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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'

#81

Post by creer »

Pathogen-David wrote: post #61

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://…

Good one. Anyone knows other review sites that do provide more control on which reviews I get to see?

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

#82

Post by yardstick »

Larrikin wrote: post #60
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.

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.

If modern computer games have shown us anything, people will go out of their way (grind, pay) for shiny badges by their names, fancy skins, etc.

I’m sure many reviewers will enjoy having a special badge against their name. Not all, sure. We don’t need everyone’s reviews in this situation.

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

#83

Post by creer »

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…

So far "verified" has run into the issue of how to verify while maintaining privacy and while allowing "not purchased on this platform". Verified sounds gtreat in theory but it's very hard to imagine how it would work.

Separating account verification and restricting the amount of reviews allowed - separated from privacy-respecting reviews might be a direction. But currently it's hard to trust anyone's "privacy-respecting" features.

(My impression is that in consequence, currently, "verified" means "mostly positive".)

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

#85

Post by creer »

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…

That Steam idea of giving the viewer more options on how to filter the reviews sounds great actually: Let reviews come in, but allow the viewer to filter against accounts that burst reviews, or by country, etc. Pretty cool idea (because in particular it allows privacy.)

Although really the current concept of "review" is terrible. Few reviews are detailed and specific enough and multi-dimensional enough. They cannot be searched well enough (Although we might be nearly there with LLMs - asking them to critique a book from our point of view and preferences.) It's hard to follow reviewers that you have learned to trust (hard enough to notice them in the first place). Star ratings are not useful in the intended way and only a few sites ask for multi-dimensional star ratings (generally asking to rate irrelevant things :-) Bleh!

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

#86

Post by yardstick »

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?

False flag operations? Amazon slips their own false review gift certificate in. If you use it, they flag you as an ignorable reviewer (shadow ban or whatever).

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

#87

Post by chongli »

somenameforme wrote: post #73
chongli wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I think it is if the product itself is cheap enough. A $10 product where you get a free $10 gift certificate is essentially free. I think lots of people would be willing to leave a quick 5 star review in exchange for getting the thing they just bought for free, even if the product is kinda crappy. As long as it’s not totally broken and useless!

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

#88

Post by creer »

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.

Naively verified reviews is a way to enforce "mostly positive reviews" - at least in legal-threat-happy countries like the US or the UK.

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

#89

Post by chongli »

yardstick wrote: post #86
chongli wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

False flag operations? Amazon slips their own false review gift certificate in. If you use it, they flag you as an ignorable reviewer (shadow ban or whatever).

What incentive does Amazon have to do this? Best case scenario: they ban and alienate a bunch of customers who bought stuff on the site. Worst case scenario: they spend tons of money on these false flag operations and end up removing a lot of bestselling products from the site, reducing sales overall.

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

#90

Post by creer »

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?

You could report the bribe to Amazon, now and then. (If you believed they would do something about it.)
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