Went to Google Play to complain about Hulu. I noticed Google advertising that over 300 reviews had the verbatim quote “watch and movies that you love”. It’s always confusing that buggy corporate apps have >95% 5 star reviews until you see that the majority are just completely fake, and no one cares or is doing anything about it.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    732·
    6 months ago

    It’s only a bandaid over a gaping wound, but check out Fakespot, an extension for Firefox and Chrome. It won’t help with google play, but when browsing Amazon, BestBuy, or other retailers they use machine learning to detect duplicate/repetitive reviews, and go into reviewers’ history to determine if they are trustworthy.

    I’ve seen a lot of “5 star products” get an adjusted rating of <2 because of this extension.

    • breakingcups@lemmy.worldEnglish
      53·
      6 months ago

      I have an axe to grind with fakespot. My wife has a tiny business and is one of the most honest and sweet people I know. She would never pay for fake reviews and she wouldn’t even have the knowledge on how to do so. Someone (not even us, mind you) posted a link to her product on Reddit and a Fakespot robot instantly called her out for supposedly having suspicious reviews, even though each and every order (and thus each and every review resulting from that) was legit. Her product was then mocked and all it did was give my wife stress.

      So yeah, take them with a grain of salt. They are probably pretty good on average but some innocent people get caught in it as collateral damage.

        • tomi000@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          Haha I see what you mean. If it works as suggested that would actually help me out a lot though, thats why I got excited. There are certain types of products where I know from the start that 99% of the reviews are fake. There cant be 50.000 people buying the exact same model of screen protector for my noname phonethat not even 50k people own.

          • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            3·
            6 months ago

            Sometimes I’ve noticed that a seller will repurpose the product page for a previously seemingly legitimate product with good reviews to sell something entirely unrelated while benefiting from the positive reviews of the prior product.