Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
There are known backscratching rings that have been gaming the reviews.
They needed to go. Ditto with the paid reviewers they've been suing.
Reviews exist for buyers, not vendors, so pruning anything suspicious is good business sense. The tinfoil hat crowd is of not enough consequence compared to the credibility of the reviews with the buyers. Losing a few hundred buyers is a small price to pay.
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Pruning is fine. It's how you handle the few that complain. All that Amazon had to do was say, "sorry our algorithm must have made an error, we've added your review back in".
Data mining is in it's wild west stage and there is going to be a lot of challenges to it. There needs to be a lot of debate about what is ok and what isn't, it can't be up to the money grubbers to unilaterally decide. Categorizing anyone that questions any aspect of it as a "tin foil hat crowd" is being naive. Bruce Schneier is a well respected security expert.