Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real? I think any random review you pull up is more likely than not to be fake. Of course, we can't know for sure, but Amazon has simply lost my trust.
I no longer believe any of the reviews on Amazon are real, and Amazon will have to prove to me they are before I ever trust a review on that site.
That's harder to game, because while a seller certainly could post a negative review citing some irrelevant flaw (and I have seen that), and hope that triggers buyers who don't care, they won't stop other people (like me) from posting negative reviews too, and what I'm looking for is products with a reasonable number of negative reviews where there is an absence of reviews mentioning things I care about.
I also know first hand from selling a novel on Amazon that you can perfectly well gain honest reviews in ways allowed by Amazon, and I also leave a reasonable number of reviews on Amazon myself, so I have every reason to expect at least a portion of the reviews to be honest.
Overall I've managed to avoid buying anything that appears to have been fake from Amazon, despite having bought a couple of thousand products at Amazon over the years (based on the order page stats, and taking off a few hundred as an estimate of digital only products)
It probably sucks to be an honest seller affected by it, but I've yet to find a situation where I have unable to find a product I'm happy with, so clearly they're not doing this often enough to affect me much.
Because they contain facts which anchor them to reality and act as “proof of work” in some way.
I don’t care for a review which says “this camera takes amazing pictures” that could apply to any camera and is subjective, but one which says “the cover on the sd card slot is sharp and cut my finger twice” is likely someone who has used that specific camera, and has a specific comment, and while it could be faked - why would it be? Like the difference between house adverts that say “cozy kitchen” vs “marble countertops”, didn’t Freakonomics find that specifics increase value more than generalities because people know what a marble countertop is but a cozy kitchen is filler when there’s nothing good to say.
With fake positive reviews, the seller has an incentive to leave them up, and Amazon has no particular incentive to remove them -- you, a random user, has to somehow convince Amazon to take them down.
With fake negative reviews, the seller has an incentive to get them taken down, and has the data to prove that the reviewer didn't actually buy the item. (Actually buying all your competitor's items to leave fake negative reviews about them would dramatically increase the cost of the tactic.)
End result: ignore positive reviews because they're easily faked, check negative reviews because they're probably accurate.
Especially since, you know, GTP-3 is a thing, and its effects are going to be felt pretty soon.
Worse, that way you would end up avoiding the "fair players" who don't leave fake negative reviews with the competition.
And in terms of trying to game out the fake reviews, I've found relying on the 2 to 3 star reviews are the best. The liars who are trying to trash the product tend towards 1 star. The liars who are trying to sell the product almost always go for 5 stars. 2 to 3 stars, sometimes 4, are usually the people who actually bought it.
Fake reviews aren’t all that cheap, in the scheme of things. Leaving bad reviews on the competition doesn’t have anywhere near the immediate impact on your bottom line as fake good reviews on your own products. I also haven’t seen reports of people being paid for bad reviews, when confessions of people being paid to write good reviews are all over the place.
In case a popular product is simply handled by Amazon or other sellers, they aren't responsible for the quality itself. Bad review of a keyboard on one site is as valid as on another.
Well written reviews are a common good, and there is good reason to believe that leaving reviews encourages others to do the same, and that helps me, so I do it.
Yes, I know there'll be fake reviews, but most of the time they are pretty easy to spot.
Not least because the reviews that swing things for me -- both towards buying and away from it -- are the negative reviews.
Most of the obvious fake ones are good reviews, but I'm usually more concerned about what the worst thing someone has to say about a product. If someone posts about a printer that it doesn't work with Linux, I won't buy it (at least not without double-checking and verifying that said reviewers info is outdated) no matter how many positive reviews there are. Meanwhile, if I can't find any negative reviews complaining about things I care about it will often convince me to buy.
That is a lot harder to game than getting a bunch of people to write that they love the product.