Fake review factories that run on Facebook and post five-star Amazon reviews
There's another side of the medal. Merchants that are trying to sell anything on Amazon have to have some positive reviews, otherwise their product will not be sold at all, even when the product is great. I guess that here two factors contribute, the product is being outranked by others, which have good reviews, and users not trusting such products.<p>I totally see how in this chicken and egg problem merchants would choose to buy some fake reviews.<p>Now, add the problem of lack of transparency in reviews, i.e. there's no record of rejected legitimate reviews, no record of removed reviews; and now you have a dysfunctional system. No one is happy about it, but it degrades both quality of Amazon and trust in it.