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> The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing. That might make sense for electronics
by Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing.
That might make sense for electronics and other items, though even here sellers have found ways to get around it by offering to reimburse their shills who bought the product just for a 5-star shill review.
However, Amazon's introduction of the Verified Purchase tag on reviews and recent changes that make non-VP reviews difficult to view, has had a deleterious effect on reviews for books, films and music. There were a lot of great well-written and insightful reviews written by people who got the media in question from the library (or a filesharing community). For books and films, that reviewing culture lives on at Goodreads and IMDB, but both are now owned by Amazon and who knows how long those reviews might last. There is however no analogue for reviews of music (Allmusic has strict character count limits and few ever go there, Discogs reviews seem mainly meant for vinyl enthusiasts).
Yes, in retrospect it was silly for fans of music, books and films to create a rather non-commercial community of enthusiasts on the basis of a site whose sole aim is to make lots of money, but I still regret what has been lost.
- mcphage 9y ago> That might make sense for electronics and other items [...] Amazon's introduction of the Verified Purchase tag on reviews and recent changes that make non-VP reviews difficult to view, has had a deleterious effect on reviews for books, films and music. Surely Amazon could control this on a category-by-category level...
- bitexploder 9y agoAs long as there is a profit interest to game the reviews people will try. At least with Goodreads there is some, but less, interest.
- WalterBright 9y ago> it was silly for fans of music, books and films to create a rather non-commercial community of enthusiasts on the basis of a site whose sole aim is to make lots of money Nothing silly about it at all. I've written many such reviews and I'm well aware that I'm giving my work for free to a profit making entity. The thing is, I also benefit a lot from reviews on Amazon, even for things I'd never buy. Amazon is my go-to site for reviews on books and music. (Not so for films, I use IMDB for that.) I enjoy writing and posting the reviews, and enjoy getting "likes" on them from others that find them useful.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gwern 9y ago> who knows how long those reviews might last. One point in Goodreads's favor: they make it easy to export your entire library to a CSV which you can reprocess. (For example, I have a Haskell script which reads my Goodreads export and turns it into a Markdown table.) So even if they go down or start to disappear, people can get their reviews out.
- nasredin 9y agoThat's why you should always save your writings and post it on your blog, etc. Keep it in 3 places: review site, your blog, local storage (and backups). I am still pissed about the IMDB Forums. There was a music recommendation thread there that I forgot to read before it was nuked by Amazon. That few kilobytes of knowledge are gone from the history forever... like tears in...
- asddddd 9y agoMusic reviews: Sputnikmusic.com (primarily new releases), metal-archives.com (Metal, obviously).
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoNeither of those are comparable to Amazon, which offers the possibility of reviewing the whole scope of recordings available for sale.