Re:Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach
by ej12n on Friday May 07, 2021 @01:05PM
(#27078175)
>So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking over the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a gatekeeper between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"
This is a fair concern, but I'd say that if you're building something right now, I think is better to worry more about getting your startup in a position to take over the world first and then deal with those concerns. Worrying about these big problems when you're small I would say is a bit of premature optimization.
Re:Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach
by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday May 07, 2021 @01:34PM
(#27078528)
If we had known in 94 that customer reviews would eventually get gamed in this way, should we ever have added the feature? Was 15 or 20 (?) years of a "working" review system enough to make it worthwhile, and now it needs revisiting, or should we just have said "no" right at the start?
Re:Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach
by Nasrudith on Friday May 07, 2021 @05:18PM
(#27080950)
No review system would be even worse as you cannot even tell if people are getting crap. There is already ceasesless whining about false positives being an abuse of power and in the same breath complaining about not doing enough.
The "do nothing ever without the foresight of a precog or else you are EVIL!" school of ethics never made any sense. It is just an excuse to be outraged and pin all of the world's problems on the tall poppy.
I think if you had told us then that this sort of thing would eventually happen, we would not have believed you. This goes to show, perhaps, that imagining the significance of something when you're first building it is almost impossible. The notion that worldwide manufacturers and distributors would consider it so important to have "strong" amazon reviews that they would engage in this kind of behavior just would not have crossed our minds back when amazon itself had no significance.
So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking over the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a gatekeeper between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"