There's a site I use to sift through counterfeit items and fake reviews on Amazon (and other sites I believe). [0] It's made the headache of finding legitimate products on Amazon a lot easier to manage for me.If you actually look at a lot of the fake 5-star products and analyse the reviews, the majority are really obviously fake. They're chock-full-of buzzwords and they almost always come from verified purchasers with absolutely nonsensical names. I agree - it's gotten really difficult to find real things. However, I haven't found it to be very difficult to spot the fakes in the markets current form. You would think Amazon could internally flag the name patterns for review, but I guess that would take moderating human-power.
> but I guess that would take moderating human-power.
Maybe they could use mturk?
Or maybe give you a button to set up an mturk job on a product to weed out the fake reviews for you, then you could pay only a few cents to get a 'real' review...
[0] https://www.fakespot.com/