🚩 Fake review abuse on our new scraper shows platform needs better safeguards
Yesterday we released our new Semrush Scraper. Within hours, a competitor (as we know now, having investigated it ourselves) used multiple fake accounts to leave more than ten 1-star reviews. Some of the accounts ran the scraper once with deliberately invalid inputs, others didn’t run it at all (more reviews than actual users) and just posted “not working.” or similar reviews to manipulate the public image of our actor and in the end also on our reputation. As a result the rating for this actor dropped significantly on the first day of launch, even though the scraper works as expected.
This shows clear weaknesses in the review system. At the moment, there are 3 key weakness that we would like to point out:
- Users can leave a review without ever running an Actor
- Brand-new accounts can post reviews immediately (primarily free accounts)
- There is no effective prevention against creating multiple fake accounts
Apify has recently added a reply option for developers and a delete option for review authors, which is a step forward, but this case shows the system is still very easy to abuse.
I’ll share screenshots of the reviews so the pattern is visible. This kind of manipulation doesn’t just affect our actor, it undermines the reliability of ratings across the whole Apify store in our opinion.
We hope a support member @Apify Developer Community Manager contacts us soon and our case is resolved quickly, and for the community we hope that the larger flaws in the review system are addressed soon after to make the platform safer for everyone.
8 Replies
This is true, I believe Apify implemented some changes so that reviews from paid user has more weight than those from users users which is already a good thing, but overall this definitively needs improvements..
Haha I've once received DM from someone (I believe I'm not the only one), which proposed to bump my actors reviews for little money : 😂
Yes, that's happened to us several times as well via email. It's always some random gmail address, probably the same dude 😄
@mario.jose This is really sucky behaviour. I am following up with you in DMs but just to confirm here for everyone's information that when you delete reviews they no longer impact on your rating.
The best way is simply that free users can’t leave reviews! I think this would make it very hard to trick the system, since you’d need a paid account, which creates an incentive not to abuse it. In the current case, a competitor (like in the example image) could easily create many free accounts.
This applies not only to negative reviews; I also suspect that some accounts are being created to post positive reviews as well.
I’d rather have fewer reviews than a bunch of useless ones, because if most of them are fake, nobody will trust the review system.
Also sometimes people raise their issue in the review. One of my actor where user left a review saying it shoukd support more options
I replied to him but he never just replied and thats still there
Thank you all for this discussion. I know that reviews are something that several of you feel strongly about and I'm making sure this feedback goes back to our team.
I tend to agree with you to a certain extent on that point, because it would definitely make it harder to make an attack like this.
I think this was discussed in the community, and one of the arguments against it was a comparison with how major stores like the App Store or Play Store handle it. The reviews are not bound to paying users only.
So maybe a compromised solution could be some sort of reputation system for (free) users. So, for example you need at least x amount of time on the platform to be able to leave a review, you would at least need to run an actor before you can leave a review. On addition to that reviews would have a badge on them to tell everyone if the users are a paying or free user. Also, all users would have the option to report a review for different sorts of illegal content. This is actually necessary for every platform that provides user generated content under Article 16 DSA of EU Law, so this needs to happen at least.
Yes, the same thing happened to us. This was before users could remove their reviews, but this has now changed for good 👍🏼 We tried to mitigate this by leaving a log message at the end when a run fails, with a link and instructions where they can report issues. It helped a bit i guess, but it would be better if the "open an issue" button in run details was bigger and highlighted.
@mario.jose just advanced to level 1! Thanks for your contributions! 🎉