Thanks Amazon, for providing me with such a reliable way of rejecting a product. I would never buy anything from a company that paid for tainted reviews (unbiased my ass)!
 
Unfortunately this seems to be 75% of the products you find on Amazon these days. They're all at it. 

Hmm... I wonder if Cakewalk would like my unbiased opinion about a free SONAR lifetime update? 

craigb
Hmm... I wonder if Cakewalk would like my unbiased opinion about a free SONAR lifetime update? 

Why oh why would you unbias SONAR? Some tapeop you are. 

It's just a phase.

Reely?

I know somebody that does those reviews.  She's pretty honest about them.

So is the reviewer who admits to a potential conflict of interest more or less reliable than someone with no history at all? There is a thriving industry in creating phony online store reviews receiving revenue from manufacturers or distributors of the products or services. I expect you would find fewer of the individuals or robots working for such firms to be highly rated enough to receive evaluation copies of products than more or less reliable reviewers chosen by other shoppers. Unless the other shoppers rating the reviewers are phony reviewers or robots as well.

free SONAR lifetime update? 
 
I miss out on everything 

slartabartfast
So is the reviewer who admits to a potential conflict of interest more or less reliable than someone with no history at all? There is a thriving industry in creating phony online store reviews receiving revenue from manufacturers or distributors of the products or services. I expect you would find fewer of the individuals or robots working for such firms to be highly rated enough to receive evaluation copies of products than more or less reliable reviewers chosen by other shoppers. Unless the other shoppers rating the reviewers are phony reviewers or robots as well.

 
I'm aware that there are other kinds of phony reviews, however you can pretty much spot those immediately by clicking on the user name and seeing their review history. If for example they have 50 reviews all posted on the same day, I'm not going to trust them as far as I could throw them. But whichever way you slice it, there is no denying that someone who has received a free product in exchange for a review has been paid for that review and hence the credibility of that review has been compromised. There will be people out there who have turned receiving free items into a career, and how do you know they deliberately give good reviews in order to make themselves look more attractive as reviewers to companies which give out free stuff? After all, if I was looking to solicit reviews by giving away freebies, the last person I'd select would be a super critical Amazon reviewer who picks fault with everything. 
 
I think what you'll also find as well is that "professional" reviewers will submit reviews of a product almost immediately after receiving it in order to get the review out of the way (and who knows, a quick review submission might be a condition of receiving the freebie). I'd much rather read a review submitted by a genuine customer who has had a chance to use the thing over a period of time to see how it works out in the long run. For instance I once bought a popular brand of humidifier which was great for the first couple of months but then developed a leak. I replaced it on warranty and the new one developed the same problem after a couple of months. So I wrote a bad review outlining this and it was quickly upvoted to the best one-star review. I think part of its popularity as a review was that I pointed out that many of the five-star reviews were written as initial impressions of the humidifier and didn't really reflect its long term performance. 
 
So anyway, while I admit that Amazon reviews were never perfect and should always be taken as a pinch of salt, this latest trend of offering freebies for reviews has tainted their whole review system even further to the point where I'm constantly backing out of product pages because of the domination of these paid reviews. What's also significant is that Amazon does not forbid these paid reviews - how can it after all, when that's exactly what its own "Amazon Vine Program" does as well? They'd be hypocrites. 

I feel the standards for creating online copy are pretty low. A company I work with, published an article about the history of Marshall amps. It was just a cobble of other articles stitched together and not good at all. There was a link to other works by the same author so I followed it. Sure enough, there was her article on Marshall amps along with her observations on the Real Housewives of Atlanta and a guide to New England B&B's. Mostly you get what you paid for on the internet. Just read the Wiki pages on somebody you know real well and you may see what I mean.