Generally less money, yes. But not all motives are financial. And there are loads of conflict, drama, and emotions in many parts of the writing world.

... But when you're an incumbent that's likely to be around for at least a quarter of a decade with a sizeable monopoly, later really is better than never.

But Amazon allows sellers to swap different products in under an existing listing so you don’t even know anymore if the review is for what you are buying. This allows sellers to cheat. It’s insanity.

It reminds me of the phone network. It’s so riddled with bad actors that entire generations now have been trained to never pick up the phone.

Why would a network operator allow caller ID to be so easily spoofed? For abusive callers to operate unrestricted? Even the audio quality of the calls seems to have gotten so bad in my parents rural backwater.

I don’t get it. Is engagement the only metric that matters?

Unintentionally a hilarious statement, straight outta sci-fi.

Likely a script that looks for the first x reviews and then starts generating fake ones, and some party that is just lazy. There's probably a market somewhere to short.

One way to look at what you've done is authenticated the source of your reviews. They're not anonymous people behind a fake username.

I'd really like to see a hierarchy of trust. Get some certs signed by a reputable bank who has seen you in person, high trust. Self-signed certs, much less trust. Completely anonymous, you get basically shadowbanned; people who want it can go looking for it.

The Internet is an information flood (and so much worse now that we have LLMs). Filtering it has always been the key challenge. We should be able to filter on source, while still allowing people to say whatever it is they want. We just don't have to read it.

Environments where reprisals are possible simply have different dysfunctionality from ones where they generally aren't. And you can see how catastrophic suddenly turning on reprisals is, known as "doxxing".

What's more, governance processes for the forum shouldn't be anonymous at all. I mean flagging, voting, moderator action etc.

That's arguably the most important conversation here. Most in need of illumination by public discussion.

But so often (in these social media forums) it is taken one step beyond pseudonymity to full anonymity. Hidden from all eyes.

Why? I never heard a good argument.

Also, there are social media sites with real name policies; in what way are they better?

Counterfeit goods on Amazon is a meme, everyone knows. There are YouTube channels that make a sport of it. Once the market just accepts that, it seems impossible to elevate something like reviews

Fair moderation encompasses a well defined vision on what to moderate, and good definitions of that - what is tolerated and what not. Enforcement needs to be swift and fair. There needs to be a barrier of entry, to combat cheating the moderation by quickly re-joining.

If these are successfully upheld, bots, trolling, and abuse has little chance. Not being anonymous can raise the barrier of entry, but it's very far from a working solution; see how horrible people act of facebook, with their name and photo attached. And this site, for example, has very little publicly visible badness going on, because of how effective the moderation is.

And yet they won't do anything about sellers who change their listing to a completely different product once it gets to the 4-5 star range. Can't tell you how many times I've been looking at some tool or gadget only to glance at the reviews and see people mentioning socks.

This is a significant factor, imo. Many great modern Russian artists are banned by the state. Meanwhile, the current imperialist Russian state is a group of professionally trained sandcastle kickers running wild.

I look forward to a day when the Russian people, and the world, have a Russian government that works for things other than destruction.

One is there isn't a separate section for professional reviews (Polish movie/TV site Filmweb has that), so that right off the bat the first comment might be that someone doesn't like what the book is even about, it's a 1-star, liked by 15 people.

Two is they closed their API completely, so there's no way you can get any book info from their DB, not with limits and/or authorization, not if you pay, just not at all.

It depends on the contents and the number of them. If multiple/many negative reviews for something all mention a similar defect, you can be pretty sure it is an actual issue with the thing. It is then up to you to determine if the thing is still worth your time/money.

I will say that for some things the motivations of the reviewers are something to take into account especially. For book reviews on Goodreads I've found that animosity towards the author causes heavy overstating of the 'defects' of a book.

I've had multiple Amazon negative reviews vanish over the years. Often, it happens a few weeks after posting. I've heard it's people bribing Amazon reps to do so, under the auspices of "bad review". I've even occasionally noticed others on Amazon, in reviews, complaining that their last review went missing.

Really sad.

That's a wild claim!

Baseless, callous accusation. And the conclusion is wrong too. Without getting something in return, people write genuine reviews with multiple different intents: out of feeling of obligation, support, appreciation. Out of discontent. As a substitute or alternative for customer support. To help other people find the thing, or to dissuade them from an unworthy purchase.