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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'

#101

Post by tedunangst »

dahart wrote: post #45
itsoktocry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fined by who, and for what? What a strange comment. Why would the government police such matters?

Maybe the Bureau of Consumer Protection, and for fraudulent and deceptive practices? There’s plenty of precedent, and Amazon’s failure to do anything about fake products and fake reviews, if not active encouragement of fraudulent behavior, is a real economic problem where we the consumers pay the costs. https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-consume...

Shouldn't they start by fining the reviewers? Have they tried sending a subpoena to Amazon for all the reviewers' IPs and purchase histories? Did Amazon block it or something?

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

#102

Post by CWuestefeld »

dahart wrote: post #45
itsoktocry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fined by who, and for what? What a strange comment. Why would the government police such matters?

Maybe the Bureau of Consumer Protection, and for fraudulent and deceptive practices? There’s plenty of precedent, and Amazon’s failure to do anything about fake products and fake reviews, if not active encouragement of fraudulent behavior, is a real economic problem where we the consumers pay the costs. https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-consume...

Reviews are, by their nature, personal opinions. I don't see how you can put a framework of fraud protection around that. Maybe in extreme marginal cases, but for the central idea of reviews, it just doesn't work.

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

#103

Post by zelphirkalt »

KittenInABox wrote: post #79
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.

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.

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

#104

Post by fireflash38 »

Syzygies wrote: post #66

Chess 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.

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

#105

Post by 3l3ktr4 »

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://…

They could use this and a bubble in the site explaining this might be review bombing and show the score of the book disregarding these events. I’ve never understood why people have such a negative opinion on goodreads, though. I guess this is the only thing I know of that makes it bad.

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

#106

Post by KittenInABox »

fallingknife wrote: post #10
ceejayoz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-read the article, or at least the second paragraph. They (and some buddies or sock puppet accounts) were low-ranking other authors’ books, specifically targeting authors of color. They’ve admitted this publicly. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/13/cait-corrain-p... > “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to dow…

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.

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

#108

Post by rightbyte »

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://…

"there's now a checkbox in your Steam Store options where you can choose to have off-topic review bombs still included in all the Review Scores you see."

Things like this is so nice. If I don't trust Gaben's bullshit review filter, I can see what the result would be without, just to check.

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

#109

Post by maximinus_thrax »

mhb wrote: post #67
maximinus_thrax wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve. I'm surprised Amazon is actually doing something, anything, related to Goodreads, including 'asking users'. The website feels abandoned.

> The website feels abandoned What does that mean?

It means that Amazon does not seem to invest anything into this aquisition anymore. Even the maintenance is lacking, this year they had an outage measured in hours.

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

#110

Post by ianburrell »

solardev wrote: post #36
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult for books where there's a strong culture of lending, both directly to individuals and from public libraries.

This won't stop people from lending things. It just means borrowers can't leave reviews. I'd rather have a much smaller set of verified reviews than a bunch of fake ones. Decreasing the quantity in this case often means improving the quality and signal to noise ratio.

There are lots of people who will be receiving books on Christmas. With your scheme, they won’t be able to review them. Or people who buy from other bookstores. Or other countries.

There is a difference between reviews on Amazon, where limiting to purchaser makes sense, and Goodreads that is open to everyone.

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