91–100 of 161 posts
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.
I would say the direction is the opposite. Assholes dont seek people out, people seek out the assholes.
In the real world, people dont walk up to strangers and ask them to disclose their most offensive opinion. However, on the internet people will scroll through pages of agreeable comments looking for something disagreeable.
The same is basically true for reviews too. The physical world default is you dont know what people think. The internet allows people to know what others think, including their dumb opinions, swings, and trends.
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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…
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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.
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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 most…
As for the individual reviewers, there are tens of thousands or millions of these, and review bombers can trivially cycle these in and out, so no individual reviewer is a “serial fake reviewer.”
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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.
I doubt it would cost a lot of money from Amazons perspective.
But yeah I agree Amazons incentives are not the same as their customers. They obviously have a lot of insight into what drives and lowers sales.
Maybe, although I seriously doubt it, at some point they will see enough reduction in sales to take action against poor quality products and their mispresentative reviews.
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.
And spoilers in book titles (the goodread ones, not the physical books)
Just a quick search for "a shocking twist" on goodreads finds many many books:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198614844-the-perfect-fa...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137436113-1800198272-978... (i have no idea who/what inputed the title here...) and how "unputdownable" is a word...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30514112-the-sister?from... ... i'll see the twist coming, you just told me about it!
...
Great, now I know that the killer (or whatever) they catch right before the end isn't the real one, and that there will be a twist in the last few pages.
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://…
The only thing missing is a country filter, so I can just disable reviews from certain countries prone to excessive national pride and the accompanying "that Island is ours, it wasn't on your map. ALL REVIEWS BE BAD" completely. The five good reviews out of these areas never outweigh the rest.
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.
> 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. And spoilers in book titles (the goodread ones, not the physical books) Just a quick search for "a shocking twist" on goodreads finds many many books: https://www.goodreads.com/book…
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The sock puppet accounts were given stereotypically of-color names, and targeted authors were disproportionately of-color. There’s pretty clear indication of bias there. > They posted a 31-page Google document containing screenshots of the activity of a number of accounts, with usernames including “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young”, suspected to have been created by Corrain. > “There’s something extra despicable about usi…
Is "Chantal" a stereotypical POC name in your opinion? News to me. You have a lot more confidence on a bunch of people doing OSS "research" than I do. The quote itself says "suspected". I would go as far as to say that believing this was racially motivated (rather than just a scummy move) based on this "evidence" is weird, but not surprising.
Interesting. I would have guessed that Chantal is a 90% black name, but I was wrong. It is only slightly more common for black women, and there are many whites with the name too. This may be a regional distinction.