Revain Pits Its Blockchain Platform against Fake Review Practices

Fake reviews, regardless of their extent, can do more harm than good to a business’s reputation. Many new, and even established companies resort to paying online marketers for engaging target audience through fake/paid testimonials. While this practice is grossly treacherous, it is still booming — sadly.

Customers turn out to be the biggest victims of such practices. Most of them rely on reviews from other fellow customers to judge the performance of a product/company they don’t fully understand. Incompetent businesses whose online profiles are flooded with negative feedbacks try to balance the situation by purchasing positive feedbacks. Thus, fake profiles are made and turned into the mouthpieces of these businesses online.

In even more horrible cases, competitors take up the mantle to tarnish their fellow players by hiring paid trolls. It simply affects the popularity of the business among new and old clients. Meanwhile, there is no way of knowing that who exactly write these bad reviews.

Using Blockchain to Bring More Transparency

Blockchain in recent years has emerged as the flag bearer of decentralization and transparency. Revain, a newly launched feedback platform, harnesses the true potential of blockchain in bringing out constructive feedback services. It is the first ever project that implements blockchain as a mean to ensure feedback legitimacy. But, to be honest, blockchain only makes the other half of the overall mechanism. Let’s try to understand the first half first.

Revain proposes to setup a Review Filtration mechanism which works in two consecutive stages: machine moderation performed by the AI and manual moderation done by the company. This ensures that none of the Revain employees participate in the moderation process; thus, ensuring platform’s integrity as a whole.

The project further utilizes machine learning and neural networks, a system which it refers as Review Automatic Filtering (RAF). It is the same system that is being implemented by big companies such as Instagram, Yandex.Market, and VK.

Revain also introduces a fresh approach to separate constructive comments from unproductive ones. This approach is called Tone Analyzer Natural Language Understanding, which focuses on a comment’s emotional range, language style, general essence, semantic blocks, and social tendencies. There are also additional filters that track the user’s geolocation, past activities, review characteristics, and others.

Once the reviews have passed RAF, Revain allows the company, at which they are intended, to review it. By that means, a company can either reject or accept a review, but the review will still be visible to the users. A company with high rejection score will be treated as untrustworthy, for obvious reasons.

These approved/rejected reviews are stored in parts, however. Mostly because the blockchains available today are not yet ready to store high data on them. Therefore, only a part of the review is stored on the blockchain, while the rest is saved on the Revain’ own Review Snapshot (RSS). This procedure ensures the integrity of decentralization.

Overall, Revain makes a strong case against the paid review mechanisms and provides:

• a strong resistance against paid reviews by making them economically impractical.
• rights to companies to reject fake reviews, so such fake reviewers lose their tokens.
• the ability to store reviews on Ethereum’s blockchain in the form of a smart contract — provably unmodifiable.
• providing quality reviewers with incentives in the form of RVN tokens, convertible to R tokens which can be traded on exchanges.

To know more about Revain and their services, please read the whitepaper here.