Write an Amazon Review, Go to Jail?

Amazon claims it will sue thousands of supposedly fake reviewers, many coming out of the curious "for-hire" work site, fiverr. At fiverr, you can pay someone five bucks to do various sorts of short online jobs from voiceover work and song-writing to writing favorable reviews on Amazon.

Amazon is crying foul and threatening these poor folks (not fiverr itself), who are merely looking to make an extra five bucks here and there. It's less than admirable for a company worth billions of dollars to do this to people it must see as peasants.

If Amazon had its act together it would realize it's cheaper to just hire review moderators, who would expunge obviously fake reviews. It's not that hard and probably not as expensive as suing over 1,000 people individually. This has to be just plain vindictiveness, and it should not be tolerated.

How does that make any normal reviewer feel? Will you write Amazon reviews if there is any chance whatsoever of getting sued? I certainly won't.

Amazon's official stance is that these supposedly fake reviews "hurt the brand." Really? I think that fake products sold on the Amazon site and endorsed by the Prime moniker hurts the brand more than a few reviews of questionable origin. Take look at this product. Here you have a remarkable 512GB thumb drive for $16.98. What a steal. It even got a five-star review. Except that five-star review (and the one-star ones) tell the public that the product is a scam. Perhaps Amazon will sue those who incorrectly use its star ranking system.

The point is, this is a product that should not be on Amazon or sold via Prime. Why is it there? And why is Amazon focused on fake reviews rather than sketchy products?

This brings us to the whole notion of public reviews. Are they any good? Are they better than what you'd get from a professional reviewer who gets paid to write reviews for a living?

A disclaimer: I'm writing this for PCMag.com, a site that hires a lot of professional reviewers. I have written reviews professionally. Professional reviews are far superior to a democratic group of amateurs who post willy-nilly, here and there. (This is not to say that there are not plenty of talented amateurs.)

The professional is easier to deal with. You find one that you are mostly in agreement with and what they say goes. It's the safest bet. It always has been. I do not agree with everyone who gets paid to write reviews. But I do pay attention to certain people who seem to be more often right than wrong. They have a body of work as evidence.

When Yelp first appeared, I may have been the first to write about it. Yelp seemed like the perfect man-on-the-street public review site that could work. I still refer to it, but it deteriorated after too much success. I still trust professionals more.

Yelp has become a site of reviewers with personal grudges. "The food was great, but the server wouldn't smile and did not greet me with her name so I'm giving the restaurant one star." I recall a Yelp reviewer giving one of the greatest restaurants in the world, The French Laundry, one star because it wasn't vegan. This type of thing has ruined Yelp along with the ability to buy your way into a better presentation on the site.

Even so, reviewers are not getting sued for these offbeat reviews because they "hurt the brand." Review sites like Yelp deal with it using moderators or other mechanisms. Yelp does not threaten to sue the people using the site, no matter what their motivation or origins (the businesses being written about on the site are a different story).

Hopefully, Amazon will back off from this and not act like a fatuous bully. That will "hurt the brand" far more than any fake reviews.