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This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon, and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague critical gestures towards Amazon in t

This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon, and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague critical gestures towards Amazon in the first four paragraphs, it gets to its real point: Goodreads, a social network, has woefully inadequate censorship, which can lead to financial losses to authors and publishers. According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't kept the site up with changes in censorship standards and technology, and just lets whoever say whatever about books.

drxzcl 3y ago
That’s only true for extremely small values of “censorship”.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  The values that include commenting on writing in general aren't small to most people. I can't imagine a larger value. edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books, the subjects of books, or whether books should have been written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat offenders banned in future.
  - lkbm 3y ago
    Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake reviews from their products? This is something most people are in favor of. You can write what you want about books elsewhere. On Amazon, product reviews and ratings should be from people who have used the product. On Goodreads, reviews should be by people who have read the book.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      > Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake reviews from their products? This is something most people are in favor of. This isn't about fake reviews, this is 1) partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book, and 2) about "review-bombing," a phrase that is used a lot in this article without an argument being made as to exactly what constitutes review bombing (do the people involved have to collude?), or whether it's illegitimate. It just assumes that it is. You've said "fake reviews" in this comment when the word "fake" wasn't used in the article a single time. They depend on you doing that for them.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book Which is a fake review in my view. Or, at least, an irrelevant review. A review is supposed to be about the particulars of that book, not about whether or not the reader thinks the subject matter is objectionable. Presumably, people who dislike the subject matter won't be reading the book anyway, so such a review is worthless. If you haven't read the book, you cannot possibly write a legitimate review of it.
        pessimizer 3y ago
        If it's a "fake" review for values of fake that don't include dishonesty, you can easily choose not to read it. This is not that. The big example cited is a bunch of people registering their objection to a light book being written about Soviet Ukraine while there's a war on. This is a real objection that a lot of (silly, annoying) people have. The reason the book was not published is because they thought that this objection would go viral and affect the sales of the book. That has nothing to with fake or false. That has to do with suppressing financially threatening speech.
        lkbm 3y ago
        > you can easily choose not to read it. I cannot easily exclude it from the ratings. There's a pretty widespread understanding that star ratings are meant to aggregate the opinions of people who read the book.
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        > are meant to Maybe review scores ought to be an aggregate of the opinions of people who read the book, but that's not what they actually are. They're an aggregate of how people feel towards a book (for any reason). Such reviews might even be against the rules and guidelines set out for reviews; reviews ought to follow the rules but that doesn't mean they will. The utility of review scores derives wholly from how they actually work, not from how they're meant to work. So devalue them accordingly.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Preventing fraud, not censorship. Writing a fake review of a book that hasn't even been finished written yet is fraud.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  A review of a book that hasn't been published that explains why I don't think the subject is appropriate for a book, how I don't like the author, and what I think about the author's previous opinions about the subject isn't "fake" or "fraud," it's discussion that virtually all intelligent people can handle. "Fake" and "fraud" are words that you're adding to the article. ----- edit: I feel like it's important to mention that the only reason this "review bombing" is painted as bad is because it convinces people. This is yet another case of (calling for) censoring speech because it is convincing. It convinced the Eat, Pray, Love author not to publish at all.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    If your review "of a book" is actually a review of the author, I agree that it's not quite right to call it a fake review, nor fraud, but neither is it truly a review of the book. Ideally there would be a way to rate authors so that people don't feel compelled to categorize their author reviews as book reviews for books they haven't read. People are going to leave these kind of reviews, so the system may as well be set up for it. Generally, I'm wary of attempts to address 'review bombing' (besides standard anti-botting measures) because it seems like accusations of review bombing have become a sort of general cope employed by creators whenever their thing gets a negative reception. It's common to de-legitimize contrary points of view by calling people dehumanizing terms like 'troll', when in fact those people probably earnestly feel that way (they aren't trolling.) If I know the earth is round but I pretend to think the earth is flat to get a rise out of people, that's trolling. But if I'm a halfwit who earnestly thinks the earth is flat, and I say so, that's not trolling. The difference between these won't necessarily be apparent from the text of the review itself; how then do you separate the trolls from the people you disagree with? On an individual basis you can go with your gut or look that person up, but that doesn't scale up to classifying thousands of reviews. What creators are really asking for is the privilege to curate the reviews themselves, but that isn't a reasonable privilege to grant because it would completely devalue reviews for consumers. Do what needs to be done to combat botting, use captchas or account verification or whatever works. But after that? Let the reviews fall where they may. Creators will cry that the bad reviews aren't legitimate because the reviewers are [dehumanizing term], but there's nothing that can reasonably be done about this.

drxzcl 3y ago

That’s only true for extremely small values of “censorship”.

pessimizer 3y ago
The values that include commenting on writing in general aren't small to most people. I can't imagine a larger value. edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books, the subjects of books, or whether books should have been written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat offenders banned in future.
- lkbm 3y ago
  Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake reviews from their products? This is something most people are in favor of. You can write what you want about books elsewhere. On Amazon, product reviews and ratings should be from people who have used the product. On Goodreads, reviews should be by people who have read the book.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    > Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake reviews from their products? This is something most people are in favor of. This isn't about fake reviews, this is 1) partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book, and 2) about "review-bombing," a phrase that is used a lot in this article without an argument being made as to exactly what constitutes review bombing (do the people involved have to collude?), or whether it's illegitimate. It just assumes that it is. You've said "fake reviews" in this comment when the word "fake" wasn't used in the article a single time. They depend on you doing that for them.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book Which is a fake review in my view. Or, at least, an irrelevant review. A review is supposed to be about the particulars of that book, not about whether or not the reader thinks the subject matter is objectionable. Presumably, people who dislike the subject matter won't be reading the book anyway, so such a review is worthless. If you haven't read the book, you cannot possibly write a legitimate review of it.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        If it's a "fake" review for values of fake that don't include dishonesty, you can easily choose not to read it. This is not that. The big example cited is a bunch of people registering their objection to a light book being written about Soviet Ukraine while there's a war on. This is a real objection that a lot of (silly, annoying) people have. The reason the book was not published is because they thought that this objection would go viral and affect the sales of the book. That has nothing to with fake or false. That has to do with suppressing financially threatening speech.
        lkbm 3y ago
        > you can easily choose not to read it. I cannot easily exclude it from the ratings. There's a pretty widespread understanding that star ratings are meant to aggregate the opinions of people who read the book.
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        > are meant to Maybe review scores ought to be an aggregate of the opinions of people who read the book, but that's not what they actually are. They're an aggregate of how people feel towards a book (for any reason). Such reviews might even be against the rules and guidelines set out for reviews; reviews ought to follow the rules but that doesn't mean they will. The utility of review scores derives wholly from how they actually work, not from how they're meant to work. So devalue them accordingly.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Preventing fraud, not censorship. Writing a fake review of a book that hasn't even been finished written yet is fraud.

pessimizer 3y ago
A review of a book that hasn't been published that explains why I don't think the subject is appropriate for a book, how I don't like the author, and what I think about the author's previous opinions about the subject isn't "fake" or "fraud," it's discussion that virtually all intelligent people can handle. "Fake" and "fraud" are words that you're adding to the article. ----- edit: I feel like it's important to mention that the only reason this "review bombing" is painted as bad is because it convinces people. This is yet another case of (calling for) censoring speech because it is convincing. It convinced the Eat, Pray, Love author not to publish at all.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  If your review "of a book" is actually a review of the author, I agree that it's not quite right to call it a fake review, nor fraud, but neither is it truly a review of the book. Ideally there would be a way to rate authors so that people don't feel compelled to categorize their author reviews as book reviews for books they haven't read. People are going to leave these kind of reviews, so the system may as well be set up for it. Generally, I'm wary of attempts to address 'review bombing' (besides standard anti-botting measures) because it seems like accusations of review bombing have become a sort of general cope employed by creators whenever their thing gets a negative reception. It's common to de-legitimize contrary points of view by calling people dehumanizing terms like 'troll', when in fact those people probably earnestly feel that way (they aren't trolling.) If I know the earth is round but I pretend to think the earth is flat to get a rise out of people, that's trolling. But if I'm a halfwit who earnestly thinks the earth is flat, and I say so, that's not trolling. The difference between these won't necessarily be apparent from the text of the review itself; how then do you separate the trolls from the people you disagree with? On an individual basis you can go with your gut or look that person up, but that doesn't scale up to classifying thousands of reviews. What creators are really asking for is the privilege to curate the reviews themselves, but that isn't a reasonable privilege to grant because it would completely devalue reviews for consumers. Do what needs to be done to combat botting, use captchas or account verification or whatever works. But after that? Let the reviews fall where they may. Creators will cry that the bad reviews aren't legitimate because the reviewers are [dehumanizing term], but there's nothing that can reasonably be done about this.