If they cared I think they should adopt a combination of Valve's review graphs, and stackexchange's system of upvoting privileges.
That combined with moderation is a pretty good system.
Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
111–120 of 161 posts
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can’t identify the review bombers. These are 3rd parties hiring the reviewers to leave reviews. That hiring process takes place offline (from the perspective of your site), so you have no way to monitor and detect these directly. 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 re…
It’s trivial under current systems. But once you start placing higher value on verified identities, those millions of bombers are going to turn out to be a lot smaller.
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the biggest loss I could imagine. I would stop using Amazon or use a third party review site.
Reviews on Amazon are heavily gamed and you should not trust them at all. I get little business cards offering gift cards for 5 star reviews regularly. Product listings get swapped for entirely different products while the review stay.
What works for me is, the reviews should fall off like a neat stair case, 5s the most, then 4s, 3s, 2s and 1s. If the 1s are bigger than the 2s by a lot, it's usually the classic "Sell 500 good quality ones, get the reviews, switch to the knock offs".
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#114They just had to stick some racebait in there:
> Corrain's downfall came after internet sleuths published a Google document detailing a number of Goodreads accounts praising Crown of Starlight and giving low reviews to works by other writers, many of them people of color.
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#115Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. Academic grading does not. Academics will never change; the humanities will never go along. 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…
> Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. I don't quite see how that applies? Those are straight up/down/tie. And not subjective at all, like book quality.
I thought there were some studies done that showed that 5-star rating systems can give worse results than a simple thumbs up/down rating. IIRC that's why Netflix moved to a simpler rating system (though they added a "two thumbs up" at some point).
While on first glance it might seem useful to have the nuance of being able to award between 1 and 5 stars, those intermediate star rankings tend to mean different things to different people, so a 2-star rating from one person might mean something fairly different coming from someone else.
Also consider how Uber/Lyft ratings are decidedly nonlinear. Anything below 5 stars -- even 4 stars -- essentially means there was a fairly large problem, and drivers will get "fired" by the platform well before their average even drops to 4.0. If any platform would benefit from a simple thumbs up/down rating system, I think it's that one.
> And not subjective at all, like book quality.
Certainly in chess and tennis they're not subjective, but a simple thumbs up/down just means "I liked this" or "I didn't like this". Sure, if you only have a handful of reviews, that maybe doesn't tell you much, but as you accumulate more, the average starts being more useful. And of course this doesn't preclude the option of allowing people to write something in addition to the binary choice.
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no motivation for amazon to improve Goodreads. Why would they? The audience isn't going anywhere.
Eh, I have definitely used it less and less after A bought them/they sold out to A.
I think it had already been going downhill before the acquisition
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can’t identify the review bombers. These are 3rd parties hiring the reviewers to leave reviews. That hiring process takes place offline (from the perspective of your site), so you have no way to monitor and detect these directly. 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 re…
It’s trivial under current systems. But once you start placing higher value on verified identities, those millions of bombers are going to turn out to be a lot smaller.
It doesn't take millions to boost a specific product's sales. As few as a thousand fake reviews can get the job done. And bombers will find ways to corrupt the verified reviewers, since their reviews will go up in value. And the cost for Amazon to verify the reviewers is really important to take into consideration. If verified reviewers end up being untrustworthy, they've put in that effort (time and money) for nothing!
This is really just a special case of the wider issue of fraud. And I'm fairly convinced of the argument that the optimal amount is nonzero [1]. A further wrinkle to this problem is that fraud tends to only get more sophisticated over time, so the costs of fighting it always go up. At some point we may reach a scenario where fraud is so rampant that entire business models become non-viable.
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the biggest loss I could imagine. I would stop using Amazon or use a third party review site.
Reviews on Amazon are heavily gamed and you should not trust them at all. I get little business cards offering gift cards for 5 star reviews regularly. Product listings get swapped for entirely different products while the review stay.
It’s very easy to look through and figure out which products have mostly bullshit reviews and it’s definitely not the vast majority of them.
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#119They just had to stick some racebait in there: > Corrain's downfall came after internet sleuths published a Google document detailing a number of Goodreads accounts praising Crown of Starlight and giving low reviews to works by other writers, many of them people of color.
I had the same reaction, however if you read the linked Google Doc from the article, "Lily" (the author under a pseudonym) even mentions how racist "her" account is.
That does strike me as the author being aware of her own choices and 'getting ahead' of the story.
Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first part is false > Many of the books given one-star ratings were written by people of colour That is not 'specifically targeting.' Why do you have to make this about race?
The list of the authors targeted have all been people of color, iirc. Given publishing is like 75+% white, it's very improbable to just accidentally target half a dozen or more debuts and they just all happen to not be white. Additionally, there is a conversation that the author faked having with a "friend". The "friend" actually admits to targeting poc authors in order to "sabotage" cait.
Whilst I don't disagree with your conclusion, the sibling comments cover:
- The subgenre this all happened in has a very different makeup than western publishing broadly, and
- The authors targeted were not all 'people of colour'.
I agree she was likely secondarily racially motivated in some way - maybe due to trust in that subgenre, or the view in some area of the internet that 'people of colour' cannot be questioned. Or maybe she's just a racist killing two birds with one stone. She seems a serial liar, so I doubt we'll ever know for sure.