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Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

#11

Post by spiderice »

informationally wrote: post #3

Reviews are meaningless, they have been for a long time now. The right way to do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality. One of my reviews was removed once because it mentioned the author lacked expertise in the domain he was commenting on. It was about AI and the author was a historian. I recommended people skip the chapters about AI but apparently that was too critical.

> do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality.

Yelp begs to differ

Re: Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

#12

Post by informationally »

spiderice wrote: post #11
informationally wrote: post #3

Reviews are meaningless, they have been for a long time now. The right way to do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality. One of my reviews was removed once because it mentioned the author lacked expertise in the domain he was commenting on. It was about AI and the author was a historian. I recommended people skip the chapters about AI but apparently that was too critical.

> do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality. Yelp begs to differ

Yelp is a social network that also happens to have business reviews. So I don't mean a social network, I mean a site specifically focused on reviewing books and other consumer products. I don't mean some rando opening an app and writing their opinion about the food they just ate.

Re: Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

#16

Post by Spivak »

informationally wrote: post #12
spiderice wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality. Yelp begs to differ

Yelp is a social network that also happens to have business reviews. So I don't mean a social network, I mean a site specifically focused on reviewing books and other consumer products. I don't mean some rando opening an app and writing their opinion about the food they just ate.

I mean some random going to a website and writing their opinion on the book they read is a review site. You're basically just describing Goodreads.

If you mean professional critics then sure, but they have their own problems and are also divorced from reality but for different reasons than "randos."

Re: Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

#17

Post by GauntletWizard »

informationally wrote: post #12
spiderice wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality. Yelp begs to differ

Yelp is a social network that also happens to have business reviews. So I don't mean a social network, I mean a site specifically focused on reviewing books and other consumer products. I don't mean some rando opening an app and writing their opinion about the food they just ate.

Yelp is a company with a reputation for offering advertising services for reputation management. There's an inherent paradox in offering reviews: true anonymity can be review bombed. Moderated anonymity has to be paid for - and the companies being reviewed are willing to pay more.

I don't know if Yelp is honest in their reviews. I can't tell for certain. But they do have reputation management services for sale, and so you have to question who is the consumer, and who the product.

Re: Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

#18

Post by Spivak »

trash3 wrote: post #4

Amazon be like we removed not 5 star reviews (down votes) to protect feelings of our content creators.

I mean I honestly expect that Amazon will eventually end up realizing that asking people to rate products on a 0-5 or even a 0-1 scale produces garbage data (like every other site before it) and switch to metrics like number of sales and number of people who recommend it.

Re: Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

#19

Post by celestialpeasan »

Reminds me of the good'ol dynasties, those who "criticize the imperial court rashly" are getting lynched. The males in the family would be beheaded, while females and kids would be sold as slaves.

And in order to show the mercy of his imperial majesty, the execution of the males would be delayed to autumn.

Re: Amazon agreed to allow only five-star reviews for Xi’s book in China

#20

Post by throway453sde »

rdtwo wrote: post #9
killingtime74 wrote: post #7

Even with 5 stars is anyone going to read this? I would only if I was at the party school and my job depended on it

I’m sure a lot of careers depend on it

dude i spilled my coffee. Funny and true at the same time.
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