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Re:Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online by jiggawatts on Monday February 15, 2021 @10:28PM (#26150582)
This is a bit like arguing that Medicare for all is impossible in the United States because it is such a big country.

This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews.

You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect.

Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.

The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.

Re:Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online by cmeacham98 on Monday February 15, 2021 @10:41PM (#26150670)
You've fallen into a common statistical trap. If we assume the volume of auto-generated spam is significantly (several orders of magnitude) higher than the volume of legitimate reviews (which seems to be the case, and would make sense), having a 99.999% success rate doesn't mean that users will observe 99.999% legitimate reviews.
Re:Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online by jiggawatts on Monday February 15, 2021 @10:51PM (#26150724)
Oh, I get that, I just didn't want to turn my comment into War & Peace.
Re:Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online by throwaway_1301 on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:38PM (#26150993)
The equivalent of "medicare for all is impossible" would be that an approach saying "anti spam is impossible so we wont do anything". That is not the case. While I do not know about amazon reviews I would bet its a fairly likely case that they do have teams trying to fight this spam.

The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.

>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.

See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.