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The Wrath of Goodreads
- fortran77 3y agoThis is also the "Wrath of Hacker News" (on a lesser scale) because nobody clicks on the link and reads the article before commenting.
- thefurdrake 3y agoI feel like sometimes gatekeeping is acceptable. The end of the article provides the perfect solution: "Do not review a book you haven’t read." People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick.
- cafard 3y agoThat sounds optimistic. I write as someone who wish that people in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read.
- thefurdrake 3y agoWhich part sounds optimistic?
- whimsicalism 3y agoUnlike picking a book you haven't read for book group, there is literally nothing to gain from reviewing a book you haven't read.
- etrautmann 3y agoPresumably many individuals do this to engage in the culture wars.
- omgmajk 3y agoExcept engagement, likes and fake internet points on social media - it seems.
- krisoft 3y ago> I write as someone who wish that people in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read. That is weird expectation to me. At my book club we decide on what books we are interested in reading by voting. That of course means that sometimes what we end up reading something which turns out to be a dud, and then we discuss why or how it felt short of our expectations. Would you expect someone to pre-vet the books you embark on reading? In my opinion picking a book for book club is not endorsement, but just an expression that it interests the book club.
- thyrsus 3y agoI thought that was how book clubs worked: they picked a book, the members then read it over a reasonable period, then reconvened to discuss it and pick the next.
- hammock 3y agoPotential solve: Amazon owns Goodreads. Amazon has a way of tagging reviews with “certified purchaser,” and they could start filtering for only these reviews, rather than just flagging and boosting them (as the article says they are doing now). Of course this means you must buy the book from Amazon Edit: don’t downvote me just because you hate this idea, haha. Obviously there are tradeoffs
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoGoodreads is much more international than Amazon, foreign users won’t realistically order from Amazon.com and might not have a local Amazon.xy site. For a time, one of the most active demographics on Goodreads was young female Iranians.
- CSMastermind 3y agoAs noted in the article they already do this.
- nerdponx 3y ago"Solution" is a fine word. And no, I don't want Goodreads to invalidate my review on the grounds that I didn't buy it on Amazon.
- jasonlotito 3y agoThe irony to make this suggestion on this article about people commenting on things they didn't read.
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoNot only might you not have purchased from Amazon and instead bought it some other way, but * Most early reviews are via ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) which you get through netgalley and similar sites, or directly from the author/publisher * It is quite likely that you're reading something (legally) without having bought it because libraries exist * Just because you bought it, doesn't mean you read it, and you might be tempted to leave a one-star review based on the fact that it shipped slowly and arrived late
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoGoodreads, like any social network, attracts a lot of perpetually-online people involved in activism, the sort where it is acceptable and even encouraged to shout down authors whom one’s community regards as detrimental to society. No need to read the book first, because judgment has already been cast. Therefore, those users can’t be expected to feel ashamed for their behavior, rather their behaviour might even serve as a form of social currency with their in-group.
- henriquez 3y agoEvery book I don’t like should be banned.
- isaacremuant 3y agoWorse, every book from people that someone told me not to like.
- manderley 3y agoBook bannings seem pretty popular in the offline-world of the US as well, not sure it's an online-only thing.
- Spooky23 3y agoThe level of effort is lower online. In real life this stuff is usually limited to more backwards places more vulnerable to phony political and “religious” figures fanning flames.
- brightstep 3y agoThe solution is trust. Crowd sourced reviews are junk because you don’t know who wrote them, what their intentions are, or if they are in any way qualified (whatever that means to you) to review a book. With well known and trusted reviewer, you understand their biases and can adjust accordingly.
- Incipient 3y agoI don't think the issue here is about mmm individual being able to trust reviews. It's more about authors being pressured to write along certain lines due to hordes of basically bots upvoting/downvoting.
- gertrunde 3y agoI once felt driven to leave a review of a book that I hadn't read. I had purchased and read several books from a particular author - all reasonably enjoyable, but extremely badly written pulp sci-fi, and I was desperately trying to find some way to stop Amazon repeatedly promoting this garbage to me through notifications 2-3 times a week... So not even a review as such, just a fruitless attempt to influence Amazon's algorithms!
- WoodenChair 3y agoAlmost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes? It’s been a learning experience for me as an author. The first chapter should not be special, it should be like the rest of the book.
- falcolas 3y ago> Almost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes? Just to provide an alternative point of view from a reader, this is fine behavior. So long as you mention this in your review. I’ve DNFed both movies and books in 10% or less. And that’s ok. There’s a ton of excellent books and movies to justify pushing yourself through content you don’t like. As someone put it, we’re not looking for needles in haystacks, we’re looking for needles in mountains of needles. So, it’s not personal, but a review at 10% is still a valid review, if it’s honest about the slice read.
- WoodenChair 3y agoSure, as long as it doesn't assume the other 90% is the same as the first 10%.
- msla 3y ago> Sure, as long as it doesn't assume the other 90% is the same as the first 10%. Is the author writing badly just for fun, then? Is this potboiler going to turn into something thought-provoking after the first chapter of cardboard characters and cliché exposition? That wouldn't be a bad idea, like an updating of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" with riffs on modern fiction styles, but I doubt "The <Greek Letter> <Ominous Noun>" ("The Omega Directive" "The Alpha Sanction") is going to turn into into a parody of airline novels after starting out as merely a poor example of same.
- WoodenChair 3y agoWe're not talking about "for fun" or "style" as much as content. Does the content get better? Does the film improve as it progresses? If the review is only based on style, then I guess, sure. But as far as content, well how would one know unless they read the rest of it? There are plenty of novels that change quite significantly in character partway through. There are plenty of films with a weird first act before you get into it. If a book is popular and has thousands of people reviewing it, why not let the people with enough context (i.e. those who actually read all of it or at least the majority of it) review it? Is one so smart that their review based on only partial information is necessary and needs to add to the chorus of all of the other reviews? Would you trust the review of a professional movie critic if they said well they didn't like the first 15 minutes so they just quit. Well today because we all have a megaphone through review sites, we are all on the level of professional critics to more of an extent than anyone would be in 1990 so we all have some responsibility to write informed reviews.
- DangitBobby 3y agoPeople suck, so this is a non-solution. Review sites that accept fraudulent reviews are worthless so this should be seen as an existential crisis. I think should delete any reviews that were found to come out before a book could have been read, delete any other reviews they've written, and permaban their accounts.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> The end of the article provides the perfect solution: > "Do not review a book you haven’t read." No, that isn't the perfect solution. Andrew Gelman stated the issue better here ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/07/02/the_moral_of_th/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/07/02/the_moral_... ): > I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI’m not at all convinced. How would you review a book you haven’t read? At least you could point out some specifics to maybe convince some people
- thaumasiotes 3y agoWhy would it be necessary to read the autobiography of Uri Geller before pointing out that it's full of crap? That's a waste of everyone's time.
- shmde 3y ago> "Do not review a book you haven’t read." > People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick. Replace books with games and the whole gaming community will be in pitchforks after you.
- sien 3y agoHere is a proud "I haven't read the book review" from a highly ranked reviewer on Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2325928726 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2325928726 He's #6 in Australia. If hundreds of people like a review which clearly states that the reviewer hasn't read the book what are you meant to do.
- neonate 3y agohttps://archive.ph/OUVFq https://archive.ph/OUVFq
- prepend 3y agoI don’t think Goodreads has any terrible power as I don’t think people rely on it for reviews or recommendations. I’m sure this author is unhappy someone rated her low, but I don’t think it affects sales. Although it’s hard to know. I expect Amazon ratings are more important.
- whimsicalism 3y agoNo clue what other people do, but I certainly do rely on Goodreads for that stuff. That said, if it has a low number of recommendations, like in many of the examples, then I won't give it much mind.
- smcleod 3y agoI absolutely do, similar to IMDB/RT where it doesn’t mean I’ll agree with the review / score but it’s a good indicator.
- crazygringo 3y ago> I don’t think people rely on it for reviews or recommendations Not sure why you think that, since that's literally the entire purpose of the site. And it's the 175th most popular site in the US [1], so clearly lots of people use it for that. So it's definitely going to affect sales. How much, or whether Goodreads or Amazon reviews affect sales more, is hard to say. But the idea that it has no effect isn't plausible. [1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/goodreads.com/#ranking https://www.similarweb.com/website/goodreads.com/#ranking
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago> that's literally the entire purpose of the site. It’s not the entire purpose of the site. The site also serves to simply keep track of the books that one has read – you can export your activity as a CSV file, so (at least for the time being) you still own your own data. Quite a few of the users listed under books that I read, simply catalogued the book as "Read" without giving it a star rating or writing a review.
- 3y ago
- mycologos 3y agoGoodreads is a mountain of evidence against the idea that simply reading makes you a better person.
- johndhi 3y agoThis is cute and funny - but imo it really just points out that social media attracts anger.
- mlinhares 3y agoOr we mostly surface anger. In any case it’s a net negative.
- mycologos 3y agoThank you, I appreciate being cute and funny! But I guess I can add more context. Yeah, Goodreads is like other websites in that people get a certain something out of joining a chorus of criticizing voices. But I'm also talking about the sheer volume of reviewers who essentially read the same book over and over again, or who try to shoehorn every new book into a rigid (and unimaginative) notion of what a book is supposed to be. I think we valorize reading because, at its best, it's a uniquely immersive way of being exposed to new ideas; I think the preceding ways of reading thwart that. I don't begrudge people who just want to read fantasy novels forever, it's your life, but I don't think it's what we have in mind when we tell kindergarteners that reading is power.
- gdulli 3y agoWhat's the right number of times to read a book, and what's the right notion of what a book's supposed to be, and what degree of flexibility to it is required? We're all eager to start reading correctly but can't until you tell us more specifically how.
- cwmoore 3y agoThe classic is "How to Read a Book": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21956990-how-to-read-a-book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21956990-how-to-read-a-b...
- thenerdhead 3y agoAs someone who loves Goodreads, I've largely ignored the "bad parts" such as what this article is describing. I've seen these review bombs on plenty of titles once certain authors or books become heavily politicized. Sometimes decades after the fact of their published book. You also see a general sentiment of people who want to voice their opinion on how bad books are to the point where they say "DNF" and thus leave a scathing review over a single chapter. I don't know if there is a fix to this problem, but I do wish more people read the entire book instead of judging it by its metaphorical cover.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- extragood 3y agoI don't know if it's the answer, but proving basic knowledge of a text could help e.g. a short multiple choice quiz. Anyone determined enough could defeat those measures of course, but it'd probably cut down on the volume of insincere reviews and lend credibility to those that pass.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoWho is going to pay for the creation of those quizzes? Amazon bought Goodreads to minimize its own liabilities, but otherwise it doesn’t want to invest any more money in the site. Morever, Goodreads doesn’t just cover a few popular fiction or non-fiction works for which a short multiple-choice quiz could be realistically created. It allows you to catalogue and review any book that has an ISBN. As someone involved in an academic field, my Goodreads activity is mainly obscure works of scholarship from university presses.
- extragood 3y agoI was imagining that would be crowd sourced as well, assuming no publisher input. But I have to admit it has its flaws, and I don't have a great answer for academic texts. As far as Amazon investment goes, it seems like a missed opportunity if they're not putting at least some more money into it. That's got to be the best possible marketing platform for their ebook/kindle and wider book sales.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago30 years in & it feels like the internet hasn't taken a single step to moderating the moderators. The web has almost nothing here & that's kept us locked in this sad holding pattern. I love the Web Annotation specification. Comment on anything on the web! Share those annotations! And it will let you select/target content in the page. But actually being able to annotate something like the discrete comments within the page, that feels missing. Maybe good reads lets us view a specific comment by a specific author: there's a page for it. That we can annotate & mark up, in a way we can aggregate against that comment or that author. But if we're just browsing a list of reviews, there's a missing link in figuring out semantically what it is on the page we're trying to markup.
- jmeister 3y agoCommunity Notes?
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoI know very little about how the different voices there are moderated/synthesized I to what's shown. It's just an anonymous black box machine to me. But tes, it is a recent example of crowdharvesting some opinion!!
- crtified 3y agoPerhaps the whole notion of getting our (e.g. user review) information from the same source that sells the product, is flawed.
- tweetle_beetle 3y agoI remember feeling very naive learning from a friend who used to work in a large chain bookshop that the reviews (handwritten on small cards signed with staff names) scattered around shelves were only for books which were shortlisted by management.
- mparnisari 3y agoThe solution is to never read those reviews.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AraceliHarker 3y agoI don't understand giving pre-release books to TikTok influencers for promotion - do TikTok aficionados really read books? I don't think the publisher's attitude of just getting buzz is sincere towards readers and authors.
- bombcar 3y agoPublishers give no shits about whether people read the books. They just need them to buy them. And that’s been a staple for years, any trip to Goodwill will find you volumes and volumes of books featured on Oprah, etc, where the spines show zero evidence of having ever been opened.
- Graziano_M 3y agoI stopped trusting Goodreads when I read a review for "The Mythical Man Month" which gave it 1 star because the author used "He" pronouns when referring to software engineers. Remember that this was a book written in 1975.
- mparnisari 3y agoAt least this person gave a reason for their bad rating. Most just leave 1 star with no comment...
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- poisonborz 3y agoDue to how books work, Goodreads could require reviewers to put the book on the "currently reading" list X amount of time before a review could be written, or it could at least display the "read time" on the review, similar to how Steam does with reviews.
- ryzvonusef 3y agoGoodreads is so bad it allows reviews of books that don't even exist. There exist pages for books that are "presumed" to exist based on author expectations, but have not been even conceived of yet, much less written, edited, titled, covered, published and read to be reviewed. For example, Brandon Sanderson thinks that his current big hit series (Stormlight) will have ~10 books, he's currently half way writing the 5th book, so the 10th is a LONG way coming. It's entirely possible he will change his plans, after all he did so for his other series Mistborn, he put four more books in between book 3 and what was originally going to be book 4 (now possibly book 8), if he doesn't change the plan again, or cancel the book series entirely and re-write the entire multiverse setup he has in his brain. Yet a page for this hypothetical Stormlight book 10 exist: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17250985-untitled https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17250985-untitled There is no harm in pre-emptively creating a page bookmarking purposes, I supposed, but it already has 22 written reviews and 94 ratings giving it 4.68 stars. WHY? why allow such things for non-existent books? How hard is it lock star ratings and comment box until the book is, you know, actually existant and read?
- onlypositive 3y agoPretty hard. There is no centralized book registry. All you need to publish a book is a valid ISBN10/EAN13. You can buy those online in bulk. And technically you don't need one, but generally if you want to sell it enmasse you want one. Given its owned by Amazon you'd think they'd limit it to known ASINs but then I guess they can't account for rare or old books that predate the isbn system.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoNot long ago, I was in charge of a lending library at church. A very small lending library, like we started with one bookcase and grew to two. At first, the most important task was sorting the donations, and determining which books were good for our shelves, and which to discard/recycle. So I was studying a lot of publication houses and authors and reputations. And at that time, I was sorting the books more or less by size and shape, or randomly. So I had no catalog of books; each had a little library-style pocket with a library-style checkout card, and on the honor system, the parishioners would choose a book, remove the card, and keep the book for a few weeks. But we didn't know what was on the shelves in the first place. So I decided I would find a book cataloging app for Android. You know, something that a small-time librarian could use. Ahahaha! That was a pointless exercise at the Play Store! Perhaps I gave up far too early. I also looked for a barcode scanning app, so that I could just zap each book and immediately know its ISBN and other details. At that point, I started noticing whether a book had a barcode or ISBN, and guess what, a lot of them had neither. More ISBNs than barcodes, that's for sure. What did I expect? These books were donated from parishioners who passed away, and represented 50 years or more of collecting tomes. Eventually I just started taking photos of the bookshelves after I was done organizing them all. Oh, and there was at least one unknown person whose mission in life was to purposely mess up all the organized books, and put them in weird arrangements. Far more than someone who's innocently browsing the shelves, this was some kind of deliberate messing with my mind. It came to a point where I had to decide whether I would spend volunteer hours re-re-re-arranging and organizing, or just do a 10-minute tidy on it and stop worrying about this living Catholic troll.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoAlmost every book on goodreads has between 3.5 and 4.2 rating and it seems unrelated to the quality of the book or it’s sales stats. Anything above 4, theoretically, stands out, but often not, often it’s just a rating shortage or something in the zeitgeist leading to high ratings that year, which may not apply to next year. I only use the site myself to look for 3-4 star reviews, hoping somebody with this middle of the road rating said the good and the bad, but also, there’s a ton of spoilers in those reviews, so even then, I avoid them…
- LeoMurphy 3y ago[dead]