3 ms·

As 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

As 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
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extragood 3y ago
I 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 ago
  Who 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 ago
    I 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.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      The best possible marketing platform for their ebook sales is when they send you a notification through the kindle app that says "an author you've purchased from in the past has just published _this_ new book". I'm always happy to get those if I liked the earlier purchase. Unfortunately, I've bought some kindle books that turned out to be not so great, and there doesn't appear to be any way to exclude them from this feature.
  - mcherm 3y ago
    If the goal is to prevent brigading then works that have very few reviews wouldn't need to be protected. That combined with restrictions on reviews before publication might be a viable approach.
  - rjknight 3y ago
    Creating that kind of quiz feels like it's within the reach of today's better LLMs.
    - j16sdiz 3y ago
      .... and the potential spammer can use a LLM to pass the quiz
esperent 3y ago
I'm kind of torn on the DNF reviews as I have left a couple myself. Usually after several chapters at least though. On the one hand, if I'm leaving the review because I disagree with the author of a nonfiction book, that's obviously not cool. But (this usually applies to novels but sometimes nonfiction too) if the book is badly written trash and I want to save other people from the wasted hours I just put in, a DNF review seems reasonable.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

extragood 3y ago

I 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 ago
Who 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 ago
  I 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.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    The best possible marketing platform for their ebook sales is when they send you a notification through the kindle app that says "an author you've purchased from in the past has just published _this_ new book". I'm always happy to get those if I liked the earlier purchase. Unfortunately, I've bought some kindle books that turned out to be not so great, and there doesn't appear to be any way to exclude them from this feature.
- mcherm 3y ago
  If the goal is to prevent brigading then works that have very few reviews wouldn't need to be protected. That combined with restrictions on reviews before publication might be a viable approach.
- rjknight 3y ago
  Creating that kind of quiz feels like it's within the reach of today's better LLMs.
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    .... and the potential spammer can use a LLM to pass the quiz

esperent 3y ago

I'm kind of torn on the DNF reviews as I have left a couple myself. Usually after several chapters at least though. On the one hand, if I'm leaving the review because I disagree with the author of a nonfiction book, that's obviously not cool. But (this usually applies to novels but sometimes nonfiction too) if the book is badly written trash and I want to save other people from the wasted hours I just put in, a DNF review seems reasonable.