Which one is boosted and which one is real

I was just talking to a Chinese friend who works for a company that sells various goods on amazon.
He told me they budget to buy between 50 and 100 fake reviews for every single product they launch.
He said that without the fake reviews, the products will never start to sell on their own.
Whether to blame Amazon or blame the sellers, I'm not sure. But Amazon writes the rules of the game.
- He said that without the fake reviews, the products will never start to sell on their own.
  Then, once it really starts to sell, he should be afraid of Amazon taking over the product and including it as their own product line.
  The product lifecycle at Amazon
  
  Indeed you're right. Amazon watches out for Amazon.
- I mean he’s right, i won’t buy a product that has 0 ratings, seems sus
- How else are they going to get off the ground? That's the reality when you're competing in a digital marketplace. You have to have some reviews or nobody's buying.
- That’s why Amazon has the Vine program. They give “free” items to customers to review and they are genuine reviews, or should be. And for the purpose of giving new items a chance on Amazon to start with some reviews and other reviewers are aware of it.
  I’m part of it and I have to pay income tax on the stuff I get, but that’s it.
  I did have one asshole seller recently who said I and other reviewers were lying. The listing showed a completely different product and myself and others stated such and the seller reported us for fake reviews and removed the pictures showing they were lying. Fucking pissed me off and I still get emails telling me about my review getting removed sometimes now.
  I used to do the illegal way before I knew it was illegal. A guy from China would hit me up and I would choose a few items off his list and I would order them, give them 5 star reviews and I would send him the receipt and he would send me back the money in PayPal and a little extra, like an extra $5-$7.
  I gave everything 5 stars and part of it was adding pictures/videos, but I tried to be honest, in terms of actually talking about what I liked about it.
  Only did it like 3 times and got a kids camera and vacuum and a HDMI converter. I still have the stuff so it wasn’t all crap.
  I think a lot of these sellers prefer the illegal way because it’s guaranteed 5 star reviews than just exposure, especially when they know they’re selling straight up garbage.
  
  This is really fascinating to me!
  I didn't know about this Vine program. Maybe that's what his company uses. Or I wonder if it is limited somehow ... If all the sellers use it then perhaps instead of it being an advantage it just gets you up to sea level. I know those guys will do just about anything to get an algorithmic advantage.
- https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9361204b-a5fa-49c6-8d93-b2f6f77e1bd1

5 star reviews (even real ones) are useless. They generally just say: "awesome product, love it"
No feedback or product info and anything. 4 stars and 2 stars are the most interesting to me. People who don't care and like it rate 5, people who don't care but didn't like it rate 1.
2 and 4 star ones thought about the product and found at least one fault normally, and that lets you read about it a bit more. And then you can decide if the issues mentioned by the comments directly are worth it for the price for you.
Plus it's generally easier to tell if the 4 star text review is real.

I google mapped the best pizza spots in my city rated above a 4. It showed me everything from little Caesar’s to dominos. What even is the point anymore? I also find there are paid results, like I can search “sushi near me” and in the results there will be McDonald’s and other corporate chains that have nothing to do with what I typed
- It's all rubbish except for actually reading bad reviews as far as I'm concerned. Read the 2-3 star reviews (1 is usually stupid reasons) and see which place is the least complained about.

Pretty sure you can buy 3000 reviews the same way you can buy 19 tho
- With family hostages!
  big brain
  
  ?

3.6 ⭐ chinese restaurant with people complaining about the service and the general tso is only alright. See one review from a Chinese-American whose visiting a friend raving about how good the food was. Then show up and see most tables with Chinese families.
This is the only restaurant you're allowed to go to now.
- This is actually the 3.5-star rule for American Chinese restaurants. Any restaurant below 3 stars or above 4 stars will be garbage. The goal is to find some place that lands right in the middle with the ~3.5 star average.
  3.5 stars is the perfect combination of good reviews from Chinese people, and bad reviews from locals who expect American style service. If it has +4 stars, it’s too American. The service may be great, but you won’t find a single Chinese person inside because the food is too Americanized. If it’s under 3 stars, the place will just be gross or the food will be bad enough that even Chinese people don’t like it. 3.5 stars is the right mix of authentic Chinese food (meaning it gets good reviews from Chinese people) and Americans not being able to read the menu and getting upset that it takes +5 minutes for the server to come over and take your drink order.
  
  I'd like to go to those places but I probably can't read the menu. How does one navigate that? Are those the ones with the pictures of everything in the windows?
  I've had good success with finding lots of other authentic food around me but I'd like to try another style of Chinese. I know it's a trope but I feel good about my choice of restaurants when the patrons and staff are speaking to each other in their native tongue

I equally enjoy the 1 and 2 star reviews where they will openly state “product is great, no issues” but then immediately throw all that away because the version they bought doesn't fit their grandpappy’s 1963 Barracuda, or “that table of six let their kids run around the restaurant, 1/10”.
The bipolar reaction of the average consumer is maddening, no nuance.
- People don’t tend to write reviews for middle-of-the-road experiences. They only bother doing it when things were great or awful. The issue is that people have wildly differing opinions on what makes for good or bad experiences.
  
  I tried to get into a habit of reviewing every campsite i stay at. i gave a reasonably good review to one i went to with my partner and the owner dug out my email and wrote me to complain because it wasn't a perfect 5*
  Suspiciously there were just enough new reviews at 5* in the month following to push mine onto the second page. none since then

I would say read the middlin' reviews to find the real opinions, but I imagine at this point the review selling places have figured out that strategy, too. Really now it's best to find a third-party source you trust for anything you want to buy off Amazon.
- Or, just don't buy off Amazon.
- I scan for people stating the same negatives, then disregard the ones that were obviously unlucky or just removed.

It's because the system is gamed, we all know it, and you would be hard pressed to be able trust anything -- even your own grandmother -- when it comes to the internet. It's nearly all psychological and sociological warfare.
If we see 5 stars, we just assume the bad reviews have been hidden or discarded, or simply never existed (since all the reviews good or bad are fake anyway). Because way too often, that's exactly the case.
And when we see thousands of reviews we tend to ignore the fact that it's computationally trivial to generate millions upon millions of reviews that are just believable enough to avoid automated detection and/or are easily influenced or corrupted by a variety of means (ex: social engineering, backdoor deals, etc). Psychologically we just close our eyes and ears, yell la-la-la-la-la mentally, and hope that the truth is buried in the myriad of faked/gamed reviews somewhere.

I think about this a lot. Let's assume for a second all reviews are legitimate (I know they're not, but not detection isn't what I'm talking about). I hate when you sort by ratings you get 5.0 (1 review) at the top. Why isn't there some semi objective agreed upon way to do this? It doesn't need to be perfect. Search engines aren't perfect but we use them all the time. Something like 4.9 (10 reviews) should be above 5.0 (1 review).
- In NPS (net promoter score) tracking - you know the survey "would you recommend this to your friends and colleagues"
  it's worded and scored 0-10 so that you can assume everyone that scores 7+ is happy and anyone below isn't.
  It's a psychological thing that wouldn't work if it was thumb up or thumb down.
  In 5 star systems 4 and 5 should be considered promoters and 3 and below should be considered detractors, but again you should bifurcate and dichotomize the output so you see how many scored 4>= and how many <=3
  
  Thanks for the information, I'll look further into it. But even in those scenarios, say you get a score of like 90% recommending it with 100 people, but another with 89% recommending it but 1,000,000 people. I'd say the million people with 89% score should be higher. That's more what I'm talking about. It's like the more people that rank highly the more confident the result is. (Which is why for this discussion I said assume bots don't exist lol.)