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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

#41

Post by LorenPechtel »

lobocinza wrote: post #37
pydry wrote: post #22

https://www.amazon.com/Xi-Jinping-Governance-English-Version... I can see some non 5 star reviews here.

Score is 3.7 but it has 4 1-star reviews and 2 5-star reviews so real score should be 2,3. It's inflated somehow.

Amazon ratings never match the reviews--the problem is you can have ratings without reviews. I dislike it but it's common with most places that allow reviews.

Generally I don't care too much about the rating, I look at the negative reviews and see what they are complaining about. If there is a pattern of apparently legitimate gripes avoid. If it's a bunch of garbage ignore them. (I've seen many, many a one-star review because the buyer didn't understand what they were getting and the "fault" with product is that it won't do something it was never intended to do and in no way implies that it will do.)

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

#42

Post by vaxman »

Keep everything distributed thru Amazon bc it will make it easier to incrementally swap out the producers with new ones setting up in Mojave/Sonora, Ohio Valley, etc. Next 3T biz is recreating the Chinese supply chain in America bc there is no cure for what China has.

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

#44

Post by wdr1 »

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.

> Reviews are meaningless, they have been for a long time now.

That doesn't make this okay.

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

#45

Post by codeddesign »

laurent123456 wrote: post #34

Looks like the book is being review bombed on Amazon.com probably in part because of this news (and probably in part because it's a rubbish book).

“Amazon has noticed unusual reviewing activity on this product. Due to this activity, we have limited this product to verified purchase reviews.”

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

#46

Post by lobocinza »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #41
lobocinza wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Score is 3.7 but it has 4 1-star reviews and 2 5-star reviews so real score should be 2,3. It's inflated somehow.

Amazon ratings never match the reviews--the problem is you can have ratings without reviews. I dislike it but it's common with most places that allow reviews. Generally I don't care too much about the rating, I look at the negative reviews and see what they are complaining about. If there is a pattern of apparently legitimate gripes avoid. If it's a bunch of garbage ignore them. (I've seen many, many a one-star revie…

Yep. But paid reviews and FUD campaigns are destroying that.

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

#48

Post by JohnFen »

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.

If the off-site review is on a product review blog or website, then I don't think it's likely to be any better than the ones on Amazon.

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

#49

Post by JohnFen »

Spivak wrote: post #18
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.

> switch to metrics like number of sales and number of people who recommend it.

Which is also largely meaningless.

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

#50

Post by robbedpeter »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #17
informationally wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Yelp is shady af.
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