I recently received an offer to interview for a job that offered a lot of money for little work. Turns out you start out making a little money for the work but it’s the work that bothers me!!! The job is reviewing a list of items purchased online that used one of the companies that allow you to split you payments. They hire people to give 5 star reviews to every purchase that uses their platform. I didn’t take the job because that is dishonest. I have no idea if any on those items are any good or not but now I know that all those “verified reviews “ are fake!!!
yeah it sucks but it’s real tons of fake 5 stars out there now u gotta read the bad reviews too n look for patterns if every review sounds the same, prob fake
online reviews used to help us avoid scams. Now they are the scam
Online reviews have been gamed for years. It's to the point that they are nearly worthless anymore.
I'm shocked they would bother hiring humans to write fake reviews at this point. But yes, I think we're all mostly aware that most reviews are fake these days. It's unfortunate.
Reading reviews is like reading tea leaves now.
I find the best information in the negative reviews that explain the product and how it didn't work for them but it's a feature I was looking for.
Example, I have one large dog and one small dog. So I needed a big doggy door the tiny dog could still get through. The negative review that sold me on my current doggy door complained about how weak the magnet was to hold the door shut. Well, that's exactly what I was looking for.
Got the product, the magnet was strong enough to do its job while weak enough the tiny dog could get through it with its reduced physical and mental strength.
Same thing. I wanted to get a battery bank with solar panels. I know solar panels that size won't provide much power but I was having a hard time finding out how much power they provided and how long it would take to charge the brick with it.
Enter the 2-star: "It took 4 days to fully charge off the panels!"
Perfect! About what I was expecting. Bought.
I was mostly getting it because I wanted a big ol' power bank. The solar panels are because I live in an area where a storm could potentially knock out the power for an extended period of time, so the panels would give me a fairly guaranteed "turn on phone and check in" amount of power. Same for backpacking.
I had a horrible experience at a car dealer, long story short: they locked me in the dealership and went home for the night while I was in the waiting room.
I left a review on Facebook and they just removed it the next day. What's the point of reviews if bad ones are just deleted?
Should have included a photo of you kicking out the window so you could escape. That would have been a lot harder to cover up.
LOL, luckily a rental car guy showed up to pick up a car and he had keys and got me out of there.
You coulda ended up like that guy who got locked in an elevator and sued.
It's really skewed things. At this point, if the amount of bad reviews (which I assume to be people who at least actually used the product) is enough to drop it below a 4 stars, I'm very dubious of the product.
On Amazon, I’ve had fairly good luck sorting by Recent and filtering for Verified Purchases Only, then I look at the percentages and usually only read the 4 or possibly 3 star reviews.
Click on the reviewer and try to see their other reviews, the bots have that feature turned off. You can tell very quickly if someone is a bot on Amazon.
Trick is to ignore the positive reviews and look at the negative ones- if all the complaints are different, it’s probably fine, but if everybody has the same complaint you know it’s a shoddy product.
The world should take honesty and honor more seriously
I Agree
I once gave a negative review of a product with a 4 star rating, Amazon shoved into a black hole because I gave it a 1 star rating with the review, “This product does not work within the parameters of its design and functionality description”
I've always assumed the paid shilling is actually balanced out by the one star reviews of mega-Karens, you know, the kind who think a hotel room is abjectly ruined by a stain on the carpet, or who want to rant about how outraged they are that their server at the restaurant had a nose ring. Pissed off entitled people are ten times more likely to post a negative review than people who enjoyed their experience are likely to post a positive review.
But I also feel like I can tell when it's paid shilling or bots most of the time anyway.
Worked for someone who paid for loads of 5 star reviews, product was that bad it managed to bring the average rating up to 1.9 for a week. It was so obvious as well, a burst of 5 star reviews over a couple of days.
You can figure out patterns to decipher if they’re fake or not
it's most likely only for their own products. 2 years ago i bought some Aukey keyboards. one of them was great the other was total trash and i got major grief from their customer service so i left a shit review on amazon.
a few days later i get an email from them saying if i change my one star review they will give me a $25 dollar amazon gift card. well i told them no. so later i get all these sob story emails how if the person cant get me to change my review the will get fired and offered me a $50 gift card this went on for weeks all the way up to $150. told them to shove it. then later i find out that all Aukey products were removed and they are suspended from doing business on Amazon. i also later got an email from amazon asking if i had been solicited by any vendor to change my Reviews. so i told them i actually have been asked by several to change my reviews. i found that they do this to get around using bot reviews apparently those are easy to filter out.
go ahead and search for anything from Aukey on Amazon. you wont get one hit.
so yeah there are alot of paid for reviews. i can't be the only one.
I've had this happen before too. Its one of many reasons why I don't use Amazon anymore. That plus their horrid labor practices.
I can't be the only one who finds it suspicious that Amazon is filled with highly promoted products of really strange sounding brand names like Aukey and similar nonsense. These ghost companies just pop up and pump out shitty products, get suspended from the platforms, and then rebrand as something else.
I ditched the flawless fives, skim the messy 3-star takes, cross-check Reddit or YouTube, pattern spotting beats blind trust every time.
You don’t
I wonder what the good/bad ratio is for determining how good a product actually is. I check out the bad ones and see how recent they are first.
This has been a thing for a long time.
Yes, this is why I don't read the "good reviews," I look at the really detailed bad reviews to see what is wrong with the product or service, but only look at the recent reviews since they seller might have fix the issue already. As a general rule, if they're just raving about the product without stating the pros and cons then they're probably getting paid to do it.
There are many ways to use reviews.
For example, before buying a product online, look at all the 1-star reviews. If you see a complaint that comes up more than once, ask yourself if that would be a major issue for you.
And of course you similarly want to look at the good reviews. But understand that these fake review sites are all trying to bump up the average number of stars, so they post 5-star reviews, as in your almost-job. Therefore, look at the 4-star reviews.
What about the average number of stars? Well, that was always meaningless. Ignore it.
Again? Fake reviews have been a thing forever.
If I give this comment a five star review, will you pay me? 🤣
Hahahahaha Excellent response
Can't trust reviews anymore
You don't. I don't mean that in a cheeky way, I mean it is literally nonsensical to extend trust to anonymous testimonials. If you're too lazy to learn what to look for, expect to get tricked by people who will do the thinking for you.
What? I'll take that job. Got a link?
This is actually probably a "task" scam (in addition to creating fake reviews). After you've earned a certain amount of money, they'll say you need to deposit money to take out the money you've earned or pay a fee to earn higher-value tasks: https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/11/task-scams-create-illusion-making-money
Yes, you are correct- that is exactly what it is.