- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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This will work for 15 microseconds before people start deploying it as an adversarial training aid.
Came here to say this.
Guess it’ll have to be a live service that is constantly running and updating what a wonderful world
Amazon is in trouble
I don’t see why. Fake reviews don’t benefit Amazon. The review information is a value-add for them, and fake reviews detract from that.
Hell, if it actually is able to reliably detect fake reviews on Amazon – which I doubt, but let’s roll with it – Amazon might buy the company that does the fake review detection to get it so that they can filter it.
firefox hitting homeruns on user-friendliness with actually useful features that protect you online, while all other browser just wanna put more ads in front of your face.
Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with? The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. “Thing arrived and box looked pretty” is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn’t make a difference. Even a review that puts effort into itself, is largely useless when the writer didn’t have multiple competing products at hand to compare. And on top of that you have the issue that products will frequently change under the hood, so even if the product was good a year ago, there is no guarantee you are getting the same thing when you order it today.
The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.
My favourite is someone who rates it 1 star because they got it late.
You’re reviewing the item you wet wipe, not Katie who works for Evri/Hermes…
There is also the question section.
“How big is the item itself”
Some idiot: I don’t know. Bought it as a gift
I love the reviews that say “I haven’t gotten it yet but I’m sure it is good” or they review UPS instead “Package arrived damaged”. They are as useful as those idiotic unpacking videos.
If I use reviews I look for ones with specific information and what the general range of negative ones are. If there are a mess of negatives ones and they are recent with details included then I pay attention.
With Amazon there’s also the problem of them combining reviews of entirely different products into a single product’s page. I have no idea why they do this. There are also sellers who switch the product on the page while keeping the positive reviews for an earlier product.
Stiftung Warentest is such a thing in Germany.
Photos from people who received the product are useful, you never know with the marketting bs. And I would argue that random people review are important, but they are so bad right now that you got used not to look at them. Of course some will be stupid (1/5, came late), you just have to read them. Which is impossible with the 50.000 fake on every product.
I like the reviews that say “I’ve owned this for 20 minutes and it works great!” I assume most reviews are from people who just received the product (because that’s when they’ll think to write a review) and are therefore pretty useless as a guide to quality.
Amazon’s not “in trouble” because they’re not fake reviews. They’re real reviews left by purchasers, which get bribed to leave them in most cases.
Yeah basically if you want free stuff, then you’re incentivized to leave good reviews so that they are more likely to send you free stuff. Plus, there’s a cognitive bias where you didn’t pay for it so even if you would have been critical you’re more likely to say something positive.
So it’s a real review when someone receives cash to say good things about the product, gotcha.
Stay in context, genius, you know exactly what I mean. Not bot or algorithm can do anything about a review, left by a real customer, with a real acct and purchase history, so yes, it’s “real”. Not being truthful is another thing.
The dedicated websites to check amazon reviews like fakespot.com have been almost completely beaten. What is Firefox going to do differently?
Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved
Yeah. Fakespot is no better at all. The best thing to do right now is know if a product has only been listed for less than a couple months and has hundreds of reviews, it’s BS.
Next up; go to the review section, sort by newest, and read those reviews. Usually the fake reviews are flooded in early and you get more real ones in later. I’ve seen things rated at like 4.5 stars with 500 reviews, but then half of the 10 most recent reviews will rate it 1 star.
Yeah it doesn’t seem too difficult to me to see when reviews seem fishy. I have never tried fakespot myself.
Another thing to check is that the reviews match what the product is for - I have seen a lot of Amazon listings where the seller will have a product up for a long time, get a lot of positive reviews, then change the listing to something else. So it looks like the listing has been up for a long time with good reviews but it’s really a different item. Then note the seller and don’t buy anything from them lol.
I have a Firefox extension from this website, and another one… So I’ve had this all along. I guess it’s great to hear they are building something into the product itself, though.
Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It’s manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.
Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.
Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.
That was my understanding of why Amazon Basics was started, cheap not garbage to set a floor for prices and try to stop the race to the bottom
We’re switching to Firefox!
Good. But remember when Firefox was supposed to be a lean alternative to other browsers? I remember.
I do not, please inform me, since as far as I know Firefox was always trying to be featurefull browser.
I’m skeptical… how are the fake reviews identified and how do you avoid flagging real ones?
They’re just building Fakespot into the browser so the same way Fakespot does, by analyzing the user who posted the review
Can we please stop with the browser bloat? This is something that should be a plug-in, not a kitchen sink feature.
I actually don’t agree, and the reason is - non tech people. You and me can install plugins but ordinary people don’t do that. So the default experience must be good, offering improvements to the experience over Google Chrome.
Otherwise all privacy features could also be plugins. Imagine if that was true. Firefox would have no identity and you would have to install plugins and make it your own.
So some features should be built in. Maybe the ability to get pop-ups about false reviews will actually make users go “wow that is so useful”.
Compromise: Develop it as a Plugin and then install it by default. That way people who don’t want the feature can easily remove it completely. That approach would likely also reduce the number of Firefox forks whose sole purpose is to remove the new features some consider bloat.
That’s actually what Firefox usually did for these kind of features. They’re usually delayed as system add-ons.
Now, let’s talk about adblockers… Oh, wait, Google would get upset if FF had an inbuilt adblocker and could stop giving us those $weet money…
If Google stopped sponsoring, Mozilla would go down and Google would get slammed with anti-monopoly lawsuits from the EU.
So Mozilla can do whatever they want and Google won’t stop sending them money. Since that is a lot more profitable in the long run.
Mozilla can do whatever they want and Google won’t stop sending them money.
So… What are they waiting for? Are they going to rely on gorhill for ever?
You want Mozilla choosing what gets blocked?
Sure, as long as we still have options to disable their blocker and use a 3rd party one if we choose. It’s astounding how many users don’t bother to install an adblocker and it would be a massive improvement for those users who don’t know better.
There’s been more than one occasion that I’ve used a family member’s PC and they have Firefox installed without a single extension, they didn’t even know that extensions existed.
So, this sounds like just another AI-authorship detector, which haven’t been very successful so far.
ugh, stop adding bloat to my browser. I don’t want your shitty shopping assistant Mozilla as much as I don’t want it in Edge or Chrome. Once extension support in Epiphany is good enough for KeePassXC I’m switching away from Firefox entirely…
I must admit that I do like the built in page translation, which I guess was made by a similar team using ML and all. Maybe I will like this too? Feels a bit… niche. Maybe it’s a stepping stone to any misinformation at some point?
Edit This actually might not be coming as a browser feature at all. Mozilla is trying to increase the size of their Mozilla.ai team, so perhaps it’s really looking for people with AI knowledge with web tech and a track record of using it for a ethical purpose. This team would be well placed to build pretty much any AI based tool for the firefox ecosystem.
It’s definitely coming as a browser feature, Mozilla has confirmed it :) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/review-checker-review-quality
We literally just want passkeys and native PWA’s (add-ons do not count), and an interface optimized for Android tablets. And I refuse to use Firefox again until these things are added.
This is incredibly out of scope for a browser feature set.
I mean I don’t particularly like firefox either (although it’s still probably the browser I dislike the least), but firefox needs users to keep google from having complete control over the web.
but firefox needs users to keep google from having complete control over the web.
Okay, but then what does that make Apple with Safari powered by WebKit (and it’s mandated use on iOS)? In addition to the few and between browsers that make use of it like GNOME Web.
