Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing' • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#51

Post by chongli » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

thenerdhead wrote: post #46

chongli wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Review bombing isn’t just negative. People also review bomb their competitors with positive reviews in order to get their competitors’ listings taken down. How do we stop that? The harder we police against fake positive reviews, the more we incentivize this sort of anticompetitive sabotage.

I mean some straight-forward ones might be... Accounts need to verify themselves somehow. Accounts should be old enough before contributing reviews. Accounts should only be able to review X amount of titles an hour/day/etc. Moderators should have tools to identify influx of reviews and decide mitigation strategies. Moderators should be able to put up a banner on a title that may be review bombed so the community can…

The question is not whether they can detect an influx of fake positive reviews on a product, it’s what to do about it. How do you tell the difference between someone review bombing their own products with fake positive reviews and their competitors review bombing them with fake positive reviews to try to get them banned?

Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should stop banning listings for that and focus on policing the reviews themselves. But that actually turns out to be a very difficult problem in itself! Sellers of crappy products will often include notes that induce/bribe the customers into leaving fake reviews. A seller of cheap products can rack up thousands of verified purchaser fake reviews this way.

They can also do things like hire a botnet to purchase the product in bulk using thousands of hacked PCs all over the world and get those PCs to review the product, generating more fake verified purchaser reviews.

In the end, if you don’t ban sellers for fake positive reviews then you run into these tactics and it’s very hard to police individual reviews. If you do decide to ban sellers then you have the opposite problem of dealing with sabotage.

As for detecting “influxes”, that problem is far from trivial. If a review bomber is using a botnet of thousands of PCs then it’s quite trivial to stagger the timing of the fake reviews over a period of weeks. It’s not like they’re forced to push a button and have them all hit the review page at the same time.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#52

Post by fbdab103 » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

thenerdhead wrote: post #26

Maybe start with showing reviews that are verified or somehow legitimate. There is a problem on both ends of inflating and bombing titles. I personally cannot stand the former where publishing teams will buy or fake mass amounts of reviews to play into the NYT bestseller formulae. It is fairly easy to tell an ad hominem in a "review bomb" in my experience. Usually it relates around politics or something controversial…

Not just reviews, I thought it was a well established practice to purchase one's own book to ram it up the rankings.

I have also heard that it is a backdoor way of spending political campaign money. Candidate "writes" a book, the Campaign to Elect X buys a warehouse of the books, candidate then gets the profits.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#53

Post by acdha » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #39

This doesn't seem like an impossible problem to solve for at least 80% of cases. I'm sure there's a long tail of review bombing, but in any given week, how many different titles are being brigaded? They say there are 300 volunteer "librarians" who moderate reviews: a relatively safe plan would be to get another couple dozen of them, give them a dashboard to show clusters of unusual review activity, and see how many w…

It’s problem for Amazon not wanting to spend money. They could significantly reduce the problem by taking Goodreads off of back burner status instead of expecting volunteers to do it for free.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#54

Post by AlbertCory » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #34

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not super difficult to only show reviews you are highly confident AREN'T completely fake. Instead they prioritize having as many reviews as possible - when possibly a majority of them are fake. And the cost is - the reviews are completely meaningless. All they care about is engagement - and if users have to dig through reviews manually trying to sort out signal from noise - that's engagement to them, not an awfu…

Not all they care about is engagement. They also care about keeping costs down. If costs were no object they could simply hire well-paid, trustworthy, professional reviewers to review every product and listing. These high quality reviews could establish their site as the gold standard, strengthening the brand (think Apple levels of brand value) and drawing even more users. But all of this could be so expensive they’d…

Meet Kirkus Reviews. They will actually read it and write a (I guess) well-reasoned review of it.

But you, the author, have to pay them. When I checked, it was $450.

If you're an author, you also get a deluge of offers to write a review. I didn't follow up on any of these, but you'd assume that they couldn't get any repeat business if they panned your book.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#55

Post by yardstick » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #51

thenerdhead wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean some straight-forward ones might be... Accounts need to verify themselves somehow. Accounts should be old enough before contributing reviews. Accounts should only be able to review X amount of titles an hour/day/etc. Moderators should have tools to identify influx of reviews and decide mitigation strategies. Moderators should be able to put up a banner on a title that may be review bombed so the community can…

The question is not whether they can detect an influx of fake positive reviews on a product, it’s what to do about it. How do you tell the difference between someone review bombing their own products with fake positive reviews and their competitors review bombing them with fake positive reviews to try to get them banned? Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should stop banning listings for that and foc…

Sounds like there is a need for identity verified reviews. Ie the account doing the review has provided some government issued id during their registration process. Then add in another criteria that they can’t post reviews unless their account is say 3 months old (or some timeframe).

You could still record unverified reviews, but hide them and their ratings by default until the user explicitly wants to see them.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#56

Post by maximinus_thrax » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #21

siva7 wrote: post #14

How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then

Fined by who, and for what? What a strange comment. Why would the government police such matters?

> Why would the government police such matters?

Because at the end of the day this is fraud?

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#57

Post by barbazoo » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

bastard_op wrote: post #13

barbazoo wrote: post #3

I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve.

If they wanted to, they would. They obviously don't care. How this is any different from their poor handling of fake reviews on all the Chinese garbage that floods their normal sales I don't know.

That’s right, it’s not

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#58

Post by bhpm » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

I’m interested to hear what value HN folks have in book reviews from strangers. I thought the value in something like Goodreads would be to create a community of people you know IRL to share what you read. I don’t see myself having much in common with a bunch of people I don’t know.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#59

Post by chongli » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

yardstick wrote: post #55

chongli wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not whether they can detect an influx of fake positive reviews on a product, it’s what to do about it. How do you tell the difference between someone review bombing their own products with fake positive reviews and their competitors review bombing them with fake positive reviews to try to get them banned? Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should stop banning listings for that and foc…

Sounds like there is a need for identity verified reviews. Ie the account doing the review has provided some government issued id during their registration process. Then add in another criteria that they can’t post reviews unless their account is say 3 months old (or some timeframe). You could still record unverified reviews, but hide them and their ratings by default until the user explicitly wants to see them.

I'm a legit user of Amazon. My account is probably over 20 years old. I've ordered tons and tons of products. I've never reviewed anything, however I have received products containing "gift certificates" promising me a $10 reward for leaving a fake review (of the product I just purchased). How does Amazon stop me from accepting this bribe?

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#60

Post by Larrikin » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

yardstick wrote: post #55

chongli wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not whether they can detect an influx of fake positive reviews on a product, it’s what to do about it. How do you tell the difference between someone review bombing their own products with fake positive reviews and their competitors review bombing them with fake positive reviews to try to get them banned? Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should stop banning listings for that and foc…

Sounds like there is a need for identity verified reviews. Ie the account doing the review has provided some government issued id during their registration process. Then add in another criteria that they can’t post reviews unless their account is say 3 months old (or some timeframe). You could still record unverified reviews, but hide them and their ratings by default until the user explicitly wants to see them.

Who is going to scan in their government ID and send it to a book review site except for the people on the pay roll of a book publishing company that requires their employees to register an account on their first day of work so they can "review" books in three months.