Max Oudenbroek

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In a recent blog, Ewoud described how fake reviews on web pages are misleading the customer.

In a comment, I asked Ewoud the question: How do you think this problem can be solved in the near future? Improve the algorithms to detect and delete these reviews? Make regulations about these incentivized reviews? Make reviews more personal by providing some personal details about the reviewer? Honestly, I didn’t know the answer to these questions either. However, it seems that Amazon found a way to fight and control these incentivized reviews.

Incentivized reviews are written by people that receive the product for free, in return for their “honest review”. These honest reviews however, are diluting the actual honest review score and are therefore misleading to the online shopper. There are, unfortunately, a lot of examples of incentivized reviews. Looking at the reviews of a product with 4+ Star ratings, only to see that these 4Star plus reviews are written by the people that received it for free, while the people that bought the product themselves rate it like sh*t. This is causing distrust amongst the customers. However, these incentivized 5 star reviews could also be based on truth. However, as explained in a video by Reviewmeta, these reviews are extremely biased and affect the average score of products. This video went viral, and apparently Amazon caught air of it.

Yesterday, Amazon announced that they are making changes to their Review system. With this update, ratings will no longer be influenced by incentivized reviews. How will they do this? Amazon will be able to identify trusted reviewers. Additionally, they will add some measures of control to eliminate biased reviews out of their review database. The only incentivized reviews left, will be done by customers selected for the Amazon Vine program. Amazon will select helpful and trusted reviewers based on previous reviews, and asks them to give their honest opinion about new products, which have not yet received a lot of reviews. The amount of these Vine reviews will be limited per product, in case they still influence the bias towards the product. The producer of the product won’t be in contact with the reviewer. This will not entirely delete the incentivized reviews, but allows Amazon to control the process.

Nevertheless, Amazon will not delete reviews that complied with its previous review policy, which means that there will still be product review scores that are heavily influenced by incentivized reviews.

Who will be next to follow Amazon?? Google Playstore, iTunes, I’m looking at you…

https://digitalstrategy.rsm.nl//2016/09/23/should-we-trust-online-reviews/

https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/abpto3jt7fhb5oc

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/03/amazon-bans-incentivized-reviews-tied-to-free-or-discounted-products/

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/55pkdi/amazon_bans_incentivized_reviews_tied_to_free_or/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk

5/5 (1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA

Recently, YouTube has revealed the introduction of YouTube Heroes, a global community of volunteer contributors who help create the best possible YouTube experience for everyone. The idea is to reward certain ‘points’ to users that contribute to the community. Below are some of the actions will earn the users points:

Accurate reports of videos that violate community guidelines
Contributing a sentence that gets published as a subtitle
Answering a user question on the YouTube help forum with a comment selected as Best answer.

Based on these points, users can reach a certain level, which rewards them with incentives such as the ability to Mass flag abusive content and contact YouTube staff directly.

Although the idea behind it seems rather nice; gamify the monotonous aspects of YouTube, the Heroes introduction video led to a mass outrage on the internet. The video, which was released just 2 days ago, already received a massive 350.000+ dislikes, as opposed to 5.000 likes. On top of that, YouTube disabled to ability to comment on the video, seems like they had a lot of trust in it…

“Talk to Youtube staff directly!” Something their content creators should be able to do. This is absurd.” (Reddit user MisterMagicka)

“Look at the dislikes. Seems like “mass flagging videos” sounds good to no one.” (Reddit user Zach)

These two reactions summarize the main issues of most people. It seems strange, that content creators with over hundreds of thousands subscribers struggle to contact YouTube staff directly when facing issues related to privacy and content stealing, while if you add some subtitles and mass report some videos, you’ll receive the privilege to contact them. Instead, these loyal content creators receive automated responses, which in most cases won’t help a thing.

“I can’t wait to flag all the videos that go against my beliefs and opinion.” (Reddit user MasterChrono)

As do all websites with user created content, there are a lot of the so called internet ‘trolls’ on YouTube. These trolls purposely report videos that meet al user guidelines, just because they do not like the content or creator. Rewarding the Heroes with the ability to Mass flag content, will not only make it easier for these trolls to report videos, it will also draw the attention of more trolls.

Incentivizing people to moderate your community without having to pay real moderators and creators seems like a nice idea. But the Heroes incentive makes users do all the boring and non-sexy jobs: Adding subtitles > Translator, Moderate content > Moderator, Test new features before release > Beta tester. Normally, these jobs are paid functions in an organization, done by real employees, but at the so called ‘highest’ hero level, you basically become a Beta Tester without any form of compensation…

All in all, I think the idea of crowdsourcing captioning and subtitles is a great idea. I just don’t think the levelling system and incentives to report are not.

What do you think about YouTube Heroes? Comment below!

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_introduces_a_new_program_that_rewards/d7x1721

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_introduces_a_new_program_that_rewards/d7wv5yk

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_introduces_a_new_program_that_rewards/d7wveyu

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_introduces_a_new_program_that_rewards/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrlGOAjK6Dg