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This is so depressing. Fakespot is an amazing app, I never buy anything off of Amazon without using it. Actions like this caused me to trust Amazon significantly less.



I used it for a while until it got me wondering - what, exactly, is their business model? And why do I trust their judgement on how reliable reviews are?

This is not to say that Amazon reviews are generally good, just saying that Fakespot might have an incentive to... tune their reviews of reviews :) so where's the Fakespot of Fakespot?


Considering FS is free and they are hiring, they must have some sort of monetization roadmap. My bet is either they become paid, they do paid whitelisting, or they provide some sort of sales intelligence to sellers. The first option is the best case scenario. In the latter cases, akin to Facebook, the actual customer would be sellers, charged based on the number of active users FS promises.

ReviewMeta, on the other hand, is clearly donation based, and also seems more honest at the moment (e.g., not claiming to be some sort of “trusted advisor”, showing a big warning that it’s adjusted score is only an estimation).


Monetization could be selling training data to big Amazon sellers on sentiment analysis of products. Or they just start whitelisting products, kinda like adblock does the "acceptable ads" we now have acceptable garbageproducts.


There's always the monetization roadmap of acquisition, possibly even by Amazon to shut it down.


Could be similar to AdBlock


Well, they heavily promote their browser extension[1] (at least for me, when I hit their homepage). The addon gets access to your browser tabs and website data. Their privacy policy grants them access to serve you targeted ads based on information you share with the service, so that seems like it would be their monetization strategy.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...


They're excellent for curiosities now. I just bought linen bags with big dollar signs on them as props for a personal project. Amazon made it easy.

So basically any time you need something where the concept of fakes doesn't matter or is removed entirely.

Otherwise Amazon is a hulking pile of scams and garbage


Looks like they aren’t generating any revenue yet. According to crunchbase they received a 5.3m USD series A funding so far, which is gonna keep the company running for quite a while with less than ten employees.

They most likely are trying to get users first, and then look money printing opportunities later.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot/people


I used to use Best Buy to try items out before buying on Amazon.

Now, I shop on Amazon, using most helpful critical reviews only, and buy either local, or direct from manufacturers.

Most times shipping is comparable to Amazon’s “not really two day two day shipping”

Also, Streisand effect in play here for sure. Now I know about FakeSpot. Thanks!


One of Fakespot's indicators is number of reviews removed by Amazon. Amazon is weak on trust for me.


I've posted a similar comment before, but on what basis do you trust fakespot? If they were being paid to promote or even outright manipulate the analysis how would we know? Or how would they be immune to the same review manipulation by sellers that Amazon is prone to? Why do you think we don't need a fakespot for fakespot too?


Fakespot shows reviews it thinks are dubious and you can take a look and decide if it's right. Some are pretty blatant.


Idk is that very useful? There will dubious reviews on any popular product. Isn't the true utility in fakespot that it makes a decision on the credibility of the overall rating of the product for you based on some aggregation of the total reviews? That's what I'm questioning whether or not can be manipulated or tammpered with, in which case we'd be back at the same problem fakespot tries to solve requiring a fakespot for fakespot reviews


Amazon is behaving like a mafia. There is no way they are not able to spot fake reviews and scams in 2021.

They are either highly incompetent or unethical. Or both.


Have you used reviewmeta? If so how does it compare to Fakespot in terms of accuracy?

It was recommeded along with fakespot by some users for identifying fake amazon reviews when it was asked on my problem validation platform[1].

Amazon says,

> According to Amazon, the company already has the necessary tools to identify and stop fake reviews, suggesting that third-party services that claim to do this “are mostly wrong.”

If that was the case, People wouldn't be actively looking for solutions.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/42-identifying-fake-reviews-in-...


> Actions like this caused me to trust Amazon significantly less.

Not Apple also?


Why doesn't it make you trust Apple significantly less? They took it down. They're another profit seeking organization not some natural phenomenon.


Fakespot is literal cancer that steals passwords, location data, purchase history etc etc.

Should never been in the app store to begin with!


Amazon and Apple.




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