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Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

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31–40 of 161 posts

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

#31
post #14

How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then

Yes, and then Goodreads reviews vecomes the most trusted review source on the internet. Thus making it critical to have good reviews on the site. Thus causing the cheaters to try even harder to post on the site. It's probably not a winnabl3 battle.

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

#32
post #14

How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then

Wish they'd just go the Steam route and only allow reviews from people who've purchased the product. Amazon has a Verified Purchase label, but still too much noise. For goodreads they'd need a different system (reputation based? helpfulness?)

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

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

#33

Earlier 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 sock puppet accounts were given stereotypically of-color names, and targeted authors were disproportionately of-color. There’s pretty clear indication of bias there. > They posted a 31-page Google document containing screenshots of the activity of a number of accounts, with usernames including “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young”, suspected to have been created by Corrain. > “There’s something extra despicable about usi…

Break this down to just the facts presented. There are 31 pages of screenshots. They mention two names that were included that sound like POC. Note that they avoid saying anything beyond that. And they make sure to include the disclaimer that they are "suspected" to be sock puppets. They are clearly grasping at straws to bring race into this.

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

#34
post #14

How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then

It's not super difficult to only show reviews you are highly confident AREN'T completely fake. Instead they prioritize having as many reviews as possible - when possibly a majority of them are fake. And the cost is - the reviews are completely meaningless. All they care about is engagement - and if users have to dig through reviews manually trying to sort out signal from noise - that's engagement to them, not an awfu…

Not all they care about is engagement. They also care about keeping costs down.

If costs were no object they could simply hire well-paid, trustworthy, professional reviewers to review every product and listing. These high quality reviews could establish their site as the gold standard, strengthening the brand (think Apple levels of brand value) and drawing even more users. But all of this could be so expensive they’d actually lose money for doing it. So they don’t.

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

#35
post #14

How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then

Books are not expensive so you'll get the same money backed reviews you always did, like the ones obviously written by a professional writer.

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish they'd just go the Steam route and only allow reviews from people who've purchased the product. Amazon has a Verified Purchase label, but still too much noise. For goodreads they'd need a different system (reputation based? helpfulness?)

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.

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

#38

To me this is just one in a continue set of examples of GR's lack of care for their platform. The issues mentioned that lead to and encourage this behaviour have existed for well over a decade. Their solution is to make it a userland issue.

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.

It a bit like navel gazing, but HN?

If a thread started for ‘best X of 2023’, I’d be pretty sure of the results.

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

#39
This doesn't seem like an impossible problem to solve for at least 80% of cases. I'm sure there's a long tail of review bombing, but in any given week, how many different titles are being brigaded? They say there are 300 volunteer "librarians" who moderate reviews: a relatively safe plan would be to get another couple dozen of them, give them a dashboard to show clusters of unusual review activity, and see how many wildfires they can put out just by throttling the number of reviews, or temporarily halting reviews for a book.

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

#40

Maybe start with showing reviews that are verified or somehow legitimate. There is a problem on both ends of inflating and bombing titles. I personally cannot stand the former where publishing teams will buy or fake mass amounts of reviews to play into the NYT bestseller formulae. It is fairly easy to tell an ad hominem in a "review bomb" in my experience. Usually it relates around politics or something controversial…

Review bombing isn’t just negative. People also review bomb their competitors with positive reviews in order to get their competitors’ listings taken down. How do we stop that?

The harder we police against fake positive reviews, the more we incentivize this sort of anticompetitive sabotage.

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