Tell HN: Amazon Reviews

10 points by iforgottherest 5 years ago | 5 comments

I recently shared some negative review on a disappointing electronics product I bought on Amazon

Instead of displaying the review, Amazon secretly blocked my account from reviewing it!

Without notice, my review was ignored and hidden, and access denied.

In short: Don't trust Amazon reviews at all. And keep all packaging if you ordered something during these holidays, since you may wish to return it.

noemit 5 years ago |

I was working for Walmart once, and I typically did FE JavaScript engagements, but one time they asked for a script that hid bad reviews on individual product pages in a "natural" manner - ie don't hide all the bad ones, but artificially bump up the score. And they bumped up the score only for particular products that were profitable or they had more in stock of. This was yeaaaars ago.

Needless to say, I never trusted a review again!

tomcam 5 years ago | |

I hate hearing that.

sdevonoes 5 years ago |

Do people still trust Amazon reviews at all? Nowadays I check if the product I want to buy has a "unboxing" or something similar in YouTube. In general, how can you trust reviews that are "controlled" by the very same place where you buy stuff? Doesn't make sense.

I also check reddit for that, but I take it with a grain of salt.

iforgottherest 5 years ago |

Apparently I'm not the only one.

So if your review is considered 'bad for business', it gets you blocked from reviewing. Ridiculous.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/8u47vw/sorry_we_are...

tmaly 5 years ago |

did you submit a picture with the review? Maybe if you had given it a 3 star but included the ups and downs they would have accepted it?