/or fraud, benefitting deep pockets and highly motivated parties.
It ends poorly.
That's no foolproof solution, but of course, it increases the cost of fake reviews.
Also, language is not taken into account. It's probably more expensive to buy fake reviews in, say, Norwegian, rather than in the standard English, so non-English speaking countries have an advantage.
And at least for German I can say that fake reviews are probably not more expensive...they seem to just have lower quality and range between barely understandable auto-translation to almost passable if it weren't written like an advertisement.
Whenever I buy anything on Amazon I look at the negative reviews and most of them are people saying they straight up got the wrong product or whatever they got came broken/scratched up right out of the box. I see these complaints often enough that I assume people aren't just lying outright, but I personally have never had any of this happen to me despite all of the junk I've bought on Amazon. It's made the negative reviews almost as worthless as the positive reviews that are possibly just paid off.
Like another person said, the 2-3 star people are often what I find most helpful. I find they tend to be people who are honest but just way pickier than the average buyer, so the stuff they complain about usually doesn't matter to me, but its still informative.
I think this is a symptom of co-mingling inventories. You can 'buy it from Amazon' or buy it from 'Joe's super legit online shop' for $0.30 less. I suspect many reviews of wrong or broken products are coming from some kind of drop-shipping operation and the buyers aren't aware they're buying from a 3rd party seller.
There's a hashtag dedicated to this complaint (#BOREDerlands) that goes back some years, and it appeared in a yachtzee review.
People usually don't get all up in arms like that if a random Bluetooth speaker they bought doesn't sync as well with their Android TV as it does with their iPhone.
I do the same thing for movies, restaurants and video games.
I try to be careful here as well. I feel a lot of the negative reviews are paid for by competitors. Of course they tend to be easy to filter out because they're low effort reviews.
https://medium.com/imperium42-game-studio/online-indie-games...
reddit thread on the article:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/dad48z/online_indi...
Like, you have a garden where you don't plant any flowers but are pissed at having to deal with the weeds.
Need more reviews? Ask! Inform! Let your fans know!
Should I want to game the system. I would definitely post negative reviews on my competitor's products. Safety-related issues, like some component catching fire would be ideal but even a seemingly well thought out disappointed review could be effective. With that in mind, I am also suspicious of negative reviews.
I don't know if that happens in real life. It's risky, and attacking all your competitors is a lot more work than paying for glowing reviews for your own products, but it is not like discrediting your competitors is a new thing.
I don't expect developers to test every combination of hardware in a given market. That's silly. I do think it helps buyers understand the risk in buying ported titles though.
The only exceptions are cases where customers are faced with a wide range of vendors, but only tiny, well-delineated subsets are in actual competition. Restaurants serving travelers in a small town would be an example.