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Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

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Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#51

Post by dougmccune »

nine_k wrote: post #37
scrabble wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awful. Has no one automated the process of checking for bogus reviews and reporting them?

How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.

In this case there were a few things that made it glaringly obvious (to a human at least).

The bogus reviews had one or more of these aspects:

- bad reviews from reviewers with no other reviews

- mentions of the same competing book in my bad reviews

- 5 star ratings of that mentioned competing book (and no other reviews beyond those)

- 1-star reviews of another random book. This one was interesting, there was another book (Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies) that is entirely unrelated. But 2 of the reviewers also gave shitty reviews to that book as well as mine. There's no logical reason that the same people badmouthing my book would have also read, reviewed, and badmouthed that other book (totally different topic) within a few days. So they were clearly hired for a number of books at once.

So yeah, you'd think some of those patterns would be easy to automatically detect. Although I assume it's constantly a game of cat and mouse.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#52

Post by FilterJoe »

I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week.

Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:

Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word?

I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.

Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person (perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833

All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.

I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8

However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#53

Post by doktrin »

I'm also surprised that Amazon has such a poor handle on their product reviews. Obviously fake reviews absolutely litter the site. Speaking as only a consumer, it makes the process of purchasing much more cumbersome than it ought to be.

It's not reasonable to expect Amazon (or anyone, really) to detect fraudulent behavior with perfect accuracy. I have to agree with the OP, though, in that they should be able to do a lot better. Many fake reviews are blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#54

Post by bduerst »

nanidin wrote: post #44
nine_k wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.

Probably apply ML techniques. Similar to how spam is classified - build a classifier that determines the likelihood of a review being bogus, then flag it for human review if it exceeds a certain threshold.

They probably already have this, to be honest. Some of the fake reviews used keywords from the book title, probably in a learned attempt to game the classification.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#55

Post by thebiglebrewski »

dougmccune wrote: post #15

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…

Wondering what your book was! I'm writing Linux for Hobbyists right now and wondering if it's a bit too niche.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#56

Post by bduerst »

FilterJoe wrote: post #52

I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week. Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test: Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word? I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but seve…

Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move.

Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy.

If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn't be there as a constant reminder.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#58

Post by IndianAstronaut »

scrabble wrote: post #34
dougmccune wrote: post #15

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's awful. Has no one automated the process of checking for bogus reviews and reporting them?

It's not automated but probably outsourced. Thus making it much harder to track.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#59

Post by dougmccune »

thebiglebrewski wrote: post #55
dougmccune wrote: post #15

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…

Wondering what your book was! I'm writing Linux for Hobbyists right now and wondering if it's a bit too niche.

It was Adobe Flex 3 for Dummies. Niche book on a tech topic that flamed out after a few years. If you've never written a book I'd still probably recommend doing it once. But don't expect to make any money, besides whatever advance you get. But it's still damn cool to be able to say you wrote a book.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#60

Post by thebiglebrewski »

dougmccune wrote: post #59
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wondering what your book was! I'm writing Linux for Hobbyists right now and wondering if it's a bit too niche.

It was Adobe Flex 3 for Dummies. Niche book on a tech topic that flamed out after a few years. If you've never written a book I'd still probably recommend doing it once. But don't expect to make any money, besides whatever advance you get. But it's still damn cool to be able to say you wrote a book.

Wow, that one's super niche haha!! Sure, I'm self-publishing. Just glad to say I'm an author and hoping to make a little bit of cash too, we'll see.
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