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Re:Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake... by doppio19 on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @04:26PM (#44437713)
For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.
Re:Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake... by rasz on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @06:39PM (#44438602)
Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil
Re:Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake... by doppio19 on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @07:00PM (#44438738)
Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.
Re:Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake... by rasz on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @08:49AM (#44443117)
Indeed. You would need a plugin running on user computers, or maybe even control over User Agent. Insurmountable blocker for Mozilla.
Re:Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake... by i80and on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @06:54PM (#44438706)
DeepSpeech shuttered in 2021. The repo was just made read-only the other day
Re:Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake... by rasz on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @08:46AM (#44443097)
Re:Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake... by ashoeafoot on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @07:21PM (#44438841)
So they wrote a ping pong shader for monetization going with the user or selling out the user.