5 ms·

... and give away $20 gift cards to people who leave 5-star reviews!

by toxik 6y ago

jrockway 6y ago
There is something about how the human brain works that makes us hate this. It happens in games a lot; the community will complain that a certain character is broken and that they hate playing against it... but won't actually go play the character themselves to exploit the brokenness for their own gain. Seems silly to me. (Buying reviews might actually be illegal though, so that's a strong argument to not do it.)
- dvtrn 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
- jdmichal 6y ago
  If you've never read it before, I highly recommend reading David Sirlin's Playing to Win. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ Specifically the chapter "Introducing... the Scrub" discusses exactly this sentiment. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub > In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely.
  - cafard 6y ago
    If you are applying this to computer games, I see your point. If you are applying it to 5-star reviews for $20, then I disagree. (Luigi Barzini mentions an Italian book on card-playing--written, I think, by a clergyman--that begins "Always try to see your opponents' cards." He was trying to point out the light value to that Italians assign to official rules.)
    - jdmichal 6y ago
      But this is life, and there's not really a difference between "arbitrary rule system designed for a game" and "arbitrary rule system designed for 5-star reviews". They're both just "arbitrary rules", and some people are going to Play to Win. So what are you going to do about them?
      - brendoelfrendo 6y ago
        This is what the guillotine was invented to solve.
      - filoleg 6y ago
        I think you and the parent comment are both missing the point of the example with the videogame (not in the least part, because the analogy was not really applicable at all). Having that "arbitrary" throw mechanic in the game was done intentionally to make the game more balanced and enjoyable for the customer. The only people complaining about it are very very early beginners, who don't realize that removing that mechanic would completely break the game balance and make it unplayable. It is an advertised feature, not a bug, in this specific scenario. I don't think that we can say the same about paid reviews on Amazon. It isn't a rule (i.e., Amazon doesn't require every seller to offer gift cards in exchange for 5-star reviews), and it doesn't exist to increase the value that Amazon marketplace provides to their customers, it does the opposite. P.S. I actually agree with what you said completely. It just that the comment that brought up the videogame analogy didn't realize how completely different the situation there was, so it ended up derailing the further chain of arguments.
        chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    In different terms, that is a passage that could be taken directly out of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking of.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    And this is more akin to a situation where someone finds a glitch that allows them to throw someone from across the screen, never having to actually get close and risk attack. At that point, there's two options from the game designers. They can patch the glitch to restore what people considered the normal, designed, and balanced gameplay, or they can state that's just how the system works now and people need to choose whether to accept that or not and play something else. Amazon can fix (or attempt to at least) the problem and make it harder for sellers to get 5 star reviews and lower reviews averages for some big selling items, or they can choose to do nothing, and some people will decide to leave and shop elsewhere because they can't trust the site and reviews. Actually, there's a third option, which is that they can say they are doing everything they can to fix the problem while not doing much, therefore maximizing both reviews/profit as well as customer satisfaction in the short term. If they actually start fixing the problem before too long, it might be the maximal solution for them, but if they take too long their reputation will suffer even more (and it may give competitors a toe-hold). I suspect Amazon is doing this. I have no idea if they can go longer, are at the point they need to change, or are too late, but as a customer it sucks right now.
  - jkinudsjknds 6y ago
    This feels like a poor analogy though. Throws are part of the game design. What's being talked about is more like exploiting a glitch. The glitch may truly be unfair and not part of the intended system. The scrub's fault here is that he doesn't understand the system, but at high level play, there's exploits that the professional community agrees not to employ because its the group assumes social norms to make a better system.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chowells 6y ago
    I'm afraid you've deeply misunderstood Playing to Win. This is quite common. Sirlin assumed a sort of community knowledge as to the context that people who came across the series later tend to lack. Playing To Win is about people who refuse to learn the rules of a game. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that people who understand the rules very well are pointing out that they have holes in them. Scrub statement: "throws are cheap". Informed statement: "the way SF2 tick throw setups work biases the gameplay too far in favor of the player with offensive agency." You'll note that the latter makes no mistake about the purpose of the rules and makes no judgments about players using the tools provided. Instead it focuses on system interactions and their net result. You'll note that almost every big fighting game in the 20 years since the end of the SF2 series has reduced the power of tick throws by means of frame data or broader system changes. Players generally decided that getting the first knockdown should not have that much influence over a match. Scrub statement: "I hate people who get upset at review purchasing." Informed statement: "Review purchasing makes the buying process worse for everyone by creating incentives to deceive buyers, increasing costs for sellers that purchase reviews and reducing sales to sellers who do not. It shifts the Nash equilibrium towards paying more for lower-quality products." Again, the latter examines the system interactions and emergent behavior rather than making moral judgments about the participants.
    - jdmichal 6y ago
      First, I find it hard to believe that you inferred that I deeply misunderstood an entire book due to posting a single quote with almost no other context given within my response. Please be more charitable in the future. Second, I have the same disagreement with you as I do with the other chains. Which is that, de facto paying for reviews is currently a rule in the system. I can tell it's a rule because it's happening, and there's no rules or punishment appearing stop it. In video games, the rules are explicitly coded and nothing beyond that code is permitted. This is why bugs vs intended behaviour becomes a conversation of intent, because the code is obviously allowing it and the code is the ruleset. But that's not true in real life. And that's the part that all responses like yours are missing. There's a game being played at Amazon, where boosting your review stats correlated with boosting your sales stats. Except the permitted ruleset is everything not explicitly prohibited and punished by Amazon. Complaining about people buying reviews is just being a scrub not understanding the rules. The correct conversation to be having is the same as when an apparent bug is found in a game: Is this intended behaviour from Amazon's perspective, and if not what active action are they going to do about it?
- martamorena918 6y ago
  This has nothing to do with unwillingness to exploit. If you would get a 1 million dollar coupon by leaving a 5 star review, almost everyone would do it (except perhaps billionaires). The thing is: Everybody has a price, but what that price is, is always different. The less money I have, the more incentive I have to take advantage of these schemes. For me, the effort of earning 20$ this way would make this a few hundred dollars net loss (compared to working my job instead). So yeah, give me a 1000$ coupon and I am game! For the same reason, I rarely return items I buy if they are in the under 50$ category, or write negative reviews for products that suck. It's just a waste of time, considering time is the most precious resource, and it is also money. I often write positive reviews for products that amaze me (doesn't happen too often), but here the product gave me so much value that I am willing to spend my time for this.
  - gowld 6y ago
    You post on HN, so obviously you have plenty of free time that could be given to help your fellow shoppers and quality merchants.
- topkai22 6y ago
  The point of a game isn't to win, its to have fun. A certain character may disrupt the mechanics of the game that are the most fun to a subgroup of players. To take it to an extreme, let's say a character is introduced to a fighting game and this character will win as soon as the "A" button is pressed. Now whatever fun people were doing to win in the game before is gone. In order to win, you just have to pick this super-character and hit the A button. Doesn't sound very fun to me. At a deeper level, that people won't "exploit the brokenness for their own gain" is key to a functioning society. Just as the promise of laying out rules in detail (expert systems) failed to capture the complexity required to get high-functioning AI, societies can not function by formal rules (laws and regulations) alone. There are sorts of complexities about norms, mores, and moral codes that are important to keep societies and organizations running. What is expected behavior when everyone is queued up to buy tickets at an event, but there is no formal sign saying "please queue here"? I mean you could audiciously walk up, stand next to the person in front of the line, and then walk up to the windows when they say "next please" and not be breaking any written rule, but everyone sure would be angry, and if everyone did it you'd have near total anarachy where the pushiest or strongest always got to the front of the line first. One of the biggest problems with internet scale is that its pretty easy to start running into individuals who ARE ok with exploiting the rules, or just ignoring them. This can be because they are from societies with different norms than the one they are encountering online, or just because they are in the small minority of people who just don't care. This effect is aided and abetted by the relative anonymity online. If you cut in line, people who you can see and here are going to yell at you right now. Break the social norm (or actual policy) of not paying for reviews and you'll most likely just get a strongly worded letter and possible ban on selling (which is easy enough to get around). In short though, not exploiting a broken rule or system just because its broken isn't silly. Its the a huge part of having a functioning society.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Well, with game you have to be careful to distinguish between behavior unintended by developers and intentional design. The Street Fighter series has had any number of opportunities to "fix" behavior that some players consider "cheap" or an exploit. Developers have kept them in. If using those moves deprives another player of fun, that doesn't mean it shod be removed. There is always a winner and a loser, and someone who loses repeatedly to the same technique isn't any more entitled to the fun of winning. Winning is not meant to be a resource evenly divided among all players. Winning is predicated on skill, which is also not evenly divided among all players. Given effective counters, which always exist, calling other players cheap for having developed a novel play style amounts to a sense of winning as entitlement rather than earned. Again, the above presupposes intentional design, or judgement that emergent behavior nonetheless keeps gameplay in balance..
- theamk 6y ago
  Yes, this is called “not being a jerk”. Doing something which is technically legal, benefits you, but causes other players to “hate playing” is not a good long term strategy. This normally ends with either the person being rejected, or, if the rest of people are nice, the group itself disbanding. Nothing silly about this.

... and give away $20 gift cards to people who leave 5-star reviews!

by toxik 6y ago

... and give away $20 gift cards to people who leave 5-star reviews!

There is something about how the human brain works that makes us hate this. It happens in games a lot; the community will complain that a certain character is broken and that they hate playing against it... but won't actually go play the character themselves to exploit the brokenness for their own gain. Seems silly to me. (Buying reviews might actually be illegal though, so that's a strong argument to not do it.)

dvtrn 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
jdmichal 6y ago
If you've never read it before, I highly recommend reading David Sirlin's Playing to Win. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ Specifically the chapter "Introducing... the Scrub" discusses exactly this sentiment. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub > In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely.
- cafard 6y ago
  If you are applying this to computer games, I see your point. If you are applying it to 5-star reviews for $20, then I disagree. (Luigi Barzini mentions an Italian book on card-playing--written, I think, by a clergyman--that begins "Always try to see your opponents' cards." He was trying to point out the light value to that Italians assign to official rules.)
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    But this is life, and there's not really a difference between "arbitrary rule system designed for a game" and "arbitrary rule system designed for 5-star reviews". They're both just "arbitrary rules", and some people are going to Play to Win. So what are you going to do about them?
    - brendoelfrendo 6y ago
      This is what the guillotine was invented to solve.
    - filoleg 6y ago
      I think you and the parent comment are both missing the point of the example with the videogame (not in the least part, because the analogy was not really applicable at all). Having that "arbitrary" throw mechanic in the game was done intentionally to make the game more balanced and enjoyable for the customer. The only people complaining about it are very very early beginners, who don't realize that removing that mechanic would completely break the game balance and make it unplayable. It is an advertised feature, not a bug, in this specific scenario. I don't think that we can say the same about paid reviews on Amazon. It isn't a rule (i.e., Amazon doesn't require every seller to offer gift cards in exchange for 5-star reviews), and it doesn't exist to increase the value that Amazon marketplace provides to their customers, it does the opposite. P.S. I actually agree with what you said completely. It just that the comment that brought up the videogame analogy didn't realize how completely different the situation there was, so it ended up derailing the further chain of arguments.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
- ineedasername 6y ago
  In different terms, that is a passage that could be taken directly out of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals
- jrockway 6y ago
  Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking of.
- kbenson 6y ago
  And this is more akin to a situation where someone finds a glitch that allows them to throw someone from across the screen, never having to actually get close and risk attack. At that point, there's two options from the game designers. They can patch the glitch to restore what people considered the normal, designed, and balanced gameplay, or they can state that's just how the system works now and people need to choose whether to accept that or not and play something else. Amazon can fix (or attempt to at least) the problem and make it harder for sellers to get 5 star reviews and lower reviews averages for some big selling items, or they can choose to do nothing, and some people will decide to leave and shop elsewhere because they can't trust the site and reviews. Actually, there's a third option, which is that they can say they are doing everything they can to fix the problem while not doing much, therefore maximizing both reviews/profit as well as customer satisfaction in the short term. If they actually start fixing the problem before too long, it might be the maximal solution for them, but if they take too long their reputation will suffer even more (and it may give competitors a toe-hold). I suspect Amazon is doing this. I have no idea if they can go longer, are at the point they need to change, or are too late, but as a customer it sucks right now.
- jkinudsjknds 6y ago
  This feels like a poor analogy though. Throws are part of the game design. What's being talked about is more like exploiting a glitch. The glitch may truly be unfair and not part of the intended system. The scrub's fault here is that he doesn't understand the system, but at high level play, there's exploits that the professional community agrees not to employ because its the group assumes social norms to make a better system.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chowells 6y ago
  I'm afraid you've deeply misunderstood Playing to Win. This is quite common. Sirlin assumed a sort of community knowledge as to the context that people who came across the series later tend to lack. Playing To Win is about people who refuse to learn the rules of a game. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that people who understand the rules very well are pointing out that they have holes in them. Scrub statement: "throws are cheap". Informed statement: "the way SF2 tick throw setups work biases the gameplay too far in favor of the player with offensive agency." You'll note that the latter makes no mistake about the purpose of the rules and makes no judgments about players using the tools provided. Instead it focuses on system interactions and their net result. You'll note that almost every big fighting game in the 20 years since the end of the SF2 series has reduced the power of tick throws by means of frame data or broader system changes. Players generally decided that getting the first knockdown should not have that much influence over a match. Scrub statement: "I hate people who get upset at review purchasing." Informed statement: "Review purchasing makes the buying process worse for everyone by creating incentives to deceive buyers, increasing costs for sellers that purchase reviews and reducing sales to sellers who do not. It shifts the Nash equilibrium towards paying more for lower-quality products." Again, the latter examines the system interactions and emergent behavior rather than making moral judgments about the participants.
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    First, I find it hard to believe that you inferred that I deeply misunderstood an entire book due to posting a single quote with almost no other context given within my response. Please be more charitable in the future. Second, I have the same disagreement with you as I do with the other chains. Which is that, de facto paying for reviews is currently a rule in the system. I can tell it's a rule because it's happening, and there's no rules or punishment appearing stop it. In video games, the rules are explicitly coded and nothing beyond that code is permitted. This is why bugs vs intended behaviour becomes a conversation of intent, because the code is obviously allowing it and the code is the ruleset. But that's not true in real life. And that's the part that all responses like yours are missing. There's a game being played at Amazon, where boosting your review stats correlated with boosting your sales stats. Except the permitted ruleset is everything not explicitly prohibited and punished by Amazon. Complaining about people buying reviews is just being a scrub not understanding the rules. The correct conversation to be having is the same as when an apparent bug is found in a game: Is this intended behaviour from Amazon's perspective, and if not what active action are they going to do about it?
martamorena918 6y ago
This has nothing to do with unwillingness to exploit. If you would get a 1 million dollar coupon by leaving a 5 star review, almost everyone would do it (except perhaps billionaires). The thing is: Everybody has a price, but what that price is, is always different. The less money I have, the more incentive I have to take advantage of these schemes. For me, the effort of earning 20$ this way would make this a few hundred dollars net loss (compared to working my job instead). So yeah, give me a 1000$ coupon and I am game! For the same reason, I rarely return items I buy if they are in the under 50$ category, or write negative reviews for products that suck. It's just a waste of time, considering time is the most precious resource, and it is also money. I often write positive reviews for products that amaze me (doesn't happen too often), but here the product gave me so much value that I am willing to spend my time for this.
- gowld 6y ago
  You post on HN, so obviously you have plenty of free time that could be given to help your fellow shoppers and quality merchants.
topkai22 6y ago
The point of a game isn't to win, its to have fun. A certain character may disrupt the mechanics of the game that are the most fun to a subgroup of players. To take it to an extreme, let's say a character is introduced to a fighting game and this character will win as soon as the "A" button is pressed. Now whatever fun people were doing to win in the game before is gone. In order to win, you just have to pick this super-character and hit the A button. Doesn't sound very fun to me. At a deeper level, that people won't "exploit the brokenness for their own gain" is key to a functioning society. Just as the promise of laying out rules in detail (expert systems) failed to capture the complexity required to get high-functioning AI, societies can not function by formal rules (laws and regulations) alone. There are sorts of complexities about norms, mores, and moral codes that are important to keep societies and organizations running. What is expected behavior when everyone is queued up to buy tickets at an event, but there is no formal sign saying "please queue here"? I mean you could audiciously walk up, stand next to the person in front of the line, and then walk up to the windows when they say "next please" and not be breaking any written rule, but everyone sure would be angry, and if everyone did it you'd have near total anarachy where the pushiest or strongest always got to the front of the line first. One of the biggest problems with internet scale is that its pretty easy to start running into individuals who ARE ok with exploiting the rules, or just ignoring them. This can be because they are from societies with different norms than the one they are encountering online, or just because they are in the small minority of people who just don't care. This effect is aided and abetted by the relative anonymity online. If you cut in line, people who you can see and here are going to yell at you right now. Break the social norm (or actual policy) of not paying for reviews and you'll most likely just get a strongly worded letter and possible ban on selling (which is easy enough to get around). In short though, not exploiting a broken rule or system just because its broken isn't silly. Its the a huge part of having a functioning society.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Well, with game you have to be careful to distinguish between behavior unintended by developers and intentional design. The Street Fighter series has had any number of opportunities to "fix" behavior that some players consider "cheap" or an exploit. Developers have kept them in. If using those moves deprives another player of fun, that doesn't mean it shod be removed. There is always a winner and a loser, and someone who loses repeatedly to the same technique isn't any more entitled to the fun of winning. Winning is not meant to be a resource evenly divided among all players. Winning is predicated on skill, which is also not evenly divided among all players. Given effective counters, which always exist, calling other players cheap for having developed a novel play style amounts to a sense of winning as entitlement rather than earned. Again, the above presupposes intentional design, or judgement that emergent behavior nonetheless keeps gameplay in balance..
theamk 6y ago
Yes, this is called “not being a jerk”. Doing something which is technically legal, benefits you, but causes other players to “hate playing” is not a good long term strategy. This normally ends with either the person being rejected, or, if the rest of people are nice, the group itself disbanding. Nothing silly about this.