Can we please stop with the browser bloat? This is something that should be a plug-in, not a kitchen sink feature.
Agreed. This is well outside the scope of native browser functions. Firefox already has a rich extensions ecosystem. They can just include the extension with the browser by default for all I care, but as a native feature, this makes no sense.
They do that. Screenshot upload and so on are handled as extensions.
Firefox extension platform frontend is a mess and has been for years.
I’d say these should be “recommended plug-ins” but imho FF/Moz embarassed themselves on that front with the whole “Pocket” thing.
I agree and I worry about what options they’ll remove from about:config next to make room for or force the acceptance of new features like they have a habit of doing.
There’s LibreWolf. It allows you to disable many things that you can’t disable in normal Firefox. It also has uBlock Origin pre-installed and it’s pre-configured for privacy.
+1. When Edge added a price tracker / financing thing, the same people threw a fit.
If you were pro that, you should be pro this.
Amazon only operates in 58 countries, so it’s basically useless for everyone else. But the company they acquired (fakespot) seems to do more than amazon, but that still does not make it worth packaging it with the browser
Just use LibreWolf if you want debloated Firefox
Librewolf isn’t just a debloated version of Firefox. It’s built with a completely different goal of being extra locked down for privacy. More so than the defaults of Firefox. Also, it doesn’t even include auto update functionality unless you’re using a package manager.
It’s built with a completely different goal of being extra locked down for privacy. More so than the defaults of Firefox.
That’s good, isn’t it?
Also, it doesn’t even include auto update functionality
I completely forgot this was even as thing because I exclusively use Linux and install/update everything with a package manager. You can also use Chocolatey on Windows or Homebrew on macOS. I feel like more people should use package managers, by using them you avoid having to download some random executables from shady websites and your system doesn’t get bloated up by 423942389 update daemons that are constantly running in the background.
That’s good, isn’t it?
It is, but it’s also not for everyone
Also, I strongly don’t expect everyday users to use package managers. And personally, I like having notifications in the app whenever it’s time to update so I can take action right there.
It is, but it’s also not for everyone
Why? Pretty much every website works fine on LibreWolf.
I like having notifications in the app whenever it’s time to update
I mean, yeah, sure, it would be great if LibreWolf had an auto-update functionality, for me it’s not a deal breaker though.
I bought an 4.7 rated amplifier on Amazon that broke the first day. Looking at the reviews closer, I noticed they were 100% paid reviewers.
When I tried to leave a negative review, Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product. This product is still out their with a high rating and no way for actual purchasers like me to warn other customers.
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I’ve gotten into the habit of never buying anything from Amazon
FTFY. I don’t even have an account there.
I only use it for 2 dollar Amazon prime video + gaming sub that I got when Apple App Store glitched.
How do these analyzers determine if a review is fake?
It’s some ML/AI thing that analyzes the review content.
I honestly have no idea how accurate it is either, but I guess if it gives a strong ranking back you’d probably be best to take that into consideration.
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That’s appalling customer service.
Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product
Can you elaborate? I’ve never experienced this and would like to understand how they do it.
I’ve had this multiple times.
Tried to leave a big detailed helpful negative review and it gets flagged for being suspicious, with no copy of the review attached so I have to write it all again. And then it gets removed again.
I just looked in my emails. The exact phrasing was “We have reviewed our decisions and concluded that the product you received is authentic. As a result, we removed your review specific to this product. This ensures other customers see reviews that reflect the current shopping experience.”
Most recently it happened with a body trimmer, where I never questioned the inauthenticity, and then a zojirushi travel mug that I genuinely believe was a fake, and attached a lot of evidence.
Give it 2 stars instead of 1.
And never read the 5-star reviews.
Amazing. Thanks for the description.
They’ve blocked my review on a shower chair that was absolutely not rated for what they said. I nearly fell on my butt and my skinnier partner said it was too wobbly. They’ve blocked the negative review 5 times saying I questioned the authenticity of the product and they have confirmed it. I knew it was Medline brand. I’ve had to file a FTC complaint which I expect to be worthless.
Do you mean Vine? I can tell you a few things about that.
Yep vines, never paid attention to them until this happened.
Are they all fake or something?
Customers who were sent free products “to honesty review”
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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…
If Amazon had visible seller reviews, I would be more inclined to agree.
Then again, if people would actually say who their sellers were, I would be less inclined to agree.
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It’s probably because Amazon nags them to complete a survey, and they feel pressured to answer it.
The unfortunate thing is that the weak-minded people most likely to succumb to that pressure are also the least competent to give good answers.
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Of course they are a problem? The real issue is the star ratings in aggregate of course, but the value in individual reviews is detecting patterns - “didn’t like the lock thing” “latch was loose” “maybe it’s just me, but the latch didn’t feel solid” “the lock broke off within a week”. You start to see trouble spots if you know how to skim actual reviews.
So to get that value, you don’t restrict input, you leave it open, the “pretty box” people aren’t ideal, but it’s fine because it allows for the breadcrumbs that tell the larger truth. It’s ridiculous to expect normal, busy people to do “consumer reports” style reviews for every small kitchen sponge and packet of stickers sold online?
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.
This right here. It should be illegal to do this. I discovered this I think last year and it blew my mind, it’s straight up misleading the consumer.
I avoid those as soon as I notice the signs, but I’ve found less and less instances over time (which is a relief since there used to be loads of pages like that). I thought I read somewhere it’s against Amazon’s own rules to do this. Not 100% sure though.
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Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with?
For me, the answer is mostly “no” because I just assume everything (except certain name-brand items that I did my homework on elsewhere) on Amazon/Ebay/Aliexpress/etc. is marginally-functional crap and adjust my expectations accordingly.
If anything, the only signals I go by on those sites are the number of ratings and reviews (not their content) as indications of popularity, following the “wisdom of crowds.”
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.
But-But how are we supposed to know how handsome/beautiful the delivery rider who delivered the parcel is???
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.
Yeah if you want in depth review it’s not the way to go for sure. Independant reviewer on youtube or, if you’re really desperate, reddit are better.
Yeah I think it’s pretty easy to work around fake reviews. Seems like a skill issue tbh.
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.
And unfortunately Firefox is sitting at 2 to 3% so even if Amazon were dependant on fake reviews, they have little to fear due to the low marketshare.
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I’ll be switching to libre wolf because of this.
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Well I’ll always use Firefox, no question about it. There is incredible value in using a browser with no alterior motivations, no additional products to sell you, no reason to spy on you.
Amazon makes a lot of money facilitating the sales of counterfeit goods.
Sure. But they’d make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.
They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon’s market share.
But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it’s hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say…they make money either way, so it’s not the highest-priority problem to fix–though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they’ve tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.
But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that’s fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too–likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.
people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole
Lol, as of this hasn’t already happened
I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don’t show it with the amount they spend on it.
There are some things you can really only buy there. Which is why I bigly agree with the US government that they’re a bigly monopoly bigly abusing their monopoly power (bigly).
It extra sucks for rural America where you might only have a handful of stores to pick from and all are discount stores like Walmart and Dollar General. Makes it hard to buy better quality/up market items
buy better quality/up market items
I find this to be a challenge in general. Amazon and Walmart killed recognizable name brands as quality markers. Walmart forced their suppliers (some of which were name brands) down in quality and prices in order to maintain shelf space, and Amazon is just a haven for rip-off and junk goods.
But the only places you can find quality with good warranty periods in my experience is ultra-high end suppliers in very top line stores. For instance, I’m trying to buy a leather jacket and everywhere I look both online or in person seems like a junk expo…except if you look at very high end stuff (800+ minimum, 1-2k median).
I’ve had similar problems with furniture, and even home goods recently. The only place I’ve had any luck at all is Costco.
PS: I do agree that small town America gets even more screwed because they don’t have the high end stores to speak of.
Got any examples? Between Walmart, Etsy, AliExpress, Best Buy, MonoPrice, Home Depot, and Wayfair, plus the fact that nearly every major store has online shopping and delivery…I really can’t think of anything I could only get on Amazon. To be quite frank, I think the US government’s case is sorta ridiculous.
Of course you do, you post like some type of Amazon shill.
I was looking for hardware at home depot and the dude recommended I buy what I was looking for on Amazon.
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
It won’t. It’s clickbait. It’s dumb.
Edit- tHeY’rE iN TrOuBle isn’t clickbait? Fuck off. This might dip into their profits, slightly, but Amazon is hardly in trouble. FFS.
I just want native vertical tabs lmao
I’ve been using Sidebery with some userchrome to hide the top tabs, and it’s a workable solution, but far from ideal.
I also wish keybindings were configurable. For example, with the “/” search, ctrl-g/G to go to next/prev match is really weird
Tried Sidebery too with some basic hidden UI CSS but having to keep it up to date makes it clunky at times, leagues away from Edges implementation where it’s just a toggle away.
what’s a vertical tab
Where the tabs are on the side of the desktop screen instead of the top.
And i just want a tab bar on Android tablets/foldables like every other 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
What does “analyzing” mean?
They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account…
Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.
What does “techniques” mean?
It’s that Lego that’s slightly more advanced
Algorithms.
What does “algorithms” mean?
Heuristics.
stahp
ppl gonna stop answering my real questions and I’ll be tech illiterate firebrand
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It could be something like that (hint: they already deployed an offline neural network in Firefox with which you can translate web pages), and the idea would be to detect AI-generated content.
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Well it will be, because it’s detecting AI-generated content indirectly. What it’s directly detecting are bot posters, which are much easier to spot.
“AI detectors” have the uphill job of having to figure out whether something is generated by looking only at what was generated. Fakespot and tools like it get to use the metadata, which has many telltales that bots aren’t even trying to hide.
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IDK chief. It seems like one of those things that are hard to do in theory as you said, but relatively easy in practice.
I mean just about any human who has played a bit with ChatGPT nowadays is able to identify ChatGPT generated paragraphs within a few words. I don’t suppose it would be much harder for a machine.
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Elsewhere in this thread someone explained that its just integrating FakeSpot into the browser, which uses basic email spam detection techniques to detect fake reviews by analyzing how the reviewer posts. Is there a set schedule they post reviews by, what else have they reviewed, how new is the account, etc. A 2 day old account with 20 reviews would be an obvious source of fake reviews for example
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.
I don’t agree with the assertion that fake reviews don’t benefit them, but I may be missing something. Reviews help drive consumer behavior and more reviews lead to more sales from those who are unable or unwilling to be more discerning. (Amazon takes a cut)
For others, it the idea or presence of fake reviews might drive them to a “trusted” Amazon Basics alternative, also leading to sales with a higher margin for Amazon.
Additionally, recycling listing ASINs is a common tactic that Amazon could stop and is a source of “fake” (or at least, irrelevant in content and misleading in score) reviews. There’s minimal enforcement of rules for review integrity, such as verified purchases or quid pro quo “warranties” and “free gifts” for 5 star reviews.
All the evidence I see points to Amazon preferring the status quo.
I tried posting a negative review that mentioned a quid pro quo (offered a gift card in exchange for a 5 star review) and Amazon removed it for not being relevant to the product. So baseless 5 star reviews are allowed but not 1 star reviews.
“Brushing” scams seem way too common and easily executed through Amazon in order for them to not be turning a blind eye about it, imo. My mom was sent random LED lights for months through their return program despite never ordering them or hardly using amazon at all before she figured out what was happening. It feels like at least 5% of all my purchases come with a policy breaking email from the seller contacting me asking me for a five-star review in exchange for a free gift. Or even just contacting me 6 months later from a totally unrelated purchase and offering me a gift for no reason in exchange for a five-star review. Oh, they’ll sure reimburse the money it costs to buy it! Because they really just want that five-star review! And Amazon seems to be happy allowing five-star reviews for products that are given away for free and even has a tag to let other users know, but just this method is frowned upon? I doubt it.
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
So how much do I have to pay to boost the Fakespot rating of my product listing?
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
It is very nice to see Mozilla doing quite useful/helpful projects from time to time.
We’re switching to Firefox!
Just did it.
I’m curious to see what Mozilla will do with the shopping assistant portion. Lots of browser extensions, and potentially even some of the Mozilla sponsors offer these types of features, and if Mozilla just stamps them out all at once by integrating that feature, it might lose them some financial support.
On the other hand, I do hope they don’t start amassing huge amounts of training data from their uses. It would be a real bummer to not have a decent browser option anymore.
I’ve already been using the fakespot extension for a few years, and honestly, it feels pretty useless. I’ve seen it give A and B scores for products that I know have fake reviews. And on Amazon or Walmart and similar sites, we already know that the reviews are bullshit, so what difference does it really make for it to tell me that? It’s not like I have any better option in most cases.
Eh, Fakespot has been decent enough for me. I think it works best when there are a lot of reviews, it’s not very helpful when it’s like 5-10 reviews on a product.
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LibreWolf will probably have us covered.
It’s a fork of Firefox without Mozilla telemetry, and defaults set to “privacy on” basically.
I switched a couple months ago and am perfectly happy with it after well over a decade with Firefox.
Does anyone know the split of Amazon’s mobile app versus mobile web and desktop use? This won’t have an impact on their proprietary app and that’s a shame.
i’ve found that firefox on android is one of my favorite apps, even replacing native apps in many cases.
I watch YouTube without ads all through Firefox
You should look into Revanced.
I also entirely watch YouTube through Firefox. I’ve had no need to consider a different app for YouTube because of it
Same. I even browse Lemmy in Ff.
i like jerboa for handling any actual conversations i get into, but the search is worthless so i have some custom search engines configured just for lemmy:
https://lemmy.world/search?q=%s&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New
The question you’re responding to isn’t about the mobile app for Firefox; it’s about the mobile app for Amazon. Apparently lots of other people misread that too, so at least you’re in good company.
i know it’s about the mobile app for amazon. i’m trying to suggest that people who use firefox are more likely to skip the amazon app anyway.
And so it begins, the marketing world has got its claws in AI.
I mean, Fakespot already does the same thing. They rate the product based on the quality of reviews (whether or not they’re fake).
Yeah sorry, I wasn’t aware the AI wars already spread into marketing-land
It’s not even just AI. It’s also real people being paid to leave fake reviews.
Plenty of fake reviews are AI written now too. For a while you could go on any product page and Ctrl+F for “as a large language model” and spot several copy/pasted reviews with no proofreading that out themselves
