208 Comments
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Baconzgood's avatar

Shit...my bot saying wonkette is "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful web site I've ever known in my life." Can no longer be posted ad nauseam? That sucks for Rebecca.

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haycorn's avatar

I'm glad this won't be retroactive, because the reviews for fish antibiotics must be maintained as a document of the failure of the American heathcare system.

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Zyxomma's avatar

Ta, Dok. Nice Times.

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NH is for 🦡🍄🐍's avatar

Does this apply to existing reviews? I.e. the hundreds of 5-stars for my local shithole pizza joint? Will those be taken down? Or does it only apply to reviews going forward?

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Opalescent Riddles's avatar

Only going forward. From the article: "we were relieved to see that the rule applies to reviews going forward, so Amazon won’t have to take down the epic funny reviews of the “Three Wolf Moon” T-shirt..."

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NH is for 🦡🍄🐍's avatar

I saw that but didn’t really parse it, since keeping all the old fake reviews isn’t really a good thing. Oh /S you do defeat me…

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CounterSniper's avatar

Does anyone know if this new FTC rule covers what I call the bait & switch product reviews?

Essentially sellers list an item that is popular and they sell it for awhile garnering 4.5 stars. Now that they have a 4.5 star listing they switch the product to something problematic and untested by consumers.

The unwitting public sees this new gizmo with lots of 4 and 5 star ratings but its all deception.

The first time I made the connection was in reading the reviews when searching for an answer to a question I had about a feature of the item. I was looking at an electronic device but lots of the reviews were clearly for art supplies. Another was also for an electronic device but the reviews were for an article of clothing. This has repeated itself over and over.

Another way they do this is to sell the original item and then add a completely unrelated item to the listing and leaving the old item up but out of stock. The effect is the same, the reviews are for the old item not the new more expensive and complicated electronic device.

It’s completely shaken my way of shopping where I used to look for high rated items with lots of reviews. But now the number of reviews and the rating itself aren’t guaranteed to be real which just consumes much more of my time in a process that’s supposed to make thing quicker and easier.

The opposite it true now, online shopping is a time consuming quagmire.

A few ideas of my own ~

• Reviews should only be allowed for verified purchases.

• Multiple different items shouldn't be allowed in a single listing because the reviews aren’t sorted by item.

•Changing a listing to a new product shouldn’t be allowed but if it is allowed the rating should be automatically reset to zero.

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Anzu's avatar

I've been bribed with a $5 gift card to give a five start review to someplace. I think it was an oral surgeon. So that's illegal now, cool cool. Always felt scummy, but who turns down a $5 gift card for 30 seconds of effort?

The vast majority of my reviews are all done of my own free will, whether it was the excellent bike tour shop in Athens, Greece, or the delightful pizza place in Atlanta that loved the photo I took of their pizza so much that it ended up the featured photo on Google reviews and I have over a million view from it, netting me some kind of cool imaginary Local Guide points on Google.

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rawrtigerlily's avatar

Can we just go ahead and give Lina Khan a Nobel Prize or something? This woman is frickin slaughtering the assignment.

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Fred's avatar

I use a user name, but I AM real! I'M REAL, REAL I TELL YA!!!! Please, tell me I am real....

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Killer Pomodoro's avatar

You're here, live. You're not a cat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Cat_Lawyer

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Wondering Woman's avatar

Hope this applies to those “review aggregator” sites that I’m convinced pay people for good reviews.

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Major Is My Spirit Animal's avatar

Well then, I guess that's it then for Yelp.

Thank God.

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Wondering Woman's avatar

Yeah, I heard it’s almost impossible to remove bad reviews, even when an issue has been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction

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SterWonk's avatar

> ... because HAL-9000 may have an opinion on pod bay doors ...

WELL, *ACTUALLY* HAL didn't have an opinion about the pod bay doors; he just refused to open them when asked. What he *did* have an opinion about was the status of the AE-35 antenna control unit, which he falsely claimed was going to fail.

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Phried Ω's avatar

HAL-9000 also had an opinion about the appearance of tandem bicycle riders.

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Notorious J.I.M.'s avatar

"Dave, what is Thai food like?"

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Zyxomma's avatar

Did HAL pronounce it thigh?

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funnyhaha's avatar

That would be so helpful for people who don't know already that the reviews you read are the two-star ones. The two-star reviews have kept me from buying wobbly tables, leaky sealable bags, cheap plastic attachments that break off inside things and can't be retrieved, removed, or replaced, and countless gadgets that don't function as advertised. Five star reviews are always bullshit and one-star reviews are from people who can't read ("this table is only 12" tall," they gripe, when the description of the table is "12" tall").

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Liminal's avatar

I go with the 1 stars. I look at the ratio, any product is going to have 2-5% 1 star, if it gets over 5 then you have to look. A bunch of them are stupid, and a bunch are "Mine arrived damaged!" or "these cups break when I use them to pound nails!" but I get a gist of it's a straight up bad product.

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Jamoche's avatar

Since they aren’t posted online, I suppose this doesn’t apply to the pressure car dealer employees put on you to give them 5 star reviews because “anything less than perfect is bad”.

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bcb's avatar

>Claiming company-controlled review websites are independent: You can’t pretend that a review for a product on a website you own is an independent review.

The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline Hollywood are all owned by the company that also owns Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Law and Order franchise. I'm curious to see how those publications will review future L&O seasons. Given that we're talking about cops, I'm guessing they'll break the rules.

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Cat Cafe's avatar

Excuse me? They'll have a BOSS Editor who tells the reviewers NOT to break the rules, but they'll STILL break the rules, but they'll catch the perp who wrote the bad review, and then the Boss will say they can't charge them with breaking the law, because they're the BEST DAMN COLUMNISTS THEY EVER HAD.

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Wondering Woman's avatar

Until they are “Dick Wolfed” by a rival franchise

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Satanic Pancake's avatar

Thank you, FTC, for providing me a link to submit fraudulent reports.

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bcb's avatar

This is your irregular reminder that "user" reviews on Metacritic do not come from real people, let alone people who actually interacted with the piece of media they are reviewing.

If someone claiming to be a journalist tells you a product was "review bombed" on Metacritic, they actually mean that one person wrote a bot to leave a lot of fake reviews. By contrast, if they tell you a game was "review bombed" on Steam, they mean a lot of real humans who actually bought and played the game in question left negative reviews.

Big publishers want you to believe those two phenomenon are completely equivalent and deserve the same name.

Rotten Tomatoes is even worse. If you're looking at a film that got a theatrical release in the U.S. in July 2019 or later, the "Audience Reviews" come from real people who actually saw it in the cinema. If you are looking at a TV show, or a film released before July 2019, the "audience reviews" are from bots. The Rotten Tomatoes website presents these "audience" scores as if they are directly comparable: i.e., they want you to think the bot-filled "audience reviews" of a movie released in 2017 can be directly compared to the "audience reviews" from real customers in 2020.

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Wondering Woman's avatar

Rotten Tomatoes is genuine proof people will watch and like any crap that’s out there

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