[HN Gopher] Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
___________________________________________________________________
Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
Author : webmaven
Score : 75 points
Date : 2023-12-17 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| I'm still unhappy about the API discontinuation which was
| wrapped in a "this is better for you" announcement.
| elektor wrote:
| I too have given up on Goodreads and relocated to StoryGraph
| (https://thestorygraph.com/)
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'm surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve.
| bastard_op wrote:
| If they wanted to, they would. They obviously don't care.
|
| How this is any different from their poor handling of fake
| reviews on all the Chinese garbage that floods their normal
| sales I don't know.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That's right, it's not
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > 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.
| mhb wrote:
| > The website feels abandoned
|
| What does that mean?
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| 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.
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| They seem to be unable to solve it without hiring people and
| paying wages, hence their call for help from volunteers
| jasondclinton wrote:
| This is such a bad headline. The story is mostly about an author
| posting fraudulent reviews to promote her own work.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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 downright abusive," she tweeted.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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 using clearly
| POC [people of colour] names in the fake accounts to upvote
| every negative review on POC books so the top ones are all
| 1 star and 2 star. Like what in the yellow face," Zhao
| tweeted. Many of the accounts linked on the document Zhao
| shared have now been deleted.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| > 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.
|
| AIUI, authors in the subgenre are disproportionately non-
| white. If that's the case, it would be expected for those
| targeted to be similarly non-white.
|
| None of this is a defense of the offender: she's
| definitely a big jerk. But it doesn't necessarily mean
| that we have to make every freakin' issue about race.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Is "Chantal" a stereotypical POC name in your opinion?
| News to me.
|
| You have a lot more confidence on a bunch of people doing
| OSS "research" than I do. The quote itself says
| "suspected". I would go as far as to say that believing
| this was racially motivated (rather than just a scummy
| move) based on this "evidence" is weird, but not
| surprising.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Is "Chantal" a stereotypical POC name in your opinion?
| News to me.
|
| Interesting. I would have guessed that Chantal is a 90%
| black name, but I was wrong. It is only slightly more
| common for black women, and there are many whites with
| the name too. This may be a regional distinction.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| 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.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Whilst I don't disagree with your conclusion, the sibling
| comments cover:
|
| - The subgenre this all happened in has a very different
| makeup than western publishing broadly, and
|
| - The authors targeted were not all 'people of colour'.
|
| I agree she was likely secondarily racially motivated in
| some way - maybe due to trust in that subgenre, or the
| view in some area of the internet that 'people of colour'
| cannot be questioned. Or maybe she's just a racist
| killing two birds with one stone. She seems a serial
| liar, so I doubt we'll ever know for sure.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Sounds like type of growth hacking that start-ups are
| sometimes celebrated for... Boost your own brand while
| lowering competition...
| politelemon wrote:
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| 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.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > I don't want to have to submit my passport to share a book
| review.
|
| Why is it important that you, a person apparently unwilling
| (hyperbole aside) to prove that you have actually read a
| particular book, should be able to transmit (ostensibly) your
| opinions about said book into the heads of other potential
| readers via a software platform? A small number of verified
| reviews is almost certainly better than a large number of
| unverified reviews, for exactly the reason highlighted by
| OP's article: when there are few or no controls on who or
| what can post however many reviews, the system is inevitably
| exploited by bad actors, and said actors often operate at
| scales that dwarf the impact of a single legitimate reviewer.
| johnfn wrote:
| 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 GPT, so that people couldn't cheat. This system would
| have a million problems, sure, but would it have _more_
| problems than the current system?
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The next step would be to just ask ChatGPT to write a
| couple of reviews about the book, and not bother with
| letting people submit potentially fake reviews at all.
| pembrook wrote:
| You can either have low friction reviews, or you can have
| high quality reviews. You can't have both.
|
| For example, Facebook/Instagram/OpenAI/etc. requires non-VOIP
| phone number verification on signup. This alone would cut
| spam to near-zero.
|
| I'm sure if Goodreads required this on signup, the problem
| would solve itself.
| kart23 wrote:
| facebook and instagram still have insane amounts of bots
| and spam.
| swayvil wrote:
| There will always be many many assholes. In the past, time and
| space have insulated us from them.
|
| But now we have the internet. The assholes can see you, touch
| you, talk to you, even decide what you are allowed to say.
|
| This is a mark against the internet.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is spot-on, and I upvoted it.
|
| The Block & Mute are what makes them go away.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| And good moderation. Unfortunately many of the said assholes
| have tricked gullible people into thinking moderation equals
| censorship.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >But now we have the internet. The assholes can see you, touch
| you, talk to you, even decide what you are allowed to say.
|
| I would say the direction is the opposite. Assholes dont seek
| people out, people seek out the assholes.
|
| In the real world, people dont walk up to strangers and ask
| them to disclose their most offensive opinion. However, on the
| internet people will scroll through pages of agreeable comments
| looking for something disagreeable.
|
| The same is basically true for reviews too. The physical world
| default is you dont know what people think. The internet allows
| people to know what others think, including their dumb
| opinions, swings, and trends.
| swayvil wrote:
| >on the internet people will scroll through pages of
| agreeable comments looking for something disagreeable.
|
| I thought that I was the only person who does this.
|
| Therefore, given a forum full of people, the chance that you
| will offend somebody is increased. It becomes less "say
| something offensive" and more "say something merely
| noteworthy".
|
| We get a "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down"
| situation. On the scale of the whole internet.
|
| The internet becomes a huge engine for imposing conformity.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Seems like a problem that could be solved, in part, by reopening
| Goodreads' APIs (so that people could write ring detectors,
| inauthentic behavior, etc.). But Amazon doesn't appear to be
| interested in that.
| siva7 wrote:
| 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
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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 awful product.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Amazon adds "verified purchaser" if the reviewer bought the
| book. Which means my glowing review (if I wrote one) of
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-
| Greatest/dp...
|
| might look fake, since I borrowed it from the library.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Verified purchaser is not a good signal, and they know it.
|
| It's a way to force the fraudsters to buy from Amazon.
|
| Don't fix the problem - make more money from it. That's
| what companies do.
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Meet Kirkus Reviews. They will actually read it and write a
| (I guess) well-reasoned review of it.
|
| But you, the author, have to pay them. When I checked, it
| was $450.
|
| If you're an author, you also get a deluge of offers to
| write a review. I didn't follow up on any of these, but
| you'd assume that they couldn't get any repeat business if
| they panned your book.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Amazon would solve it by removing reviews. No big loss these
| days, IMO.
| huytersd wrote:
| It's the biggest loss I could imagine. I would stop using
| Amazon or use a third party review site.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Reviews on Amazon are heavily gamed and you should not
| trust them at all. I get little business cards offering
| gift cards for 5 star reviews regularly. Product listings
| get swapped for entirely different products while the
| review stay.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| What works for me is, the reviews should fall off like a
| neat stair case, 5s the most, then 4s, 3s, 2s and 1s. If
| the 1s are bigger than the 2s by a lot, it's usually the
| classic "Sell 500 good quality ones, get the reviews,
| switch to the knock offs".
| huytersd wrote:
| It's very easy to look through and figure out which
| products have mostly bullshit reviews and it's definitely
| not the vast majority of them.
| solardev wrote:
| 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?)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It's difficult for books where there's a strong culture of
| lending, both directly to individuals and from public
| libraries.
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| In this case, someone who borrowed the book is more
| likely to be trustworthy (IMO) than someone who
| verifiably purchased it from the site hosting the reviews
| (particularly if reviews were limited to the latter).
|
| It would be thought of as an advertising expense to buy
| books from the platform in order to qualify to write some
| of the first reviews.
| solardev wrote:
| As a hypothetical, sure, I can see how that makes sense.
| However, verified purchaser reviews have been a helpful
| reality for the better part of a decade or so, across
| different media and vendors: games, physical goods,
| Amazon books, electronics, etc.
|
| Even though it's an _imperfect_ barrier to review
| quality, at least it is _a_ barrier versus none, and time
| and time again retailers who 've experimented with it
| have found it a useful signal.
|
| Yes, you'll lose out on the borrowers who fell in love
| with a title, but they can always spend the $20 to buy
| that book to review it if they really want to (I've done
| that for things I loved, just to leave a review). But
| even if they don't, it's still usually a net win: you
| lose not just the honest reviewers but the 100x spam that
| outnumber them.
|
| When shopping for low-cost products these days, it's not
| the individual review that matters anymore, just the
| aggregate ratings. So it doesn't really matter if a few
| borrowers don't get to leave their rating, it's still
| more useful for buyers to cut out the spam.
|
| ----------
|
| Maybe a simple compromise is to just allow filtering (and
| adjust the rating) by "verified purchasers only", so you
| can see both the unfiltered and filtered scores. I'd just
| leave out the unverified ones altogether, myself, but
| others could see the raw scores and reviews if they
| wanted to.
| ianburrell wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| Yes, this will absolutely decrease the number of eligible
| reviewers. That's a given. But the argument is that it
| would also help combat spam and fake reviews, so while
| the number of reviews goes down, the signal to noise
| ratio goes up. People who read the book without buying it
| wouldn't be able to review it, yes, and that is an
| unfortunate side effect. However, it still leads to more
| useful reviews than if those borrowers are also lumped
| together with spammers and bots, which make the reviews
| useless for everyone. It's not a perfect solution, just
| an improvement over the existing mess (on Amazon).
|
| And yes, agreed that Goodreads needs a different system.
| I was responding to a post about Amazon, and even there
| mentioned that goodreads would need something different,
| maybe reputation based or whatever.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Fined by who, and for what? What a strange comment. Why would
| the government police such matters?
| danaris wrote:
| The FTC, I would imagine--this is definitely within the
| purview of regulating trade and advertising.
| dahart wrote:
| 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...
| tedunangst wrote:
| 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?
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| Where there's a will, there's a way. This isn't about
| policing valid opinions, it's about identifying what is
| currently a massive and obvious trend of actual fraud.
| Requiring authentication for reviews and products is the
| first step, and isn't that hard, we know how to do it
| already. Amazon is _choosing_ to allow reviews and
| products by people they know are bad actors. They look
| the other way and allow fruadsters to be anonymous
| because there are no consequences yet. They're not
| imposing consequences on fraudulent sellers or reviewers,
| even though they could.
|
| I don't believe the main problem is that they don't know
| how to identify fraud, I think the main problem is they
| don't have any real incentive to.
|
| Look: the FTC is already sending notice that enforcement
| is coming: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2021/10/...
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > Why would the government police such matters?
|
| Because at the end of the day this is fraud?
| bjourne wrote:
| 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.
| dazc wrote:
| 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.
| caesil wrote:
| How do you define "fake"? Review bombing is generally real
| people with real opinions. It takes advantage of the fact that
| a) it's mostly impossible to verify someone has read a book,
| and b) most people don't read, and c) most people who read
| don't leave a review, so anyone motivated to review gets an
| outsized voice.
| jdowner wrote:
| Goodreads should consider putting some effort into the platform
| they have allowed to languish for years.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Almost ready to implement the concept of showing the reviews of
| only well know or recognized user and not anyone 's 2C/ on any
| book.
|
| Maybe some people with a good understanding and able to produce a
| quality criticism about a book.
|
| We could even nickname them "critics"?
| sgift wrote:
| If you find a critic who usually aligns with your opinions on
| what's good about something that's a valid approach. The
| problem is if you don't have one, cause well, it's all
| subjective in the end, even if it's from a "well known name"
| like a critic.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| 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 rather than the actual thing itself.
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I mean some straight-forward ones might be...
|
| Accounts need to verify themselves somehow.
|
| Accounts should be old enough before contributing reviews.
|
| Accounts should only be able to review X amount of titles an
| hour/day/etc.
|
| Moderators should have tools to identify influx of reviews
| and decide mitigation strategies.
|
| Moderators should be able to put up a banner on a title that
| may be review bombed so the community can report suspicious
| reviews.
|
| Etc.
|
| These aren't honestly policing much. Just general common
| sense for these platforms. Also heavily needed on many other
| platforms that get spam in similar ways.
| chongli wrote:
| The question is not whether they can detect an influx of
| fake positive reviews on a product, it's what to do about
| it. How do you tell the difference between someone review
| bombing their own products with fake positive reviews and
| their competitors review bombing them with fake positive
| reviews to try to get them banned?
|
| Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should
| stop banning listings for that and focus on policing the
| reviews themselves. But that actually turns out to be a
| very difficult problem in itself! Sellers of crappy
| products will often include notes that induce/bribe the
| customers into leaving fake reviews. A seller of cheap
| products can rack up thousands of verified purchaser fake
| reviews this way.
|
| They can also do things like hire a botnet to purchase the
| product in bulk using thousands of hacked PCs all over the
| world and get those PCs to review the product, generating
| more fake verified purchaser reviews.
|
| In the end, if you don't ban sellers for fake positive
| reviews then you run into these tactics and it's very hard
| to police individual reviews. If you do decide to ban
| sellers then you have the opposite problem of dealing with
| sabotage.
|
| As for detecting "influxes", that problem is far from
| trivial. If a review bomber is using a botnet of thousands
| of PCs then it's quite trivial to stagger the timing of the
| fake reviews over a period of weeks. It's not like they're
| forced to push a button and have them all hit the review
| page at the same time.
| yardstick wrote:
| Sounds like there is a need for identity verified
| reviews. Ie the account doing the review has provided
| some government issued id during their registration
| process. Then add in another criteria that they can't
| post reviews unless their account is say 3 months old (or
| some timeframe).
|
| You could still record unverified reviews, but hide them
| and their ratings by default until the user explicitly
| wants to see them.
| chongli wrote:
| I'm a legit user of Amazon. My account is probably over
| 20 years old. I've ordered tons and tons of products.
| I've never reviewed anything, however I have received
| products containing "gift certificates" promising me a
| $10 reward for leaving a fake review (of the product I
| just purchased). How does Amazon stop me from accepting
| this bribe?
| somenameforme wrote:
| I'm unsure if I'm playing devil's advocate or not, but
| should that not be allowed? That seems more about getting
| over the bias that people who are content with something
| are generally less inclined to leave a review than
| somebody who is unhappy with something. If you get
| something and it's complete crap, I doubt a $10 gift
| certificate is going to convince you to go write a
| positive review of it. If anything, that'll probably end
| up motivating you to write a negative review, with
| further mention of it.
| chongli wrote:
| _If you get something and it 's complete crap, I doubt a
| $10 gift certificate is going to convince you to go write
| a positive review of it. If anything, that'll probably
| end up motivating you to write a negative review, with
| further mention of it._
|
| I think it is if the product itself is cheap enough. A
| $10 product where you get a free $10 gift certificate is
| essentially free. I think lots of people would be willing
| to leave a quick 5 star review in exchange for getting
| the thing they just bought for free, even if the product
| is kinda crappy. As long as it's not totally broken and
| useless!
| yardstick wrote:
| False flag operations? Amazon slips their own false
| review gift certificate in. If you use it, they flag you
| as an ignorable reviewer (shadow ban or whatever).
| chongli wrote:
| What incentive does Amazon have to do this? Best case
| scenario: they ban and alienate a bunch of customers who
| bought stuff on the site. Worst case scenario: they spend
| tons of money on these false flag operations and end up
| removing a lot of bestselling products from the site,
| reducing sales overall.
| yardstick wrote:
| It would be a review shadow ban only. Wouldn't stop them
| buying anything or leaving reviews.
|
| I doubt it would cost a lot of money from Amazons
| perspective.
|
| But yeah I agree Amazons incentives are not the same as
| their customers. They obviously have a lot of insight
| into what drives and lowers sales.
|
| Maybe, although I seriously doubt it, at some point they
| will see enough reduction in sales to take action against
| poor quality products and their mispresentative reviews.
| creer wrote:
| You could report the bribe to Amazon, now and then. (If
| you believed they would do something about it.)
| Larrikin wrote:
| Who is going to scan in their government ID and send it
| to a book review site except for the people on the pay
| roll of a book publishing company that requires their
| employees to register an account on their first day of
| work so they can "review" books in three months.
| yardstick wrote:
| If modern computer games have shown us anything, people
| will go out of their way (grind, pay) for shiny badges by
| their names, fancy skins, etc.
|
| I'm sure many reviewers will enjoy having a special badge
| against their name. Not all, sure. We don't need
| everyone's reviews in this situation.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Sorry but your idea is terrible. You're only incentiving
| the exact people nobody wants a review from with a bad
| analogy.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of review bombs are from real
| people, of which ID would do nothing. Steam has shown a
| really simple solution the problem - a mixture of proof
| of purchase, and then algorithmically walling off
| 'irregular activity.' Review bombs on Steam remain
| relatively regular, but now have basically 0 impact -
| even extremely large scale ones like when somebody gains
| the ire of Chinese gamers.
|
| Proof of purchase would require some modest effort on the
| part of publishers to create a workable and shared
| system, but it should otherwise be trivial to get going.
| Publishers have a strong motivation to opt-in since fake
| reviews are probably more detrimental than not to their
| bottom line.
| yardstick wrote:
| Once someone is identified as a serial review bomber,
| then you'd just ban them and all their reviews. Or at
| least flag their reviews so they aren't shown by default
| (similar to a shadow ban).
|
| That person could no longer write verified reviews. Maybe
| it's a permanent ban, maybe it's a 1-5 year ban. They
| wouldn't be able to verify another account with their
| identity until the ban is listed.
|
| Yeah Steam is good, but mostly because it is a very
| closed loop system as they own the entire transaction-
| review-lifecycle. Not soo easy with other things like
| books.
| chongli wrote:
| You can't identify the review bombers. These are 3rd
| parties hiring the reviewers to leave reviews. That
| hiring process takes place offline (from the perspective
| of your site), so you have no way to monitor and detect
| these directly.
|
| As for the individual reviewers, there are tens of
| thousands or millions of these, and review bombers can
| trivially cycle these in and out, so no individual
| reviewer is a "serial fake reviewer."
| yardstick wrote:
| It's trivial under current systems. But once you start
| placing higher value on verified identities, those
| millions of bombers are going to turn out to be a lot
| smaller.
| chongli wrote:
| It doesn't take millions to boost a specific product's
| sales. As few as a thousand fake reviews can get the job
| done. And bombers will find ways to corrupt the verified
| reviewers, since their reviews will go up in value. And
| the cost for Amazon to verify the reviewers is really
| important to take into consideration. If verified
| reviewers end up being untrustworthy, they've put in that
| effort (time and money) for nothing!
|
| This is really just a special case of the wider issue of
| fraud. And I'm fairly convinced of the argument that the
| optimal amount is nonzero [1]. A further wrinkle to this
| problem is that fraud tends to only get more
| sophisticated over time, so the costs of fighting it
| always go up. At some point we may reach a scenario where
| fraud is so rampant that entire business models become
| non-viable.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
| creer wrote:
| Naively verified reviews is a way to enforce "mostly
| positive reviews" - at least in legal-threat-happy
| countries like the US or the UK.
| creer wrote:
| That Steam idea of giving the viewer more options on how to
| filter the reviews sounds great actually: Let reviews come
| in, but allow the viewer to filter against accounts that
| burst reviews, or by country, etc. Pretty cool idea
| (because in particular it allows privacy.)
|
| Although really the current concept of "review" is
| terrible. Few reviews are detailed and specific enough and
| multi-dimensional enough. They cannot be searched well
| enough (Although we might be nearly there with LLMs -
| asking them to critique a book from our point of view and
| preferences.) It's hard to follow reviewers that you have
| learned to trust (hard enough to notice them in the first
| place). Star ratings are not useful in the intended way and
| only a few sites ask for multi-dimensional star ratings
| (generally asking to rate irrelevant things :-) Bleh!
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Not just reviews, I thought it was a well established practice
| to purchase one's own book to ram it up the rankings.
|
| I have also heard that it is a backdoor way of spending
| political campaign money. Candidate "writes" a book, the
| Campaign to Elect X buys a warehouse of the books, candidate
| then gets the profits.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I had a brief vision of a warehouse filled with e-books.
|
| But seriously, I have a similar feeling about book deals.
| That is, it's a great - and legal - way to pay (off) someone
| for "prior service", meanwhile the book's sales are shite.
| But selling books was never really the point.
| creer wrote:
| So far "verified" has run into the issue of how to verify while
| maintaining privacy and while allowing "not purchased on this
| platform". Verified sounds gtreat in theory but it's very hard
| to imagine how it would work.
|
| Separating account verification and restricting the amount of
| reviews allowed - separated from privacy-respecting reviews
| might be a direction. But currently it's hard to trust anyone's
| "privacy-respecting" features.
|
| (My impression is that in consequence, currently, "verified"
| means "mostly positive".)
| bastard_op wrote:
| If people want to look for better books, they're better off
| signing up for zlibrary anymore. Free books, people can review if
| they want, and probably real humans doing so (until bots invade
| tor).
|
| I actually get great book recommendations there via "Personally
| recommended" when I go to fetch something new to read. Far better
| than anything commercial.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| It's problem for Amazon not wanting to spend money. They could
| significantly reduce the problem by taking Goodreads off of
| back burner status instead of expecting volunteers to do it for
| free.
| bluish29 wrote:
| Some people are suggesting verification that the reviewer
| actually bought the book like what is done on amazon.com itself.
| It is different as Goodreads is not amazon.com, the goal at least
| what people are using it for) is social network that is built
| around people organizing their reading lists, sharing it with
| others and follow what their friends are reading. In addition to
| reviews to know more about books and people's reactions.
|
| Some of the problems with this proposal
|
| 1- Books borrowed from friends or libraries 2- Book bought from
| different platforms or stores 3- Books downloaded from from the
| internet legally (or illegally)
|
| Most of my readings are not books that amazon can verify I
| actually owned the books and I usually write reviews if I want to
| share it with my friends on Goodreads. That would be hard to
| implement and if so, I think personally I will stop using
| Goodreads, probably with most of the people I know.
| beej71 wrote:
| And brushing scams.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Is that "log-rolling"? In ancient times, Spy Magazine had a
| "Log-rolling in Our Time" section, where they would quote
| mutually complimentary reviews by two writers.
| sublimefire wrote:
| It is important to stress that this is a problem related to the
| sales of the new titles, not the established and time tested
| ones. There is a huge competition as we have more and more books
| published each year as well. Also, show me at least one
| marketplace where the reviews are 100% legitimate.
|
| I think publishers and authors want to free ride such platforms
| to reduce the marketing spend but then they face trolling and
| there is nothing to do but cry (but the monetary effect is
| unclear).
|
| Instead they could invest more into multichannel ads and build
| alternative platforms for the readers to check what the book has
| inside. But yeah lets depend on amazon and just wait until it
| will start asking for money to mitigate review bombing ;)
|
| Besides who reads the new titles when there are thousands of
| amazing time tested books?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| like many others who recall the early days of the open Internet,
| I am disgusted by the practices and business model of sites like
| Goodreads for the last decade+. Now they cry "foul" and ask for
| help? cry me a river.. better self-organizing reader circles are
| the answer.. "winner take all" is working out just as many
| envisioned.. ensh*tification
| bhpm wrote:
| I'm interested to hear what value HN folks have in book reviews
| from strangers. I thought the value in something like Goodreads
| would be to create a community of people you know IRL to share
| what you read. I don't see myself having much in common with a
| bunch of people I don't know.
| fragmede wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective. A total stranger has gone
| much of the same trials and tribulations as me, simply due to
| the fact that they're human, and alive at the same time. Being
| born, how to eat, how to afford to eat.
|
| If you know someone IRL, you don't magically have something in
| common with them that you didn't before. A stranger might be
| born in a foreign country so we don't have that in common.
| After I get to know them and become friends IRL, we're still
| not going to have that in common. So the idea that you don't
| have anything in common with people you don't know seems weird
| to me because of course you have things in common, you just
| haven't discovered them yet.
|
| Is a book review by John Updike at all useful to me? I didn't
| go to Harvard and don't have that in common with him, so why
| would I value his book review?
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| 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://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
| sgift wrote:
| The only thing missing is a country filter, so I can just
| disable reviews from certain countries prone to excessive
| national pride and the accompanying "that Island is ours, it
| wasn't on your map. ALL REVIEWS BE BAD" completely. The five
| good reviews out of these areas never outweigh the rest.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| I remember when Company of Heroes 2 was released and a
| certain cohort believed Russians were portrayed poorly, and
| the game was review bombed to hell by hoardes of Russian
| nationalists. Unfortunately this was before the review
| reforms and it severely affected the game's score on the
| platform.
| creer wrote:
| Good one. Anyone knows other review sites that do provide more
| control on which reviews I get to see?
| 3l3ktr4 wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| "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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| *so nice
| rightbyte wrote:
| Oh ye thanks. The autocomplete on my phone has got so much
| worse lately ...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| 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 particular review in the
| bombing is worthless like any other review, but the collective
| act of review bombing is very valuable information.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| Valuable if you want to find people bedwedding over LGBT
| representation or empowered women, sure.
| bwanab wrote:
| Classic case of Gresham's Law. Fake reviews drive out the good.
| habosa wrote:
| 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.
| lancesells wrote:
| I would argue they have the users, which is probably more
| important than pristine data.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| There's no motivation for amazon to improve Goodreads. Why
| would they? The audience isn't going anywhere.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Eh, I have definitely used it less and less after A bought
| them/they sold out to A.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think it had already been going downhill before the
| acquisition
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > 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.
|
| And spoilers in book titles (the goodread ones, not the
| physical books)
|
| Just a quick search for "a shocking twist" on goodreads finds
| many many books:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198614844-the-perfect-fa...
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137436113-1800198272-978...
| (i have no idea who/what inputed the title here...) and how
| "unputdownable" is a word...
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30514112-the-sister?from...
| ... i'll see the twist coming, you just told me about it!
|
| ...
|
| Great, now I know that the killer (or whatever) they catch
| right before the end isn't the real one, and that there will be
| a twist in the last few pages.
| tedunangst wrote:
| The spoiler text is right there on the book cover?
| manojlds wrote:
| All the books have the twist mentioned on their cover image.
|
| For The Sister I googled to see its cover images.
| Syzygies wrote:
| 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 to synthesize advice relevant
| to each user. As a component of this, treat each reviewer as a
| tennis tournament, to develop a tennis rating system summarizing
| reviews? One could apply weights tuned to each user for the
| relevance of each other user's reviews. If there was a shadow
| economy behind these uses, as if a hedge fund had to pay pennies
| to include each voter, the "review bomb" voter's inputs would
| quickly become useless, and be disregarded.
|
| What we have instead is singularly dumb. Is there room for a
| startup here? Google page rank was obvious in hindsight. Won't
| this too be obvious in hindsight?
| fireflash38 wrote:
| > 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| I thought there were some studies done that showed that
| 5-star rating systems can give worse results than a simple
| thumbs up/down rating. IIRC that's why Netflix moved to a
| simpler rating system (though they added a "two thumbs up" at
| some point).
|
| While on first glance it might seem useful to have the nuance
| of being able to award between 1 and 5 stars, those
| intermediate star rankings tend to mean different things to
| different people, so a 2-star rating from one person might
| mean something fairly different coming from someone else.
|
| Also consider how Uber/Lyft ratings are decidedly nonlinear.
| Anything below 5 stars -- even 4 stars -- essentially means
| there was a fairly large problem, and drivers will get
| "fired" by the platform well before their average even drops
| to 4.0. If any platform would benefit from a simple thumbs
| up/down rating system, I think it's that one.
|
| > _And not subjective at all, like book quality._
|
| Certainly in chess and tennis they're not subjective, but a
| simple thumbs up/down just means "I liked this" or "I didn't
| like this". Sure, if you only have a handful of reviews, that
| maybe doesn't tell you much, but as you accumulate more, the
| average starts being more useful. And of course this doesn't
| preclude the option of allowing people to write something in
| addition to the binary choice.
| Throwthrowbob wrote:
| As a heads up, Goodreads was also subject to fake books by
| authors back in August of 2023, though these were removed.
|
| https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated...
| dangjc wrote:
| We're getting to the point where sites might need to embrace ID
| verification to protect against fake, malicious, farmed, and AI
| generated content.
| anon-feaata2311 wrote:
| I wrote a book https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Machine-Learning-
| Projects-De... and despite really pushing I've only had three
| people review it.
|
| I asked all my friends, all my contacts, no one would review it!
|
| So, it's frustrating.
| INTPenis wrote:
| If they cared I think they should adopt a combination of Valve's
| review graphs, and stackexchange's system of upvoting privileges.
|
| That combined with moderation is a pretty good system.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| They just had to stick some racebait in there:
|
| > Corrain's downfall came after internet sleuths published a
| Google document detailing a number of Goodreads accounts praising
| Crown of Starlight and giving low reviews to works by other
| writers, many of them people of color.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| I had the same reaction, however if you read the linked Google
| Doc from the article, "Lily" (the author under a pseudonym)
| even mentions how racist "her" account is.
|
| That does strike me as the author being aware of her own
| choices and 'getting ahead' of the story.
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