Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!

• Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  But you’re saying yourself that those are “obviously bots”. It’s easy to ignore those. And just to be clear, I really did mean the reviews, and not the score (where the skew is less transparent).

  Everyone leaving a review has to have an account somewhere in the federated network. This includes seeing up an instance just to use it for review bots, or fake votes on something. Obviously there’s is defederation and other mechanisms, and I’m sure there are ways to improve the situation. But the whole base setup is just inherently much harder to get into a trustworthy position. Even the common centralized sites (not just Amazon) have trouble getting it under control when they can “see” will the related data, for finding outliers and such. I’m just saying it’s an even harder proposition.

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  • muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There is a simple way to solve this. Make it so only people who have purchased the product can give reviews.

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    • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There is absolutely nothing “simple” about that. It sounds simple, but what does “someone has purchased a product” actually mean, in technical terms?

      Let’s start basic, since this is a proposal about a federated system, there are instances. Who runs these and why? Does ever seller run an instance? can there be users/customers on those? if not, who runs the customer-instances? Who defines what a product is, and are products like communities? or more like posts? how do you correlate different sellers selling the same item, where a review would obviously apply to both? can you review a shop or seller? Are delivery services their own “entitty” and can you review those, too? When you purchase an item

      Now without any answers to any of those question, let’s just go to the next level. Where are the reviews stored? in the instance where the item is sold (possibly owned by the shop)? or with the user? if it’s with the user, how does a webserver displaying an item find all the reviews for it? Does this differ between reviews for items and reviews of shops/sellers?

      If a review is stored on the instance of the seller, he can just add an entry to the database stating “user x purchased item y”, and the review is valid. If the reviews are stored with the user, he can spin up an instance, and create a bunch of users there who can leave reviews, because he can mark sales as “valid” as the seller, no matter if there was any item and/or money exchanged.

      I wrote all of this thinking about the classic sellers attempt at “creating good reviews to boost a product”, but there is the opposite threat of review-bombing (might be a competing product or seller, or you just don’t like pink shirts and decide to review-bomb those): How you protect against those has similarities, but reverses the roles essentially. Sellers are now the “target”, and reviewers the “threat”.

      Aaaand this all is just about reviews, which have no monetary value. The platforms main goal would be to deal with physical items, exchanged for real money, and creating physical effects (like shipping). All those have to also be secured in a much more robust way. If a fake review or two slip through the cracks, who cares. But if just one valuable item goes missing (or is never shipped), or the payment for it, that’s immediately a problem.

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      • muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Ur gonna hate what I say next but it is the solution to all the trust issues. Monero. U can use the transaction on the blockchain to verify payments, reviews, etc.

        I would suppose the instance gets a 1% cut of products sold on its platform incentivising it to be better than the other instances. U solve the adding fake reviews thing by a review requiring a transaction on the xmr blockchain u can solve the removing issue since anyone can prove that a review was removed in bad faith (obviously u want to retain the right to remove reviews with people saying awful shit).

        Since everything is federated u can design it so there is 0 cost to using a different instance hence an instance acting in bad faith will lose its 1% cut and thus gives it a strong incentive to behave.

        If u wanna get real creative u could do a system of federated logistics where u track items with cryptographic signatures. Each logistics actor signs for the product from the previous logistics actor until the original customer recieves the product at which point funds are released to vendor and delivery. This system would allow package tracking through a decentralised logistics systems (can assign fault for loss to the actor at fault) can allow actors to specialise for a location/route and take advantage of economies of scale.

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