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Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

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

#71

Post by fragmede »

bhpm wrote: post #58

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.

That's an interesting perspective. A total stranger has gone much of the same trials and tribulations as me, simply due to the fact that they're human, and alive at the same time. Being born, how to eat, how to afford to eat.

If you know someone IRL, you don't magically have something in common with them that you didn't before. A stranger might be born in a foreign country so we don't have that in common. After I get to know them and become friends IRL, we're still not going to have that in common. So the idea that you don't have anything in common with people you don't know seems weird to me because of course you have things in common, you just haven't discovered them yet.

Is a book review by John Updike at all useful to me? I didn't go to Harvard and don't have that in common with him, so why would I value his book review?

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

#72

Post by somenameforme »

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.

The overwhelming majority of review bombs are from real people, of which ID would do nothing. Steam has shown a really simple solution the problem - a mixture of proof of purchase, and then algorithmically walling off 'irregular activity.' Review bombs on Steam remain relatively regular, but now have basically 0 impact - even extremely large scale ones like when somebody gains the ire of Chinese gamers.

Proof of purchase would require some modest effort on the part of publishers to create a workable and shared system, but it should otherwise be trivial to get going. Publishers have a strong motivation to opt-in since fake reviews are probably more detrimental than not to their bottom line.

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

#73

Post by somenameforme »

chongli wrote: post #59
yardstick wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm unsure if I'm playing devil's advocate or not, but should that not be allowed? That seems more about getting over the bias that people who are content with something are generally less inclined to leave a review than somebody who is unhappy with something. If you get something and it's complete crap, I doubt a $10 gift certificate is going to convince you to go write a positive review of it. If anything, that'll probably end up motivating you to write a negative review, with further mention of it.

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

#74

Post by sokoloff »

solardev wrote: post #36
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult for books where there's a strong culture of lending, both directly to individuals and from public libraries.

This won't stop people from lending things. It just means borrowers can't leave reviews. I'd rather have a much smaller set of verified reviews than a bunch of fake ones. Decreasing the quantity in this case often means improving the quality and signal to noise ratio.

In this case, someone who borrowed the book is more likely to be trustworthy (IMO) than someone who verifiably purchased it from the site hosting the reviews (particularly if reviews were limited to the latter).

It would be thought of as an advertising expense to buy books from the platform in order to qualify to write some of the first reviews.

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

#75

Post by solardev »

sokoloff wrote: post #74
solardev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won't stop people from lending things. It just means borrowers can't leave reviews. I'd rather have a much smaller set of verified reviews than a bunch of fake ones. Decreasing the quantity in this case often means improving the quality and signal to noise ratio.

In this case, someone who borrowed the book is more likely to be trustworthy (IMO) than someone who verifiably purchased it from the site hosting the reviews (particularly if reviews were limited to the latter). It would be thought of as an advertising expense to buy books from the platform in order to qualify to write some of the first reviews.

As a hypothetical, sure, I can see how that makes sense. However, verified purchaser reviews have been a helpful reality for the better part of a decade or so, across different media and vendors: games, physical goods, Amazon books, electronics, etc.

Even though it's an imperfect barrier to review quality, at least it is a barrier versus none, and time and time again retailers who've experimented with it have found it a useful signal.

Yes, you'll lose out on the borrowers who fell in love with a title, but they can always spend the $20 to buy that book to review it if they really want to (I've done that for things I loved, just to leave a review). But even if they don't, it's still usually a net win: you lose not just the honest reviewers but the 100x spam that outnumber them.

When shopping for low-cost products these days, it's not the individual review that matters anymore, just the aggregate ratings. So it doesn't really matter if a few borrowers don't get to leave their rating, it's still more useful for buyers to cut out the spam.

----------

Maybe a simple compromise is to just allow filtering (and adjust the rating) by "verified purchasers only", so you can see both the unfiltered and filtered scores. I'd just leave out the unverified ones altogether, myself, but others could see the raw scores and reviews if they wanted to.

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

#76

Post by lancesells »

habosa wrote: post #64

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. 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.

I would argue they have the users, which is probably more important than pristine data.

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

#77

Post by johnfn »

itsoktocry wrote: post #24
politelemon wrote: post #5

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.

Although I know you said this in jest, it got me thinking that it would be really fun to have a system where you have to submit answers to a short quiz about the book before you can submit your review. No reviews would be removed, but you would, if you wanted, be able to filter the global average by people who scored over a certain threshold on the quiz.

Probably you could even generate new questions every time with GPT, so that people couldn't cheat. This system would have a million problems, sure, but would it have more problems than the current system?

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

#79

Post by KittenInABox »

habosa wrote: post #64

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. 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.

There's no motivation for amazon to improve Goodreads. Why would they? The audience isn't going anywhere.

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

#80

Post by yardstick »

somenameforme wrote: post #72
yardstick wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The overwhelming majority of review bombs are from real people, of which ID would do nothing. Steam has shown a really simple solution the problem - a mixture of proof of purchase, and then algorithmically walling off 'irregular activity.' Review bombs on Steam remain relatively regular, but now have basically 0 impact - even extremely large scale ones like when somebody gains the ire of Chinese gamers. Proof of purc…

Once someone is identified as a serial review bomber, then you’d just ban them and all their reviews. Or at least flag their reviews so they aren’t shown by default (similar to a shadow ban).

That person could no longer write verified reviews. Maybe it’s a permanent ban, maybe it’s a 1-5 year ban. They wouldn’t be able to verify another account with their identity until the ban is listed.

Yeah Steam is good, but mostly because it is a very closed loop system as they own the entire transaction-review-lifecycle. Not soo easy with other things like books.

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