doppio19 (u/doppio19)

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

pogue · 2 months ago

I saw that actually. I mentioned in another post on here recently that I figured that the only way a Fakespot v2 could exist is with a subscription model, but on the other hand, it's probably not something I could afford. Good luck with it though! You could always try advertising & affiliate links as a test to monetize the service as well.

doppio19 · 2 months ago

Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate affiliate links after the Honey scandal: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-co...

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

Solomoriah · 2 months ago

I sell books on Amazon.com through their KDP Direct platform, and I have one book with two different covers; each is its own "book" in their catalog. FakeSpot repeatedly marked reviews I knew were valid as fake; I knew this based on the fact that the same reviewer reviewed the "other" book and that review was NOT flagged as fake. And this happened multiple times, and sometimes the wording of the two reviews were different. Further investigation showed FakeSpot had rather a poor reputation overall due to too many false positives. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned.

doppio19 · 2 months ago

That's interesting! Did you have any guesses as to what might have been setting it off to mark those reviews as false positives?

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

DrNosferatu · 2 months ago

Anyone in the know care to sum up / list alternatives?

doppio19 · 2 months ago

I'm actively working on one at https://www.truestar.pro because I couldn't find a drop-in alternative to Fakespot. I also wrote a blog post last week about the state of alternatives: https://blog.truestar.pro/fakespot-alternatives/ (spoiler: there's not much)

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

pogue · 2 months ago

I did search around looking for alternatives and the landscape isn't great. There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.

TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.

SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for

Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs

There are a few others on AlternativeTo that weren't there the last time I checked. https://alternativeto.net/software/fakespot/

On Reddit, some people were mentioning alternatives, including asking ChatGPT about the product and it might have some kinda helpful advice, but nothing like Fakespot offered. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ktm4g4/now_that_f...

If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!

doppio19 · 2 months ago

I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.

I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

xnx · 2 months ago

Did Fakespot work? I can't see how it would stand a chance against LLM generated reviews without even having the log (keystroke?) data that Amazon does.

doppio19 · 2 months ago

I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100% accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.

I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

gnabgib · 2 months ago

Discussion (1222 points, 1 month ago, 761 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063662

(62 points, 27 days ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184974

doppio19 · 2 months ago

Yup! And today's the day.

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

rasz · 2 months ago

Did Mozilla score some absolutely unrelated deal with Amazon by any chance recently? They killed DeepSpeech very same day NVIDIA paid them $1.5mil

doppio19 · 2 months ago

Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.

doppio19 commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

doppio19 · 2 months ago

For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.