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They show a graph of positive/negative reviews over time, making review bombing stand out.
If Valve identifies the anomaly as being off-topic they can even mark it as such an exclude the reviews from affecting the overall review scores. Users who don't like this can even disable the exclusion and get the "raw" review score.
More info from when this was introduced: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
There will always be many many assholes. In the past, time and space have insulated us from them. But now we have the internet. The assholes can see you, touch you, talk to you, even decide what you are allowed to say. This is a mark against the internet.
This is spot-on, and I upvoted it. The Block & Mute are what makes them go away.
Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.
Steam handles this problem fairly well, IMO. They show a graph of positive/negative reviews over time, making review bombing stand out. If Valve identifies the anomaly as being off-topic they can even mark it as such an exclude the reviews from affecting the overall review scores. Users who don't like this can even disable the exclusion and get the "raw" review score. More info from when this was introduced: https://…
While sites like Netflix use all the AI they can muster to tune and individualize their recommendation systems, the review systems we know best rely on straight democratic votes that can be gamed. Or worse, they rig the votes for profit.
The AI objective function should be to synthesize advice relevant to each user. As a component of this, treat each reviewer as a tennis tournament, to develop a tennis rating system summarizing reviews? One could apply weights tuned to each user for the relevance of each other user's reviews. If there was a shadow economy behind these uses, as if a hedge fund had to pay pennies to include each voter, the "review bomb" voter's inputs would quickly become useless, and be disregarded.
What we have instead is singularly dumb. Is there room for a startup here? Google page rank was obvious in hindsight. Won't this too be obvious in hindsight?
I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve.
> I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve. I'm surprised Amazon is actually doing something, anything, related to Goodreads, including 'asking users'. The website feels abandoned.
What does that mean?
Almost ready to implement the concept of showing the reviews of only well know or recognized user and not anyone 's 2¢ on any book. Maybe some people with a good understanding and able to produce a quality criticism about a book. We could even nickname them "critics"?
To me this is just one in a continue set of examples of GR's lack of care for their platform. The issues mentioned that lead to and encourage this behaviour have existed for well over a decade. Their solution is to make it a userland issue.
Name one social platform that doesn't have this issue. It's not a trivial thing to solve. I don't want to have to submit my passport to share a book review.
Why is it important that you, a person apparently unwilling (hyperbole aside) to prove that you have actually read a particular book, should be able to transmit (ostensibly) your opinions about said book into the heads of other potential readers via a software platform? A small number of verified reviews is almost certainly better than a large number of unverified reviews, for exactly the reason highlighted by OP's article: when there are few or no controls on who or what can post however many reviews, the system is inevitably exploited by bad actors, and said actors often operate at scales that dwarf the impact of a single legitimate reviewer.
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.
But seriously, I have a similar feeling about book deals. That is, it's a great - and legal - way to pay (off) someone for "prior service", meanwhile the book's sales are shite. But selling books was never really the point.