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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'

#131

Post by Xiol32 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #127
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://…

I too like their transparency, but for the opposite reason: I find review bombings are the only time reviews are actually useful. Reviews are a dime a dozen, positive or negative; they normally aren't useful for judging whether a product is worth buying. Review bombings on the other hand only happen when something happened to trigger the internet's sweaty wrath, and that is very useful as a unit of measure. Any parti…

Valuable if you want to find people bedwedding over LGBT representation or empowered women, sure.

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

#132

Post by CWuestefeld »

elektor wrote: post #8
superkuh wrote: post #2

I am asking Amazon to please let go of Goodreads and restore it to it's proper state before they ruined it. But neither of us is going to get what we want.

I too have given up on Goodreads and relocated to StoryGraph ( https://thestorygraph.com/ )

Thanks for the pointer. I've been checking this out, and it looks pretty good.

I can't find any way on the site to ask questions, either of the developers or of the community. What I'm trying to figure out is the semantics of their reading preferences exclusions.

The actual question asks about "types of content that you never want to read about", and that "about" confuses me. Suppose that I choose "racism" there. Does this indicate that I never want to read anything that somebody has tagged as racist (which I think is probably the case, but is less than useful because it seems like darn near everything gets tagged with that one way or another), or is the "about" saying that I don't want to read any meta-discussion of racism, that is, I don't want any books that are "about" racism - which is absolutely the case.

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

#134

Post by satvikpendem »

Dalewyn wrote: post #127
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://…

I too like their transparency, but for the opposite reason: I find review bombings are the only time reviews are actually useful. Reviews are a dime a dozen, positive or negative; they normally aren't useful for judging whether a product is worth buying. Review bombings on the other hand only happen when something happened to trigger the internet's sweaty wrath, and that is very useful as a unit of measure. Any parti…

How is that a useful metric at all? Usually it means that there is some controversy, with no value judgement on said controversy actually implied, if you are unfamiliar with that controversy. So unless you research every review bomb causing controversy, it's better to just ignore them.

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

#135

Post by Dalewyn »

Xiol32 wrote: post #131
Dalewyn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too like their transparency, but for the opposite reason: I find review bombings are the only time reviews are actually useful. Reviews are a dime a dozen, positive or negative; they normally aren't useful for judging whether a product is worth buying. Review bombings on the other hand only happen when something happened to trigger the internet's sweaty wrath, and that is very useful as a unit of measure. Any parti…

Valuable if you want to find people bedwedding over LGBT representation or empowered women, sure.

It's a great way to weed out woke nonsense, yes. It's also great to weed out draconian DRMs and EULAs, stealthy price hikes immediately prior to a sale, shitty developer behaviour in general, and other such factors I would not want to spend my money on.

Reviews by themselves don't tell me anything important, especially in times of peace. Review bombings on the other hand tell me there is or was a problem I might want to look into before I open my wallet, and that's very valuable information for making informed purchases.

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

#136

Post by Dalewyn »

satvikpendem wrote: post #134
Dalewyn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too like their transparency, but for the opposite reason: I find review bombings are the only time reviews are actually useful. Reviews are a dime a dozen, positive or negative; they normally aren't useful for judging whether a product is worth buying. Review bombings on the other hand only happen when something happened to trigger the internet's sweaty wrath, and that is very useful as a unit of measure. Any parti…

How is that a useful metric at all? Usually it means that there is some controversy, with no value judgement on said controversy actually implied, if you are unfamiliar with that controversy. So unless you research every review bomb causing controversy, it's better to just ignore them.

I do look into what the controversy that triggered the review bombing is. If it's a problem that I have issue with, I can think twice about hitting that big, green Purchase button.

But I wouldn't have that chance without the review bombing telling me there's something I might want to check first. Developers and publishers are very good (and incentivized) at hiding the problems review bombings can otherwise reveal.

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

#137

Post by pavel_lishin »

lancesells wrote: post #76
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.

It depends on what you use it for. I use it as a database of books I've read, and would liek to read, and sort them with tags. I could not give less of a shit about other users on the site.

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

#138

Post by piperswe »

Dalewyn wrote: post #135
Xiol32 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valuable if you want to find people bedwedding over LGBT representation or empowered women, sure.

It's a great way to weed out woke nonsense, yes. It's also great to weed out draconian DRMs and EULAs, stealthy price hikes immediately prior to a sale, shitty developer behaviour in general, and other such factors I would not want to spend my money on. Reviews by themselves don't tell me anything important, especially in times of peace. Review bombings on the other hand tell me there is or was a problem I might want…

"woke nonsense"

would you mind qualifying that? I'm not familiar with what "woke" actually means

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

#139

Post by achates »

johnfn wrote: post #77
itsoktocry wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If GPT could write the questions then surely it could also write the answers.

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

#140

Post by Silphendio »

piperswe wrote: post #138
Dalewyn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great way to weed out woke nonsense, yes. It's also great to weed out draconian DRMs and EULAs, stealthy price hikes immediately prior to a sale, shitty developer behaviour in general, and other such factors I would not want to spend my money on. Reviews by themselves don't tell me anything important, especially in times of peace. Review bombings on the other hand tell me there is or was a problem I might want…

"woke nonsense" would you mind qualifying that? I'm not familiar with what "woke" actually means

I also don't know what woke means, but I recall that Superhot VR got review-bombed after an "update" removed some content because it contained self-harm.
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