Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book • Hacker News Board

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#11

Post by mod » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:37 PM UTC

joelrunyon wrote: post #8

I don't think this is unique to Amazon. I've gotten this on the iTunes app store quite a bit. Low ratings from people who don't review any other products (or if they do, it looks super spammy). On top of that, the bad reviews tend to come in bunches (multiple in a day), are void of any actual useful feedback or complaints and are just vague & angry (sucks, ripoff, etc). I've had decent luck with having Apple remove a…

Of course in this case, he isn't getting bad reviews on his book. False good reviews on other books are pushing those "books" ahead of him.

Any type of system to respond would be useless for this particular problem.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#12

Post by jplahn » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

I wonder if any NLP approaches could yield an improvement on this? I immediately think of doing some NER on the review (looking for the title, authors, chapters, even specific topics) and if none of the above are mentioned, or at least not mentioned "enough", then it can be flagged for review as potential spam. Likewise, if you did sentiment analysis on a 5 star review, but the sentiment was either neutral or negative, it's likely not a very useful review.

I'm sure there's a lot that could be done with this, but some run of the mill NLP seems like it could at least help. I'm not sure the plausibility of this at a large scale, but it seems like an interesting problem nonetheless.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#13

Post by mod » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:39 PM UTC

mrbig4545 wrote: post #9

FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

Or perhaps remove non-verified reviews once there were more than just a couple of reviews.

I've never published a dishonest review, but I have reviewed a product or two that I bought somewhere else (not on Amazon), but I certainly "bought the product."

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#14

Post by awjr » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

mrbig4545 wrote: post #9

FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

This. This more than anything. Amazon is now in a position not to need reviews from people that currently own that book. Or better still, there is a point where there is a verified purchases threshold that triggers the hiding of unverified votes.

Yes it still means a person can buy the book, then give it a bad review, then return it, however the effort to do this would be higher AND there would be a purchase pattern that begins to show itself.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#15

Post by dougmccune » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

Anything with less than a real critical mass of reviews (less than hundreds) is way too easy to entirely game on Amazon. I wrote a book quite a few years ago on a niche tech topic. To be entirely honest, very few people read it. The positive reviews of the book were almost all from people I knew personally. Then the 1-star reviews started coming in. Each 1-star review had no actual content in the review. It was clear that the writers of these BS reviews hadn't read the book at all, since they didn't mention anything specific whatsoever. However, each of the 1-star reviews DID manage to mention a competing book that was "better". And all the bad reviews mentioned the same exact competing book. It was ridiculously obvious that someone was bashing my book to push a competing book instead, without any actual substance. At first I cared, and asked Amazon to remove the reviews, which they did. Then more BS reviews came back, I had them removed, they came back again, and eventually I just got tired and stopped caring.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#16

Post by Zigurd » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

Amazon will delete spam reviews if they are reported. Reviewers and reviews get meta-reviewed, and poorly meta-reviewed reviews won't appear in the featured reviews for your book.

BUT that means you still need a critical mass of genuine reviewers who give your book positive reviews, and for technical books, sometimes that's hard to come by. One way to do this is to get lots of people reviewing your manuscript pre-publication. That has lots of other obvious benefits, too.

Reply to reviews, especially if a reader had difficulty with a code example and you can help them.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#17

Post by stonemetal » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

Isn't that why they have a did you find this review helpful button? That way bad reviews can be user flagged and given less weight. Of course that can be abused by spammers as well, so who knows how helpful it really is.

I wonder if Amazon has enough info to create a Googlesque filter bubble, so reviews are per user weighted to account for reviewer\user interest overlap.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#18

Post by vhost- » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

awjr wrote: post #14

mrbig4545 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

This. This more than anything. Amazon is now in a position not to need reviews from people that currently own that book. Or better still, there is a point where there is a verified purchases threshold that triggers the hiding of unverified votes. Yes it still means a person can buy the book, then give it a bad review, then return it, however the effort to do this would be higher AND there would be a purchase pattern…

You can easily detect that. If a person buys a lot of books and make a lot of 5 star or 1 star reviews, then returns them, that's clearly abuse and you ban them.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#19

Post by sombremesa » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:51 PM UTC

impostervt wrote: post #3

Web cache version, since the site is down for me: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.p... While not really related, I seem to run across a lot of books on Amazon that have a high number of 5 star reviews that, upon reading, are just bad. Seems to happen a lot with books by independent sci-fi authors with Kindle-only books... Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.

Strangely both the cached version and the website only work for me if I hit Chrome's "stop loading" button while they load.

Seems to be this JS file's fault: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/mt.js

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#20

Post by rcthompson » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

In light of that recent article about computer-generated prose being in many cases indistinguishable from human-written, I'd say those fake reviews are likely written by a computer. Notice that they're mostly of the form "I didn't think I'd be interested in [TOPIC] but [TITLE] was really interesting and really helped me learn about [TOPIC]."