Originally published at: Firefox to have built-in "fake review detector" | Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
I’ve always found Fakespot very enlightening and helpful, guess it’s time to try out Firefox again!
6 Likes
Even then, reviews can be fake. Or not. I reviewed a company on Trustpilot and it got flagged as fake (it wasn’t). Trustpilot told me to submit proof that I had done business with that company and I told them to take a hike since I had no vested interest in whether they published my review.
7 Likes
I prefer to use Fakeblock.
2 Likes
As a long time (twenty plus years now) Firefox user, I approve this addition. I actually DO rely on reviews for most minor purchases. For anything large or more expensive, I’ll use a trusted review site like Tom’s Hardware or Consumer Reports, but when all I want to know is if that $14.99 self-healing desk pad for crafting is worth my money, the reviews make a difference to me.
11 Likes
A couple of years ago I bought a rear view camera to mount on my RV. I had some issues with the product and the company provided pretty good support to get everything working. After we got through the debugging they contacted me to make the following offer: You buy a different camera, give it a 5 star rating, and they would reimburse me for the cost of the camera. My review would then show up as from a ‘verified purchaser’ and nobody would be the wiser. I refused and, at that point, pretty much accepted that all reviews were bogus.
5 Likes
to have
@beschizza when?
will I know because it will just start doing it, overlaying some sort of flag over the text, or is this an add-on I will have to select an enable
3 Likes
I’d also like to weed out “bad reviews,” such as those on queer positive books that are clearly being made by people who’ve never read the book, ones where the issue is an end user who doesn’t understand how to use a product, or ones where the criticism is actually of something inherent to the item itself.
Yes, that micro-SD card is indeed (physically) small and if you drop it in your car, there’s a good chance you’ll lose it. No, this is not a flaw in the item itself. Clean out your car once in a while, dumb ass.
3 Likes
I bought a well-reviewed pair of headphones from Amazon that turned out to be junk. In the package was a card from the seller with instructions promising a $10 gift card in exchange for a 5-star review. This pissed me off and I tried to post an honest review that included a picture of the gift card instructions to show what they were up to, but Amazon rejected my review. Then wouldn’t let me post a review even without the picture. And I spent way too much time trying to find a mechanism to report the seller’s unethical behavior to Amazon, only to find that no real mechanism exists. I guess that Amazon benefits (in the short term, anyway) from this kind of behavior. Hard to see how a Firefox add-on can make any kind of significant dent though.
8 Likes
Who knew that the free labor from the masses would turn out to cost us* so much.
*and whenever you say “cost us” you have to also imagine that money that goes into “fixing problems” is going somewhere. Friction, inefficiency, annoyance and disfunction are jerb creators!
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
