doppio19
Joined 4 years ago
Karma
276
Submissions
15
Member since
May 6
Solo developer in San Diego (though often roaming).
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate affiliate links after the Honey scandal: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-co...
Comment · 1 year ago
That's interesting! Did you have any guesses as to what might have been setting it off to mark those reviews as false positives?
Comment · 1 year ago
I'm actively working on one at https://www.truestar.pro because I couldn't find a drop-in alternative to Fakespot. I also wrote a blog post last week about the state of alternatives: https://blog.truestar.pro/fakespot-alternatives/ (spoiler: there's not much)
Comment · 1 year ago
I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
Comment · 1 year ago
I found that it did a pretty decent job. Certainly not 100% accurate, but it often picked up on signals that made me give a closer look at a listing than I would have otherwise.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
Comment · 1 year ago
Yup! And today's the day.
Comment · 1 year ago
Not that I'm aware of. But I do know that in late 2024, Amazon made a change where users now have to be logged in to view product reviews beyond the ones that appear on the first page (about 8 reviews). From what I can tell, Fakespot scraped the Amazon product listing pages on their backend, so that simple change would have pretty much killed its current implementation.
Comment · 1 year ago
For the unfamiliar, Fakespot was a browser extension that flagged suspicious product reviews on sites like Amazon. Mozilla bought it just two years ago and integrated it directly into Firefox as their "Review Checker" feature. Today, to my dismay, they're sunsetting it. As someone building in this space, I wrote about Fakespot's history, the problem it solved, and why we need sustainable alternatives.
Comment · 2 years ago
I can believe it. I rode in a Waymo for the first time a couple days ago and it was incredible. No problems with the rain or bad San Francisco drivers. It was a really smooth ride and I felt extremely safe.
Comment · 2 years ago
No, ChatGPT is more than just a UI for the OpenAI API. Web requests are a feature built into ChatGPT using the API's support for function calls, but the API doesn't make any external web requests by itself.
Comment · 2 years ago
Same - frankly, it's crazy how often the service is interrupted for paying users.
Comment · 3 years ago
Sorry for the naïve question, but why would I need this when most apps are distributed on Google Play? Are a lot of FOSS developers publishing on F-Droid instead of Google Play because of disagreements about Google's TOS?