Lately, we’re drowning in fake reviews. Why the review economy is broken and how to fix it.
Welcome to Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
In our very first episode, we tackle the fake review economy: how online reviews got corrupted and if we can ever trust them again. Our guest is Joseph Reagle, an associate professor at Northeastern University and the author of several books, including Reading the Comments. He recently posted a positive review of a dog raincoat on Temu.
Also, Vass and Katrina talk about what it’s like to find your own name on a review for a rug you never bought!
Lately is a Globe and Mail podcast.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad.
The show is hosted by Vass Bednar and produced by Andrea Varsany.
Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack more of the latest in business and technology.
Find a copy of this episode's transcript here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions, or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:00] Hello, Vass.
Vass Bednar [00:00:01] Hey, Katrina.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:02] How is your rug?
Vass Bednar [00:00:05] Man, I don't have a rug. I don't have a rug.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:07] That's not what I read.
Vass Bednar [00:00:10] The rug that never was.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:11] The rug never was. Tell us about your now notorious rug review, please.
Vass Bednar [00:00:16] A colleague of mine at work messaged me, letting me know that she recently purchased a rug from a company, and she noticed that it seemed like I had reviewed this very same rug. So that was cool. Kind of seemed like it persuaded her to make the purchase. The only thing is it was a verified review, but it wasn't written by me. So it just.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:37] Ew. It's so creepy.
Vass Bednar [00:00:38] It is creepy, but it got me thinking about just how polluted that review landscape can be. My worry was that the website was somehow populating the reviews with names of people kind of in her network, or that are familiar to her, because it kind of, again, might prompt the very same purchase that she had. But yeah, I haven't purchased a rug in a while.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:00] Yeah, well, this feels like next level review fraud. Now, if you're actually seeing your own name pop up in fake reviews.
Vass Bednar [00:01:08] Exactly. So I'm Vass Bednar, I'm the host of Lately, and that's why I'm talking about this person that may or may not have purchased a rug that they seem genuinely happy with.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:18] Well, I'm glad that this imaginary person loves the rug that you didn't buy. I'm Katrina Onstead, I am the producer of Lately. And this week we're going to be talking about the crazy broken wild review economy.
Vass Bednar [00:01:32] Yeah, that's what it got me thinking about. How did a system that's hyper democratic based on the promise of our peers. Right? Kind of crowdsourcing wisdom of crowds, vibes become so polluted and exploited, and at the same time, we all kind of know it sucks, but we still read the reviews.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:51] We all participate. You were talking about the review economy, but you could be talking about the internet itself.
Vass Bednar [00:01:55] Could be.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:55] Speaking of broken promises. But yeah, when we started looking into it. We found that the scope of fakery and the review economy is massive, right? Amazon said that it had blocked more than 200 million suspected fake reviews last year, and the World Economic Forum put a number on this and said that the direct influence of fake online reviews on global online spending is $152 billion. So this is, you know, this is a.
Vass Bednar [00:02:17] Lot of fake rugs.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:18] It's a lot of fake rugs. But it's not only rugs, right? This is the part of this that's alarming. We're not just talking about toilet brushes and rugs.
Vass Bednar [00:02:26] No.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:26] There's high stakes fakery going on involving doctors and lawyers and contractors. There was a case in New York last year of a doctor who was fined $100,000 by the state for embellishing reviews. I really don't want to think of my doctor going on there making themselves seem better at their job, but they are.
Vass Bednar [00:02:44] Also weaponizing reviews, right? How fandoms or political groups can seek to punish employers, businesses, creators. A book may not have come out yet, a film may just be coming out, and there's a kind of coordinated effort to give it one star, which will depreciate where it shows up in search or lower its score on aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes. So it's intended to hurt financially hurt a firm.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:14] Well, it seems like it's now reached a bit of a inflection point, right? That this problem is becoming too hard to ignore by both big tech and regulators. So we've seen in the last year or so a few indicators that maybe there's going to be an attack or a push back on the fake review economy.
Vass Bednar [00:03:32] Yeah. In that way the reviews are in and they don't look good. Right. So there's sort of a consensus that this is less of a private problem that we each have to navigate privately and silently kind of sifting and sorting through, adding browser plug ins and doing tons of quote unquote research or googling. Different legislators are taking particular approaches, and also companies are being more explicit about what they're doing to fight and remove bad reviews on their site, partially because, you know, of course, they need to maintain or at least restore some of that trust that is lost when you get duped or spend more money than you want to, or make a bad purchasing decision because you had bad information.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:15] But we'll see, right? I mean, they've had a lot of years to correct this course. And, you know, so far self-policing has not been a strong suit of big tech. So it's interesting we're seeing like the Competition Bureau of Canada issuing a warning and actually issuing a fine to a small company last year who had generated out of Montreal fake positive reviews from third parties. And we're seeing the FTC in the States making noises about legislation. So maybe now we're going to change course. I don't know.
Vass Bednar [00:04:42] I think it's a big maybe, but it's a cool one because it's kind of a test of policing the internet and content. To say that these online spaces may be liable for what is false and deceiving. Right? This is ultimate deception, right? Bad information, incorrect information on their site. Or is it just the people or entities that are posting them?
Katrina Onstad [00:05:04] That's how it feels, right? Like you do feel deceived.
Vass Bednar [00:05:07] What did you buy?
Katrina Onstad [00:05:09] I bought some compression packing cubes.
Vass Bednar [00:05:12] Okay.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:12] Rip o'rama.
Vass Bednar [00:05:14] Yeah.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:14] Despite the five star reviews and you kind of know going in, right? You can just sort of sense it smells bad. There's 8000 of the same item, all of which get five star reviews. And so you just close your eyes, hold your nose and click right, and then they rip.
Vass Bednar [00:05:33] Yeah. But you didn't write a review about that they ripped. So you kind of didn't pay it forward there. Again this whole system is completely based on voluntary labor, which is also something that interests me, this idea that every purchase that I make could be an opportunity for me to take time away from something else and critique it for what? This imagined greater good, that someone else might purchase this and get as much joy from, like a Tupperware...or...
Katrina Onstad [00:06:03] That's the best version of it though, right? Is that you are helping somebody else, like peer to peer over the garden fence with your neighbor, that exchange of information. But what it often feels like is that you're being enlisted to do unpaid labor as a marketer for a company that you don't really care about. So get out of my inbox, because I'm not going to review those compression bags that I just bought yesterday.
Vass Bednar [00:06:26] Yeah.
Katrina Onstad [00:06:27] So who do we want to talk to about this?
Vass Bednar [00:06:29] We want to talk to Professor Joseph Reagle. He's at Northwestern University, and he wrote a book called Reading the Comments, which is all about how we assert our voice online in ways big and small. So it's not just about reviews, but he's somebody who's been thinking for a long time now, quite carefully and critically about what it means to engage in reviews and where we could be going. So I'm pretty excited.
Katrina Onstad [00:06:54] Are we going to encourage our listeners to review this episode?
Vass Bednar [00:06:58] We're not going to encourage people to review it. We hope that we created an episode that people will like and that they'll feel inclined to share. But we're- I don't want to compel anyone to, like, go that extra mile and write a review.
Katrina Onstad [00:07:11] I do, I want to compel them. And if they don't, we're going to hire bots.
Vass Bednar [00:07:14] We already hired bots. This is Lately. All right, let's get started. Our guest, Doctor Joseph Reagle, has locked his dog in the washroom so that we can have a quiet conversation. We're going to find out how long the dog lasts in there. Hello, Joseph. Tell us, how did you get interested in online reviews?
Joseph Reagle [00:07:48] I'm, a habitual comment reader. And one of the things I realized is I'm what a social scientists calls, though I don't often say it correctly, a maximiser, which means that I want to find out the best way to do things, that I want to optimize things. And so when I'm buying something, I had a colleague once who said I would just ask Joseph what to buy because it's going to save me hours of work. And in some ways, I enjoy reading the comments and look at the ratings and reviews and creating spreadsheets and trying to optimize the best thing. In other ways, I realize it's kind of an illness and it drives me a little bit nuts. Online comments and reviews in particular are like catnip to me, and I started reading them and posting them as soon as I could, and I just became fascinated with it as not only a place to become more informed, but the culture of it, the dynamics of it, and the weirdnesses of it, as well as the manipulations and the abuses of it. And I talked about all of those things in that book.
Vass Bednar [00:08:47] Could you tell us a little bit more about the weirdness that you see? I'm so fascinated that you don't turn away from reviews that they are sort of magnetic to you.
Joseph Reagle [00:08:56] There is a whole culture, particularly on Amazon, like 15 years ago, of people writing funny reviews. George Takei, Mr. Sulu of Star Trek has participated in some of those, and they're just an interesting view into some of the things that people are fascinated with and preoccupied with or making fun with. So I don't know if you remember that sort of meme with the three wolves howling at the moon. There is this t shirt.
Vass Bednar [00:09:22] I bought that shirt.
Joseph Reagle [00:09:22] Oh, you had one, right? Did you read the reviews?
Vass Bednar [00:09:25] 100%. So this is a circa 2008/2009 iconic internet meme before memes existed. And it's just a casual t shirt with a picture of three wolves howling at the moon. But people started having so much fun in the Amazon reviews, it almost became like a message board where people would kind of try to one up each other with their purported review of the shirt, talking about how powerful it made them, you know, insinuating that it turned them into a wolf, and just that this, again, casual t shirt called the Mountain Three Wolf Moon short sleeved T was actually completely transformative. And it was just a really fun, kind of playful moment on the internet.
Joseph Reagle [00:10:09] Yeah, people were like wearing this review. And sometimes the reviews are perplexing and bemusing, but in a more significant way. So one of my favorite reviews was someone posted a review for a smoke detector and a carbon monoxide detector and it said, like, saved my son's life four out of five stars. And that then prompts the question of, well, what do these stars mean? What do one, two, three, four, or five stars mean? And you can take that from a psychological perspective. You can take it from a cultural perspective. And I liken some of that to even the medical field. Like when you go see a doctor and they say rate your pain on a 1 to 10 scale, what does that mean? And there are all these different scales apparently when I looked into it, you know, there're scales that are more relevant for children, there's scales that are more relevant to maybe senior citizens. Do you show little pictograms? Do you show smiley and frowny faces? So a lot of the weirdness that we see on the internet actually has a lot of social science and culture behind it as well, which I find fascinating.
Vass Bednar [00:11:13] Can you tell me a little bit more about the psychology behind our faith in reviews? What hold do they still have over us, whether we're writing or reading them?
Joseph Reagle [00:11:24] Yeah, well, I think there are people like myself who just love reviews and want to be informed. The reason they're so important and why they are now $1 billion industry, is because one of the challenges of early internet commerce back in the 90s was most of us at that time could walk into a store and try on a shoe. And when commerce went online, there was this problem that economists call the information asymmetry. So one party to the transaction has a lot more information about that product than another party. And how do you overcome that information asymmetry? Well, you can get really good return policies. And we've seen Amazon do that over time. But you can also allow and permit consumer reviews. And that was one of the things that was supposed to bridge that gap about people being uncertain what to buy online. Eventually people said, okay, I now have a couple of merchants I can trust online, and that was really the first issue. But the second issue is, even if I trust the merchant, how do I know this is a product that I can benefit from and value? That's what reviews were supposed to do, along with really good return policies. And that's why they're now as big as a business as they are. And why we see so much scam and fraud and fakery.
Vass Bednar [00:12:36] To the point of fraud and fakery. The FTC had recently made an assessment that if they could fight fake reviews, it could increase consumer welfare by as much as $15 billion. It's a big number. How important is an online review to a business itself?
Joseph Reagle [00:12:53] It could be huge. Obviously, just intuitively, if you get hammered with a bunch of really negative reviews, particularly if you're, say, a restaurant and they're casting aspersions on your cleanliness or your health. That can be significant. Some economists have actually tried to quantify this to some extent, to try to figure out like, well, how much was that fraction of a star worth in terms of revenue and sales and restaurant bookings? And it is significant, and I think it's become even more significant over time. I mean, this is one of the problems when you have a marketplace that becomes infected with scams and fraud is if you're an honest restaurant, how can you even compete when it only takes one bad competitor to be leaving bad reviews on you and puffing themselves up? So it's a systemic issue, and I'm glad the FTC is trying to take some action on this. For example, they recently issued a proposal about some things they could do to crack down on the sale and purchasing of fake reviews. But that law, for example, if it goes into effect, wouldn't affect third party review sites like Yelp and Google. And there's also plenty of fraud and fakery on Yelp and Google as well. So in the United States, the regulatory context has been kind of patchwork. I'm not sure about Canada myself. Sorry.
Vass Bednar [00:14:15] Hey, you said sorry, which is a Canadian word, but I do know that Canada's Competition Bureau, it recently issued a warning. So they sent a flair out to companies using employees to post fake reviews. So it does seem like our institutions are recognizing the problem of fake reviews or just how reviews can be weaponized. Sometimes a review as you touch on as well, is so inauthentic, it's intended to be punitive, to punish a restaurant that took a particular position during the pandemic, or wanted people to wear masks, or has a particular ownership. This is a way the feedback system is kind of hijacked. There's been a politicizing of reviews, and I wondered why you pointed to the past ten years. Is that about the increasing digitization of the economy that a company has to participate in that exchange or solicitation of feedback, because it's important for search engine optimization? Are reviews just an expectation now?
Joseph Reagle [00:15:18] I think they are. I think that's right. If you're not participating, if you're not on Yelp, if you don't have a Google review page, if you don't have social media accounts where people can say nice things about you, your business is going to suffer significantly every once in a while. There's the interesting exception where someone says I'm being manipulated or abused online. Maybe they can go to a local news source, or maybe they make a game of it. Like there was a restaurant that said we only want one star reviews, and they made fun with it and they got lots of one stars reviews, and they got a lot of positive attention because of that. And in their very unique and novel circumstance they could manage, but most businesses can't do that.
Vass Bednar [00:15:59] Could you tell us a little bit more about all the different places fake reviews could come from?
Joseph Reagle [00:16:04] They can come from most anywhere. Some of the largest spaces they have cracked down on a little bit. But you know, there's websites where you can hire someone in the neighborhood, maybe to rake your leaves, like Fiverr or TaskRabbit used to be able to find lots of people offering or wanting to buy fake reviews on those websites. There are things known as like Instagram pods. So if you're an influencer and you want people to like or.
Vass Bednar [00:16:28] Subscribe or something.
Joseph Reagle [00:16:29] Promote your particular posts or subscribe like for like used to be an old saying back in the Twitter days. Whereas if you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back sort of thing. There are lots of places. They're not that furtive. They're not necessarily on the darknet, really. All you have to do is find a Facebook group and to be a little bit sympathetic to the platforms, though, I've also been somewhat critical. It's really is a game of whack a mole where, you know, take down onto Facebook groups that were doing this sort of thing and people just find another set of Facebook groups, or they move to another platform where the issue hasn't become as pronounced. And keeping up with all of that is a real challenge. But just the reviews for things like I wrote a new book. Could you write some good reviews on that book? And I'll pay you ten bucks or 15 bucks. When I looked at it like ten years ago, that's about kind of what I went for for a decent quality review. I don't mean five star. I mean it looked like a good review. It looked authentic. That's not going to go away. And it makes sense to chase them and try to do what we can. But it is a game of whack a mole.
Vass Bednar [00:17:30] Well, sometimes whac-a-mole can be fun and productive. We could be optimistic about Whac-a-mole. Have you been able to observe who's been hit the hardest by the growth of fake or weaponized reviews? Who are the winners and losers?
Joseph Reagle [00:18:01] I think it's particularly difficult for small business owners because they're not as capable and don't have the same momentum to buffet, the torrent that might befall them when someone starts harassing them online with negative reviews. And then in terms of books and movies, there's that practice known as astroturfing. So for some particular reason, perhaps it's ideological, like there is a Michael Jackson biography that came out that fans didn't like, and they started leaving very bad reviews on that. Young adult fiction authors is a very, politicized, oddly enough, space where people can leave really bad reviews for one another. Goodreads became a battleground in a number of these cases, because one of the things they did is they created a feature where you could create lists of books that you might be interested in, and you could have as many lists as you wanted. But then some people created lists of books they would never read, and authors found themselves on that list and became the source of a significant controversy at the time.
Vass Bednar [00:19:00] Well and Goodreads was later acquired by Amazon. And in your book, when you kind of take us back to the early promise of the feedback economy, hyper democratized, hearing from peers, these authentic, playful, crisp online forms of writing. Amazon, in the beginning, you share through your research, actually paid book reviewers. Given that Amazon was willing to invest in paid reviewers to build trust with their firm initially, how could or should the review economy change through firm investments if they need to rebuild trust given all the fakery, bots and spam that we currently see?
Joseph Reagle [00:19:41] That's an interesting question. And even if Amazon, in its very earliest of days, had a couple of dozen book reviewers on hand. It's difficult to imagine, given the scale of e-commerce today, how you might have something similar such that you didn't need crowdsourced reviews. And there is often this moment when we look at the digital age where something first arises and people are really excited and they can share information and they can share their enthusiasm. And there's places where you can read really good, in-depth reviews of things. But one of the sad consequences of the success of the online space, including the marketplace, is then it goes from what I call intimate serendipity, bumping into wonderful things, into a sort of filtered sludge, because people now see, 'this is a place where I can scam folks. This is a place where I can make money.' And it's challenging because I would like to think it would be in the interest of places like Yelp and Amazon to improve the quality of the reviews that appear on their sites, and they say they are interested in that, and they do sometimes take actions, but I wouldn't think it's their biggest concern. Their biggest concern originally was growth, and then it was monetization. In the United States, there's a law called the Communications Decency Act, and there's a section called section 230 and section 230 said platforms are not responsible for the content that is posted on their platforms. And so that meant that even if they chose to moderate maybe some of the most egregious stuff, they still wouldn't be liable for the content that is posted, for instance, if someone is faking a review. And that really allowed the digital economy and the platforms to flourish and grow over the years. But we are now at a point for a number of reasons, where section 230 and this notion of platforms shouldn't be responsible for the content that is on the platforms is being questioned. And you mentioned the FTC they're now thinking about can we take more action on this front? But I mentioned it doesn't apply to Google reviews, to Yelp reviews, and some of these third party review websites because they will make a 230 claim. They will say, we are not responsible for the fake reviews that are being posted on our platform. What the FTC seems to be doing is they do want to and seem to have some capacity to to say, look, if you're actually selling fake reviews, if you're buying fake reviews, then we think we might be able to take an action against you. And they have taken some ad hoc actions in the past, and they would like to reinforce that by way of a much more explicit rule. But it's still not quite what we might need to really address this issue. And going way back to your original question, like how much should companies spend to do this? I don't know, but I think it would be a significant investment. I don't know if they want to make that investment. Moderation for these large platforms in general is also an issue. You know, just with, say, hate speech or harassment that hasn't had an easy solution. Originally, a lot of that work was outsourced to countries with lower cost of living and lower expenses to the companies. Interestingly, that's where a lot of the fake reviews are now coming from in places like Bangladesh and India. So it's not a global phenomenon. And I think of late, the tech companies have been really hoping that maybe artificial intelligence would allow them to solve this in some way.
Vass Bednar [00:23:09] Right. I had noticed some commentary online around generative AI and how some platforms may want to use them with reviews. Google has shared, it took down 45% more fake reviews in 2023, thanks to a new algorithm, you have to also imagine that bots, farms, actors that engage in fake reviews try to learn the confines of those algorithmic systems so they can contort themselves around them. And of course, I wanted to add a somewhat recent announcement that there's a consortium, seems to be U.S. based, right, calling itself the Coalition for Trusted Reviews, which unites Amazon, Booking.com, Expedia, Glassdoor, TripAdvisor and a firm called Trustpilot in aiming to stop fake reviews at the source. I love that you brought up section 230, and how are ideas of the best way to govern our online world, our online marketplaces, has shifted, and that we expect more accountability from these platforms. Do you feel like this policy attention, coupled with the technological advances to kind of be more precise or detect fakery, is a turning point, or is it just another chapter in how our participation in online trust systems is evolving?
Joseph Reagle [00:24:28] You do have to be careful. So, for example, one of the marketing organizations, in their statement during their recent FTC informal hearings, said something like, look, if you make merchants liable for fake reviews, they won't even provide reviews at all. And is that what you want? And that's a good and a genuine question. So I would like to think, in the United States we're maybe moving in a positive direction. I think I would like to see these proposals about the FTC being able to be more explicit and direct on issues of people explicitly selling and buying fake reviews. I think that would be a good thing, but I've been around long enough to know that things can always change in the next 3 or 4 years, and who knows what things will look like then.
Vass Bednar [00:25:09] Well, can you imagine a world without reviews? Maybe this whole grand experiment of their review economy will fizzle or float away, and we'll substitute it with something better. But should we?
Joseph Reagle [00:25:24] No, I think there'll always be comments, and I think there will always be reviews, which are basically comments telling us what someone thinks about a particular review or service, how useful they are, how overrun they are with nonsense and scammery. I think that is the big open question. And one of the things when you do look at the internet over the decades, sometimes I use the word churn, but you see various services in various mediums and platforms come, and one of the ways you see this churn is with respect to authenticity. So, for example, there were lots of websites that came along and said, this is the place where you can be your authentic self. It was Facebook and then it was Instagram, and then there was an app a couple years ago called BeReal.
Vass Bednar [00:26:08] Right.
Joseph Reagle [00:26:08] And it randomly pinged you at a certain time of the day, everyone. And that's when you had to take a photo. But of course, they came up with mechanisms by which you could delay taking the photo. And now if you take the photo now, you'll have a couple more opportunities later in the day to take the photo. And of course, be real needs to monetize. They need to make some money. So they've been making deals and connections with various influencers and brands. And at some point, B-Real will probably be understood as not a very authentic place and they'll be another platform. So that churn of us always looking for the latest way to find authentic content, including reviews, is just going to keep happening. Maybe some of it will be more genuine and honest than otherwise, but that cyclic churn is definitely a feature of the internet that's not going to go away.
Vass Bednar [00:26:56] Well, to your point around honesty, there's a universe to look at online reviews as commentary that's kind of a form of citizenship in the online economy, right? For the people who are posting those authentic reviews that we're looking for, they're doing a huge public service for the greater good. We opened by you sharing how engaged you are in the comment kind of ecosystem. Can you tell me a little bit about a recent review that you posted?
Joseph Reagle [00:27:21] Oh, so I, like many people, have been very curious about the website Temu. It's a Chinese service that is spending a lot of money, and they're trying to break into the American market and they're competing with Amazon. And there's a couple of really interesting things about the website. One is they're spending a lot of money to acquire US customers. So I've heard it that they're losing $7 per purchase basically right now, in their move to acquire customers. The other thing is that it's extremely gamified. So you go on the website and there's a spinning wheel and maybe you land, and you get $100 coupon. And all the things that psychologists have learned about how to addict people to gambling machines and online apps. You will see there there's things blinking, saying there's only five of these products left. So it's very sticky, very kind of addictive. And there are also a lot of reviews on the website for some products that I can find, both on Amazon and on Temu, and Temu is typically half the cost. If it's cheap Chinese stuff and you don't mind waiting seven days, Temu's the place to go. But they have tons of reviews and from what I could see, they were all five stars and they were all really simple, stupid little reviews and you couldn't click on the reviewers and see kind of what else they were up to. So I was just really curious, is this legitimate or is this all just a farce? So I did buy a raincoat from my dog.
Vass Bednar [00:28:41] There we go.
Joseph Reagle [00:28:42] And it was like 40 bucks on Amazon and 20 bucks on Temu. And it was originally too small and I bought a couple of other products there. So I did want to leave some reviews of some of the products, like a bath mat that didn't take to washing very well. I left, I think, a two star review on that one, and I was curious where it would show up in the history and if it would show up at all. I was surprised to see that my one and two star reviews did show up on Temu, and I just checked before we spoke and they're still there, which I'm doubly surprised. And there at the top of the list. So I still can't figure out why so many of the reviews are five stars, and I haven't heard Temu at least saying anything about if they care about their reviews, and whether there's a lot of fakery or whether people are buying reviews there or not. But it's interesting to look at. And that's where I posted some recent reviews on a bath mat and a mirror that you could have in your shower, but it was really just a little thin piece of paper almost that was mirrored.
Vass Bednar [00:29:40] What?
Joseph Reagle [00:29:41] Yeah, it wasn't very good, but it cost $0.67. So, you know.
Vass Bednar [00:29:45] Worth the seven day wait. Our whole conversation together is kind of reviewing the feedback economy. And kicking the tires on it. What review would you leave for this system if you had to help somebody who was trying to decide whether they should believe in reviews at all?
Joseph Reagle [00:30:03] Take it with a very big spoon of salt. That would be the short of it.
Vass Bednar [00:30:08] Rock on. Thank you. And I hope your dog had a good time in the washroom.
Joseph Reagle [00:30:13] Yeah. Got to go rescue her.
Vass Bednar [00:30:14] You got to go rescue her. And I hope she enjoys her beautiful new raincoat. I didn't hear the review on that, but I'm glad to know she has one.
Joseph Reagle [00:30:21] Actually, the raincoat was good.
Vass Bednar [00:30:22] The raincoat was good.
Joseph Reagle [00:30:23] Raincoat is good.
Vass Bednar [00:30:36] Okay. You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar. And in our show notes, you can subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday. Wherever you get your podcasts.