10 ms·

Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

94 points by webmaven 3y ago

dangjc 3y ago
We’re getting to the point where sites might need to embrace ID verification to protect against fake, malicious, farmed, and AI generated content.
jasondclinton 3y ago
This is such a bad headline. The story is mostly about an author posting fraudulent reviews to promote her own work.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Re-read the article, or at least the second paragraph. They (and some buddies or sock puppet accounts) were low-ranking other authors’ books, specifically targeting authors of color. They’ve admitted this publicly. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/13/cait-corrain-publisher-drops-author-fake-accounts-review-bomb https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/13/cait-corrain-p... > “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive,” she tweeted.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    The first part is false > Many of the books given one-star ratings were written by people of colour That is not 'specifically targeting.' Why do you have to make this about race?
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      The sock puppet accounts were given stereotypically of-color names, and targeted authors were disproportionately of-color. There’s pretty clear indication of bias there. > They posted a 31-page Google document containing screenshots of the activity of a number of accounts, with usernames including “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young”, suspected to have been created by Corrain. > “There’s something extra despicable about using clearly POC [people of colour] names in the fake accounts to upvote every negative review on POC books so the top ones are all 1 star and 2 star. Like what in the yellow face,” Zhao tweeted. Many of the accounts linked on the document Zhao shared have now been deleted.
      - itsoktocry 3y ago
        Is "Chantal" a stereotypical POC name in your opinion? News to me. You have a lot more confidence on a bunch of people doing OSS "research" than I do. The quote itself says "suspected". I would go as far as to say that believing this was racially motivated (rather than just a scummy move) based on this "evidence" is weird, but not surprising.
        s1artibartfast 3y ago
        >Is "Chantal" a stereotypical POC name in your opinion? News to me. Interesting. I would have guessed that Chantal is a 90% black name, but I was wrong. It is only slightly more common for black women, and there are many whites with the name too. This may be a regional distinction.
      - CWuestefeld 3y ago
        > The sock puppet accounts were given stereotypically of-color names, and targeted authors were disproportionately of-color. There’s pretty clear indication of bias there. AIUI, authors in the subgenre are disproportionately non-white. If that's the case, it would be expected for those targeted to be similarly non-white. None of this is a defense of the offender: she's definitely a big jerk. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to make every freakin' issue about race.
      - fallingknife 3y ago
        Break this down to just the facts presented. There are 31 pages of screenshots. They mention two names that were included that sound like POC. Note that they avoid saying anything beyond that. And they make sure to include the disclaimer that they are "suspected" to be sock puppets. They are clearly grasping at straws to bring race into this.
    - KittenInABox 3y ago
      The list of the authors targeted have all been people of color, iirc. Given publishing is like 75+% white, it's very improbable to just accidentally target half a dozen or more debuts and they just all happen to not be white. Additionally, there is a conversation that the author faked having with a "friend". The "friend" actually admits to targeting poc authors in order to "sabotage" cait.
      - averageRoyalty 3y ago
        Whilst I don't disagree with your conclusion, the sibling comments cover: - The subgenre this all happened in has a very different makeup than western publishing broadly, and - The authors targeted were not all 'people of colour'. I agree she was likely secondarily racially motivated in some way - maybe due to trust in that subgenre, or the view in some area of the internet that 'people of colour' cannot be questioned. Or maybe she's just a racist killing two birds with one stone. She seems a serial liar, so I doubt we'll ever know for sure.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Sounds like type of growth hacking that start-ups are sometimes celebrated for... Boost your own brand while lowering competition...
politelemon 3y ago
To me this is just one in a continue set of examples of GR's lack of care for their platform. The issues mentioned that lead to and encourage this behaviour have existed for well over a decade. Their solution is to make it a userland issue.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  Name one social platform that doesn't have this issue. It's not a trivial thing to solve. I don't want to have to submit my passport to share a book review.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    It a bit like navel gazing, but HN? If a thread started for ‘best X of 2023’, I’d be pretty sure of the results.
  - caconym_ 3y ago
    > I don't want to have to submit my passport to share a book review. Why is it important that you, a person apparently unwilling (hyperbole aside) to prove that you have actually read a particular book, should be able to transmit (ostensibly) your opinions about said book into the heads of other potential readers via a software platform? A small number of verified reviews is almost certainly better than a large number of unverified reviews, for exactly the reason highlighted by OP's article: when there are few or no controls on who or what can post however many reviews, the system is inevitably exploited by bad actors, and said actors often operate at scales that dwarf the impact of a single legitimate reviewer.
  - johnfn 3y ago
    Although I know you said this in jest, it got me thinking that it would be really fun to have a system where you have to submit answers to a short quiz about the book before you can submit your review. No reviews would be removed, but you would, if you wanted, be able to filter the global average by people who scored over a certain threshold on the quiz. Probably you could even generate new questions every time with GPT, so that people couldn't cheat. This system would have a million problems, sure, but would it have more problems than the current system?
superkuh 3y ago
I am asking Amazon to please let go of Goodreads and restore it to it's proper state before they ruined it. But neither of us is going to get what we want.
- politelemon 3y ago
  I'm still unhappy about the API discontinuation which was wrapped in a "this is better for you" announcement.
- elektor 3y ago
  I too have given up on Goodreads and relocated to StoryGraph (https://thestorygraph.com/ https://thestorygraph.com/)
  - CWuestefeld 3y ago
    Thanks for the pointer. I've been checking this out, and it looks pretty good. I can't find any way on the site to ask questions, either of the developers or of the community. What I'm trying to figure out is the semantics of their reading preferences exclusions. The actual question asks about "types of content that you never want to read about", and that "about" confuses me. Suppose that I choose "racism" there. Does this indicate that I never want to read anything that somebody has tagged as racist (which I think is probably the case, but is less than useful because it seems like darn near everything gets tagged with that one way or another), or is the "about" saying that I don't want to read any meta-discussion of racism, that is, I don't want any books that are "about" racism - which is absolutely the case.
    - hutattedonmyarm 3y ago
      > I can't find any way on the site to ask questions, either of the developers or of the community. I can see a "contact us" button both on mobile (in the hamburger menu, top right) and on desktop (bottom right corner). Right now it seems to be a bit too sensitive and hides books a bit too eagerly, but the team is aware of that. That's about the extend of info I have though
barbazoo 3y ago
I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve.
- bastard_op 3y ago
  If they wanted to, they would. They obviously don't care. How this is any different from their poor handling of fake reviews on all the Chinese garbage that floods their normal sales I don't know.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    That’s right, it’s not
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  > I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve. I'm surprised Amazon is actually doing something, anything, related to Goodreads, including 'asking users'. The website feels abandoned.
  - mhb 3y ago
    > The website feels abandoned What does that mean?
    - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
      It means that Amazon does not seem to invest anything into this aquisition anymore. Even the maintenance is lacking, this year they had an outage measured in hours.
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  They seem to be unable to solve it without hiring people and paying wages, hence their call for help from volunteers
woodruffw 3y ago
Seems like a problem that could be solved, in part, by reopening Goodreads’ APIs (so that people could write ring detectors, inauthentic behavior, etc.). But Amazon doesn’t appear to be interested in that.
siva7 3y ago
How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  It's not super difficult to only show reviews you are highly confident AREN'T completely fake. Instead they prioritize having as many reviews as possible - when possibly a majority of them are fake. And the cost is - the reviews are completely meaningless. All they care about is engagement - and if users have to dig through reviews manually trying to sort out signal from noise - that's engagement to them, not an awful product.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Amazon adds "verified purchaser" if the reviewer bought the book. Which means my glowing review (if I wrote one) of https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/1591841526/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp... might look fake, since I borrowed it from the library.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
      Verified purchaser is not a good signal, and they know it. It's a way to force the fraudsters to buy from Amazon. Don't fix the problem - make more money from it. That's what companies do.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Not all they care about is engagement. They also care about keeping costs down. If costs were no object they could simply hire well-paid, trustworthy, professional reviewers to review every product and listing. These high quality reviews could establish their site as the gold standard, strengthening the brand (think Apple levels of brand value) and drawing even more users. But all of this could be so expensive they’d actually lose money for doing it. So they don’t.
swayvil 3y ago
There will always be many many assholes. In the past, time and space have insulated us from them. But now we have the internet. The assholes can see you, touch you, talk to you, even decide what you are allowed to say. This is a mark against the internet.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  This is spot-on, and I upvoted it. The Block & Mute are what makes them go away.
  - seattle_spring 3y ago
    And good moderation. Unfortunately many of the said assholes have tricked gullible people into thinking moderation equals censorship.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  >But now we have the internet. The assholes can see you, touch you, talk to you, even decide what you are allowed to say. I would say the direction is the opposite. Assholes dont seek people out, people seek out the assholes. In the real world, people dont walk up to strangers and ask them to disclose their most offensive opinion. However, on the internet people will scroll through pages of agreeable comments looking for something disagreeable. The same is basically true for reviews too. The physical world default is you dont know what people think. The internet allows people to know what others think, including their dumb opinions, swings, and trends.
  - swayvil 3y ago
    >on the internet people will scroll through pages of agreeable comments looking for something disagreeable. I thought that I was the only person who does this. Therefore, given a forum full of people, the chance that you will offend somebody is increased. It becomes less "say something offensive" and more "say something merely noteworthy". We get a “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” situation. On the scale of the whole internet. The internet becomes a huge engine for imposing conformity.
jdowner 3y ago
Goodreads should consider putting some effort into the platform they have allowed to languish for years.
whynotmaybe 3y ago
Almost ready to implement the concept of showing the reviews of only well know or recognized user and not anyone 's 2¢ on any book. Maybe some people with a good understanding and able to produce a quality criticism about a book. We could even nickname them "critics"?
- sgift 3y ago
  If you find a critic who usually aligns with your opinions on what's good about something that's a valid approach. The problem is if you don't have one, cause well, it's all subjective in the end, even if it's from a "well known name" like a critic.
thenerdhead 3y ago
Maybe start with showing reviews that are verified or somehow legitimate. There is a problem on both ends of inflating and bombing titles. I personally cannot stand the former where publishing teams will buy or fake mass amounts of reviews to play into the NYT bestseller formulae. It is fairly easy to tell an ad hominem in a "review bomb" in my experience. Usually it relates around politics or something controversial rather than the actual thing itself.
- chongli 3y ago
  Review bombing isn’t just negative. People also review bomb their competitors with positive reviews in order to get their competitors’ listings taken down. How do we stop that? The harder we police against fake positive reviews, the more we incentivize this sort of anticompetitive sabotage.
  - thenerdhead 3y ago
    I mean some straight-forward ones might be... Accounts need to verify themselves somehow. Accounts should be old enough before contributing reviews. Accounts should only be able to review X amount of titles an hour/day/etc. Moderators should have tools to identify influx of reviews and decide mitigation strategies. Moderators should be able to put up a banner on a title that may be review bombed so the community can report suspicious reviews. Etc. These aren't honestly policing much. Just general common sense for these platforms. Also heavily needed on many other platforms that get spam in similar ways.
    - chongli 3y ago
      The question is not whether they can detect an influx of fake positive reviews on a product, it’s what to do about it. How do you tell the difference between someone review bombing their own products with fake positive reviews and their competitors review bombing them with fake positive reviews to try to get them banned? Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should stop banning listings for that and focus on policing the reviews themselves. But that actually turns out to be a very difficult problem in itself! Sellers of crappy products will often include notes that induce/bribe the customers into leaving fake reviews. A seller of cheap products can rack up thousands of verified purchaser fake reviews this way. They can also do things like hire a botnet to purchase the product in bulk using thousands of hacked PCs all over the world and get those PCs to review the product, generating more fake verified purchaser reviews. In the end, if you don’t ban sellers for fake positive reviews then you run into these tactics and it’s very hard to police individual reviews. If you do decide to ban sellers then you have the opposite problem of dealing with sabotage. As for detecting “influxes”, that problem is far from trivial. If a review bomber is using a botnet of thousands of PCs then it’s quite trivial to stagger the timing of the fake reviews over a period of weeks. It’s not like they’re forced to push a button and have them all hit the review page at the same time.
bastard_op 3y ago
If people want to look for better books, they're better off signing up for zlibrary anymore. Free books, people can review if they want, and probably real humans doing so (until bots invade tor). I actually get great book recommendations there via "Personally recommended" when I go to fetch something new to read. Far better than anything commercial.
karaterobot 3y ago
This doesn't seem like an impossible problem to solve for at least 80% of cases. I'm sure there's a long tail of review bombing, but in any given week, how many different titles are being brigaded? They say there are 300 volunteer "librarians" who moderate reviews: a relatively safe plan would be to get another couple dozen of them, give them a dashboard to show clusters of unusual review activity, and see how many wildfires they can put out just by throttling the number of reviews, or temporarily halting reviews for a book.
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s problem for Amazon not wanting to spend money. They could significantly reduce the problem by taking Goodreads off of back burner status instead of expecting volunteers to do it for free.
bluish29 3y ago
Some people are suggesting verification that the reviewer actually bought the book like what is done on amazon.com itself. It is different as Goodreads is not amazon.com, the goal at least what people are using it for) is social network that is built around people organizing their reading lists, sharing it with others and follow what their friends are reading. In addition to reviews to know more about books and people's reactions. Some of the problems with this proposal 1- Books borrowed from friends or libraries 2- Book bought from different platforms or stores 3- Books downloaded from from the internet legally (or illegally) Most of my readings are not books that amazon can verify I actually owned the books and I usually write reviews if I want to share it with my friends on Goodreads. That would be hard to implement and if so, I think personally I will stop using Goodreads, probably with most of the people I know.
- beej71 3y ago
  And brushing scams.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
    Is that "log-rolling"? In ancient times, Spy Magazine had a "Log-rolling in Our Time" section, where they would quote mutually complimentary reviews by two writers.
sublimefire 3y ago
It is important to stress that this is a problem related to the sales of the new titles, not the established and time tested ones. There is a huge competition as we have more and more books published each year as well. Also, show me at least one marketplace where the reviews are 100% legitimate. I think publishers and authors want to free ride such platforms to reduce the marketing spend but then they face trolling and there is nothing to do but cry (but the monetary effect is unclear). Instead they could invest more into multichannel ads and build alternative platforms for the readers to check what the book has inside. But yeah lets depend on amazon and just wait until it will start asking for money to mitigate review bombing ;) Besides who reads the new titles when there are thousands of amazing time tested books?
mistrial9 3y ago
like many others who recall the early days of the open Internet, I am disgusted by the practices and business model of sites like Goodreads for the last decade+. Now they cry "foul" and ask for help? cry me a river.. better self-organizing reader circles are the answer.. "winner take all" is working out just as many envisioned.. ensh*tification
Pathogen-David 3y ago
Steam handles this problem fairly well, IMO. They show a graph of positive/negative reviews over time, making review bombing stand out. If Valve identifies the anomaly as being off-topic they can even mark it as such an exclude the reviews from affecting the overall review scores. Users who don't like this can even disable the exclusion and get the "raw" review score. More info from when this was introduced: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240333155775 https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
- sgift 3y ago
  The only thing missing is a country filter, so I can just disable reviews from certain countries prone to excessive national pride and the accompanying "that Island is ours, it wasn't on your map. ALL REVIEWS BE BAD" completely. The five good reviews out of these areas never outweigh the rest.
  - WheatMillington 3y ago
    I remember when Company of Heroes 2 was released and a certain cohort believed Russians were portrayed poorly, and the game was review bombed to hell by hoardes of Russian nationalists. Unfortunately this was before the review reforms and it severely affected the game's score on the platform.
- creer 3y ago
  Good one. Anyone knows other review sites that do provide more control on which reviews I get to see?
- 3l3ktr4 3y ago
  They could use this and a bubble in the site explaining this might be review bombing and show the score of the book disregarding these events. I’ve never understood why people have such a negative opinion on goodreads, though. I guess this is the only thing I know of that makes it bad.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  "there's now a checkbox in your Steam Store options where you can choose to have off-topic review bombs still included in all the Review Scores you see." Things like this is so nice. If I don't trust Gaben's bullshit review filter, I can see what the result would be without, just to check.
bwanab 3y ago
Classic case of Gresham's Law. Fake reviews drive out the good.
bhpm 3y ago
I’m interested to hear what value HN folks have in book reviews from strangers. I thought the value in something like Goodreads would be to create a community of people you know IRL to share what you read. I don’t see myself having much in common with a bunch of people I don’t know.
- fragmede 3y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. A total stranger has gone much of the same trials and tribulations as me, simply due to the fact that they're human, and alive at the same time. Being born, how to eat, how to afford to eat. If you know someone IRL, you don't magically have something in common with them that you didn't before. A stranger might be born in a foreign country so we don't have that in common. After I get to know them and become friends IRL, we're still not going to have that in common. So the idea that you don't have anything in common with people you don't know seems weird to me because of course you have things in common, you just haven't discovered them yet. Is a book review by John Updike at all useful to me? I didn't go to Harvard and don't have that in common with him, so why would I value his book review?
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  For me the main value of reviews, kinda like ChatGPT, is a vague summarization. I read a few high rated ones and a few low rated ones and you can kinda tell based on what the reviews focus on is this the kinda book I’m likely to like? Do the negative reviews focus on SJW topic I don’t care about? Do the negative reviews focus on opinions or do they focus on evaluating expertise/facts? do the positive reviews focus on world-building, writing, quality, or characters; what do they like about it? What do they compare it to? Sometimes I do this when I’m 10 or 20% into a book and I’m trying to evaluate if I care enough to continue. I’ll see if other reviewers say the book picks up or slows down etc.
habosa 3y ago
If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.
- lancesells 3y ago
  I would argue they have the users, which is probably more important than pristine data.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    It depends on what you use it for. I use it as a database of books I've read, and would liek to read, and sort them with tags. I could not give less of a shit about other users on the site.
  - jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
    I recently moved over to StoryGraph. There are a few much better competitors at this point.
  - habosa 3y ago
    Obviously there are important network effects but the behavior of some Goodreads users is often a negative at this point (as the article talks about).
- KittenInABox 3y ago
  There's no motivation for amazon to improve Goodreads. Why would they? The audience isn't going anywhere.
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    Eh, I have definitely used it less and less after A bought them/they sold out to A.
Syzygies 3y ago
Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. Academic grading does not. Academics will never change; the humanities will never go along. While sites like Netflix use all the AI they can muster to tune and individualize their recommendation systems, the review systems we know best rely on straight democratic votes that can be gamed. Or worse, they rig the votes for profit. The AI objective function should be to synthesize advice relevant to each user. As a component of this, treat each reviewer as a tennis tournament, to develop a tennis rating system summarizing reviews? One could apply weights tuned to each user for the relevance of each other user's reviews. If there was a shadow economy behind these uses, as if a hedge fund had to pay pennies to include each voter, the "review bomb" voter's inputs would quickly become useless, and be disregarded. What we have instead is singularly dumb. Is there room for a startup here? Google page rank was obvious in hindsight. Won't this too be obvious in hindsight?
- fireflash38 3y ago
  > Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. I don't quite see how that applies? Those are straight up/down/tie. And not subjective at all, like book quality.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I thought there were some studies done that showed that 5-star rating systems can give worse results than a simple thumbs up/down rating. IIRC that's why Netflix moved to a simpler rating system (though they added a "two thumbs up" at some point). While on first glance it might seem useful to have the nuance of being able to award between 1 and 5 stars, those intermediate star rankings tend to mean different things to different people, so a 2-star rating from one person might mean something fairly different coming from someone else. Also consider how Uber/Lyft ratings are decidedly nonlinear. Anything below 5 stars -- even 4 stars -- essentially means there was a fairly large problem, and drivers will get "fired" by the platform well before their average even drops to 4.0. If any platform would benefit from a simple thumbs up/down rating system, I think it's that one. > And not subjective at all, like book quality. Certainly in chess and tennis they're not subjective, but a simple thumbs up/down just means "I liked this" or "I didn't like this". Sure, if you only have a handful of reviews, that maybe doesn't tell you much, but as you accumulate more, the average starts being more useful. And of course this doesn't preclude the option of allowing people to write something in addition to the binary choice.
Throwthrowbob 3y ago
As a heads up, Goodreads was also subject to fake books by authors back in August of 2023, though these were removed. https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated/ https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated...
anon-feaata2311 3y ago
I wrote a book https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Machine-Learning-Projects-Deployment/dp/163343902X https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Machine-Learning-Projects-De... and despite really pushing I've only had three people review it. I asked all my friends, all my contacts, no one would review it! So, it's frustrating.
INTPenis 3y ago
If they cared I think they should adopt a combination of Valve's review graphs, and stackexchange's system of upvoting privileges. That combined with moderation is a pretty good system.
Invictus0 3y ago
They just had to stick some racebait in there: > Corrain's downfall came after internet sleuths published a Google document detailing a number of Goodreads accounts praising Crown of Starlight and giving low reviews to works by other writers, many of them people of color.
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  I had the same reaction, however if you read the linked Google Doc from the article, "Lily" (the author under a pseudonym) even mentions how racist "her" account is. That does strike me as the author being aware of her own choices and 'getting ahead' of the story.
none_to_remain 3y ago
Feels like these sort of social dynamics are the main attraction for those who remain in this realm of publishing.
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94 points by webmaven 3y ago

We’re getting to the point where sites might need to embrace ID verification to protect against fake, malicious, farmed, and AI generated content.

jasondclinton 3y ago

This is such a bad headline. The story is mostly about an author posting fraudulent reviews to promote her own work.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Re-read the article, or at least the second paragraph. They (and some buddies or sock puppet accounts) were low-ranking other authors’ books, specifically targeting authors of color. They’ve admitted this publicly. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/13/cait-corrain-publisher-drops-author-fake-accounts-review-bomb https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/13/cait-corrain-p... > “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive,” she tweeted.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  The first part is false > Many of the books given one-star ratings were written by people of colour That is not 'specifically targeting.' Why do you have to make this about race?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    The sock puppet accounts were given stereotypically of-color names, and targeted authors were disproportionately of-color. There’s pretty clear indication of bias there. > They posted a 31-page Google document containing screenshots of the activity of a number of accounts, with usernames including “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young”, suspected to have been created by Corrain. > “There’s something extra despicable about using clearly POC [people of colour] names in the fake accounts to upvote every negative review on POC books so the top ones are all 1 star and 2 star. Like what in the yellow face,” Zhao tweeted. Many of the accounts linked on the document Zhao shared have now been deleted.
    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      Is "Chantal" a stereotypical POC name in your opinion? News to me. You have a lot more confidence on a bunch of people doing OSS "research" than I do. The quote itself says "suspected". I would go as far as to say that believing this was racially motivated (rather than just a scummy move) based on this "evidence" is weird, but not surprising.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        >Is "Chantal" a stereotypical POC name in your opinion? News to me. Interesting. I would have guessed that Chantal is a 90% black name, but I was wrong. It is only slightly more common for black women, and there are many whites with the name too. This may be a regional distinction.
    - CWuestefeld 3y ago
      > The sock puppet accounts were given stereotypically of-color names, and targeted authors were disproportionately of-color. There’s pretty clear indication of bias there. AIUI, authors in the subgenre are disproportionately non-white. If that's the case, it would be expected for those targeted to be similarly non-white. None of this is a defense of the offender: she's definitely a big jerk. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to make every freakin' issue about race.
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      Break this down to just the facts presented. There are 31 pages of screenshots. They mention two names that were included that sound like POC. Note that they avoid saying anything beyond that. And they make sure to include the disclaimer that they are "suspected" to be sock puppets. They are clearly grasping at straws to bring race into this.
  - KittenInABox 3y ago
    The list of the authors targeted have all been people of color, iirc. Given publishing is like 75+% white, it's very improbable to just accidentally target half a dozen or more debuts and they just all happen to not be white. Additionally, there is a conversation that the author faked having with a "friend". The "friend" actually admits to targeting poc authors in order to "sabotage" cait.
    - averageRoyalty 3y ago
      Whilst I don't disagree with your conclusion, the sibling comments cover: - The subgenre this all happened in has a very different makeup than western publishing broadly, and - The authors targeted were not all 'people of colour'. I agree she was likely secondarily racially motivated in some way - maybe due to trust in that subgenre, or the view in some area of the internet that 'people of colour' cannot be questioned. Or maybe she's just a racist killing two birds with one stone. She seems a serial liar, so I doubt we'll ever know for sure.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Sounds like type of growth hacking that start-ups are sometimes celebrated for... Boost your own brand while lowering competition...

politelemon 3y ago

To me this is just one in a continue set of examples of GR's lack of care for their platform. The issues mentioned that lead to and encourage this behaviour have existed for well over a decade. Their solution is to make it a userland issue.

itsoktocry 3y ago
Name one social platform that doesn't have this issue. It's not a trivial thing to solve. I don't want to have to submit my passport to share a book review.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  It a bit like navel gazing, but HN? If a thread started for ‘best X of 2023’, I’d be pretty sure of the results.
- caconym_ 3y ago
  > I don't want to have to submit my passport to share a book review. Why is it important that you, a person apparently unwilling (hyperbole aside) to prove that you have actually read a particular book, should be able to transmit (ostensibly) your opinions about said book into the heads of other potential readers via a software platform? A small number of verified reviews is almost certainly better than a large number of unverified reviews, for exactly the reason highlighted by OP's article: when there are few or no controls on who or what can post however many reviews, the system is inevitably exploited by bad actors, and said actors often operate at scales that dwarf the impact of a single legitimate reviewer.
- johnfn 3y ago
  Although I know you said this in jest, it got me thinking that it would be really fun to have a system where you have to submit answers to a short quiz about the book before you can submit your review. No reviews would be removed, but you would, if you wanted, be able to filter the global average by people who scored over a certain threshold on the quiz. Probably you could even generate new questions every time with GPT, so that people couldn't cheat. This system would have a million problems, sure, but would it have more problems than the current system?

superkuh 3y ago

I am asking Amazon to please let go of Goodreads and restore it to it's proper state before they ruined it. But neither of us is going to get what we want.

politelemon 3y ago
I'm still unhappy about the API discontinuation which was wrapped in a "this is better for you" announcement.
elektor 3y ago
I too have given up on Goodreads and relocated to StoryGraph (https://thestorygraph.com/ https://thestorygraph.com/)
- CWuestefeld 3y ago
  Thanks for the pointer. I've been checking this out, and it looks pretty good. I can't find any way on the site to ask questions, either of the developers or of the community. What I'm trying to figure out is the semantics of their reading preferences exclusions. The actual question asks about "types of content that you never want to read about", and that "about" confuses me. Suppose that I choose "racism" there. Does this indicate that I never want to read anything that somebody has tagged as racist (which I think is probably the case, but is less than useful because it seems like darn near everything gets tagged with that one way or another), or is the "about" saying that I don't want to read any meta-discussion of racism, that is, I don't want any books that are "about" racism - which is absolutely the case.
  - hutattedonmyarm 3y ago
    > I can't find any way on the site to ask questions, either of the developers or of the community. I can see a "contact us" button both on mobile (in the hamburger menu, top right) and on desktop (bottom right corner). Right now it seems to be a bit too sensitive and hides books a bit too eagerly, but the team is aware of that. That's about the extend of info I have though

barbazoo 3y ago

I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve.

bastard_op 3y ago
If they wanted to, they would. They obviously don't care. How this is any different from their poor handling of fake reviews on all the Chinese garbage that floods their normal sales I don't know.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  That’s right, it’s not
maximinus_thrax 3y ago
> I’m surprised this is a problem Amazon cannot solve. I'm surprised Amazon is actually doing something, anything, related to Goodreads, including 'asking users'. The website feels abandoned.
- mhb 3y ago
  > The website feels abandoned What does that mean?
  - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
    It means that Amazon does not seem to invest anything into this aquisition anymore. Even the maintenance is lacking, this year they had an outage measured in hours.
Erratic6576 3y ago
They seem to be unable to solve it without hiring people and paying wages, hence their call for help from volunteers

woodruffw 3y ago

Seems like a problem that could be solved, in part, by reopening Goodreads’ APIs (so that people could write ring detectors, inauthentic behavior, etc.). But Amazon doesn’t appear to be interested in that.

siva7 3y ago

How about the platforms get hefty fines in the billions for fake reviews? I’m sure Amazon would solve this problem in a day then

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
It's not super difficult to only show reviews you are highly confident AREN'T completely fake. Instead they prioritize having as many reviews as possible - when possibly a majority of them are fake. And the cost is - the reviews are completely meaningless. All they care about is engagement - and if users have to dig through reviews manually trying to sort out signal from noise - that's engagement to them, not an awful product.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Amazon adds "verified purchaser" if the reviewer bought the book. Which means my glowing review (if I wrote one) of https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/1591841526/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp... might look fake, since I borrowed it from the library.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    Verified purchaser is not a good signal, and they know it. It's a way to force the fraudsters to buy from Amazon. Don't fix the problem - make more money from it. That's what companies do.
- chongli 3y ago
  Not all they care about is engagement. They also care about keeping costs down. If costs were no object they could simply hire well-paid, trustworthy, professional reviewers to review every product and listing. These high quality reviews could establish their site as the gold standard, strengthening the brand (think Apple levels of brand value) and drawing even more users. But all of this could be so expensive they’d actually lose money for doing it. So they don’t.

swayvil 3y ago

There will always be many many assholes. In the past, time and space have insulated us from them. But now we have the internet. The assholes can see you, touch you, talk to you, even decide what you are allowed to say. This is a mark against the internet.

AlbertCory 3y ago
This is spot-on, and I upvoted it. The Block & Mute are what makes them go away.
- seattle_spring 3y ago
  And good moderation. Unfortunately many of the said assholes have tricked gullible people into thinking moderation equals censorship.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
s1artibartfast 3y ago
>But now we have the internet. The assholes can see you, touch you, talk to you, even decide what you are allowed to say. I would say the direction is the opposite. Assholes dont seek people out, people seek out the assholes. In the real world, people dont walk up to strangers and ask them to disclose their most offensive opinion. However, on the internet people will scroll through pages of agreeable comments looking for something disagreeable. The same is basically true for reviews too. The physical world default is you dont know what people think. The internet allows people to know what others think, including their dumb opinions, swings, and trends.
- swayvil 3y ago
  >on the internet people will scroll through pages of agreeable comments looking for something disagreeable. I thought that I was the only person who does this. Therefore, given a forum full of people, the chance that you will offend somebody is increased. It becomes less "say something offensive" and more "say something merely noteworthy". We get a “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” situation. On the scale of the whole internet. The internet becomes a huge engine for imposing conformity.

jdowner 3y ago

Goodreads should consider putting some effort into the platform they have allowed to languish for years.

whynotmaybe 3y ago

Almost ready to implement the concept of showing the reviews of only well know or recognized user and not anyone 's 2¢ on any book. Maybe some people with a good understanding and able to produce a quality criticism about a book. We could even nickname them "critics"?

sgift 3y ago
If you find a critic who usually aligns with your opinions on what's good about something that's a valid approach. The problem is if you don't have one, cause well, it's all subjective in the end, even if it's from a "well known name" like a critic.

thenerdhead 3y ago

Maybe start with showing reviews that are verified or somehow legitimate. There is a problem on both ends of inflating and bombing titles. I personally cannot stand the former where publishing teams will buy or fake mass amounts of reviews to play into the NYT bestseller formulae. It is fairly easy to tell an ad hominem in a "review bomb" in my experience. Usually it relates around politics or something controversial rather than the actual thing itself.

chongli 3y ago
Review bombing isn’t just negative. People also review bomb their competitors with positive reviews in order to get their competitors’ listings taken down. How do we stop that? The harder we police against fake positive reviews, the more we incentivize this sort of anticompetitive sabotage.
- thenerdhead 3y ago
  I mean some straight-forward ones might be... Accounts need to verify themselves somehow. Accounts should be old enough before contributing reviews. Accounts should only be able to review X amount of titles an hour/day/etc. Moderators should have tools to identify influx of reviews and decide mitigation strategies. Moderators should be able to put up a banner on a title that may be review bombed so the community can report suspicious reviews. Etc. These aren't honestly policing much. Just general common sense for these platforms. Also heavily needed on many other platforms that get spam in similar ways.
  - chongli 3y ago
    The question is not whether they can detect an influx of fake positive reviews on a product, it’s what to do about it. How do you tell the difference between someone review bombing their own products with fake positive reviews and their competitors review bombing them with fake positive reviews to try to get them banned? Maybe you decide that sounds too difficult, so they should stop banning listings for that and focus on policing the reviews themselves. But that actually turns out to be a very difficult problem in itself! Sellers of crappy products will often include notes that induce/bribe the customers into leaving fake reviews. A seller of cheap products can rack up thousands of verified purchaser fake reviews this way. They can also do things like hire a botnet to purchase the product in bulk using thousands of hacked PCs all over the world and get those PCs to review the product, generating more fake verified purchaser reviews. In the end, if you don’t ban sellers for fake positive reviews then you run into these tactics and it’s very hard to police individual reviews. If you do decide to ban sellers then you have the opposite problem of dealing with sabotage. As for detecting “influxes”, that problem is far from trivial. If a review bomber is using a botnet of thousands of PCs then it’s quite trivial to stagger the timing of the fake reviews over a period of weeks. It’s not like they’re forced to push a button and have them all hit the review page at the same time.

bastard_op 3y ago

If people want to look for better books, they're better off signing up for zlibrary anymore. Free books, people can review if they want, and probably real humans doing so (until bots invade tor). I actually get great book recommendations there via "Personally recommended" when I go to fetch something new to read. Far better than anything commercial.

karaterobot 3y ago

This doesn't seem like an impossible problem to solve for at least 80% of cases. I'm sure there's a long tail of review bombing, but in any given week, how many different titles are being brigaded? They say there are 300 volunteer "librarians" who moderate reviews: a relatively safe plan would be to get another couple dozen of them, give them a dashboard to show clusters of unusual review activity, and see how many wildfires they can put out just by throttling the number of reviews, or temporarily halting reviews for a book.

acdha 3y ago
It’s problem for Amazon not wanting to spend money. They could significantly reduce the problem by taking Goodreads off of back burner status instead of expecting volunteers to do it for free.

bluish29 3y ago

Some people are suggesting verification that the reviewer actually bought the book like what is done on amazon.com itself. It is different as Goodreads is not amazon.com, the goal at least what people are using it for) is social network that is built around people organizing their reading lists, sharing it with others and follow what their friends are reading. In addition to reviews to know more about books and people's reactions. Some of the problems with this proposal 1- Books borrowed from friends or libraries 2- Book bought from different platforms or stores 3- Books downloaded from from the internet legally (or illegally) Most of my readings are not books that amazon can verify I actually owned the books and I usually write reviews if I want to share it with my friends on Goodreads. That would be hard to implement and if so, I think personally I will stop using Goodreads, probably with most of the people I know.

beej71 3y ago
And brushing scams.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  Is that "log-rolling"? In ancient times, Spy Magazine had a "Log-rolling in Our Time" section, where they would quote mutually complimentary reviews by two writers.

sublimefire 3y ago

It is important to stress that this is a problem related to the sales of the new titles, not the established and time tested ones. There is a huge competition as we have more and more books published each year as well. Also, show me at least one marketplace where the reviews are 100% legitimate. I think publishers and authors want to free ride such platforms to reduce the marketing spend but then they face trolling and there is nothing to do but cry (but the monetary effect is unclear). Instead they could invest more into multichannel ads and build alternative platforms for the readers to check what the book has inside. But yeah lets depend on amazon and just wait until it will start asking for money to mitigate review bombing ;) Besides who reads the new titles when there are thousands of amazing time tested books?

mistrial9 3y ago

like many others who recall the early days of the open Internet, I am disgusted by the practices and business model of sites like Goodreads for the last decade+. Now they cry "foul" and ask for help? cry me a river.. better self-organizing reader circles are the answer.. "winner take all" is working out just as many envisioned.. ensh*tification

Pathogen-David 3y ago

Steam handles this problem fairly well, IMO. They show a graph of positive/negative reviews over time, making review bombing stand out. If Valve identifies the anomaly as being off-topic they can even mark it as such an exclude the reviews from affecting the overall review scores. Users who don't like this can even disable the exclusion and get the "raw" review score. More info from when this was introduced: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240333155775 https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...

sgift 3y ago
The only thing missing is a country filter, so I can just disable reviews from certain countries prone to excessive national pride and the accompanying "that Island is ours, it wasn't on your map. ALL REVIEWS BE BAD" completely. The five good reviews out of these areas never outweigh the rest.
- WheatMillington 3y ago
  I remember when Company of Heroes 2 was released and a certain cohort believed Russians were portrayed poorly, and the game was review bombed to hell by hoardes of Russian nationalists. Unfortunately this was before the review reforms and it severely affected the game's score on the platform.
creer 3y ago
Good one. Anyone knows other review sites that do provide more control on which reviews I get to see?
3l3ktr4 3y ago
They could use this and a bubble in the site explaining this might be review bombing and show the score of the book disregarding these events. I’ve never understood why people have such a negative opinion on goodreads, though. I guess this is the only thing I know of that makes it bad.
rightbyte 3y ago
"there's now a checkbox in your Steam Store options where you can choose to have off-topic review bombs still included in all the Review Scores you see." Things like this is so nice. If I don't trust Gaben's bullshit review filter, I can see what the result would be without, just to check.

bwanab 3y ago

Classic case of Gresham's Law. Fake reviews drive out the good.

bhpm 3y ago

I’m interested to hear what value HN folks have in book reviews from strangers. I thought the value in something like Goodreads would be to create a community of people you know IRL to share what you read. I don’t see myself having much in common with a bunch of people I don’t know.

fragmede 3y ago
That's an interesting perspective. A total stranger has gone much of the same trials and tribulations as me, simply due to the fact that they're human, and alive at the same time. Being born, how to eat, how to afford to eat. If you know someone IRL, you don't magically have something in common with them that you didn't before. A stranger might be born in a foreign country so we don't have that in common. After I get to know them and become friends IRL, we're still not going to have that in common. So the idea that you don't have anything in common with people you don't know seems weird to me because of course you have things in common, you just haven't discovered them yet. Is a book review by John Updike at all useful to me? I didn't go to Harvard and don't have that in common with him, so why would I value his book review?
therealdrag0 3y ago
For me the main value of reviews, kinda like ChatGPT, is a vague summarization. I read a few high rated ones and a few low rated ones and you can kinda tell based on what the reviews focus on is this the kinda book I’m likely to like? Do the negative reviews focus on SJW topic I don’t care about? Do the negative reviews focus on opinions or do they focus on evaluating expertise/facts? do the positive reviews focus on world-building, writing, quality, or characters; what do they like about it? What do they compare it to? Sometimes I do this when I’m 10 or 20% into a book and I’m trying to evaluate if I care enough to continue. I’ll see if other reviewers say the book picks up or slows down etc.

habosa 3y ago

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.

lancesells 3y ago
I would argue they have the users, which is probably more important than pristine data.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  It depends on what you use it for. I use it as a database of books I've read, and would liek to read, and sort them with tags. I could not give less of a shit about other users on the site.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
  I recently moved over to StoryGraph. There are a few much better competitors at this point.
- habosa 3y ago
  Obviously there are important network effects but the behavior of some Goodreads users is often a negative at this point (as the article talks about).
KittenInABox 3y ago
There's no motivation for amazon to improve Goodreads. Why would they? The audience isn't going anywhere.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Eh, I have definitely used it less and less after A bought them/they sold out to A.

Syzygies 3y ago

Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. Academic grading does not. Academics will never change; the humanities will never go along. While sites like Netflix use all the AI they can muster to tune and individualize their recommendation systems, the review systems we know best rely on straight democratic votes that can be gamed. Or worse, they rig the votes for profit. The AI objective function should be to synthesize advice relevant to each user. As a component of this, treat each reviewer as a tennis tournament, to develop a tennis rating system summarizing reviews? One could apply weights tuned to each user for the relevance of each other user's reviews. If there was a shadow economy behind these uses, as if a hedge fund had to pay pennies to include each voter, the "review bomb" voter's inputs would quickly become useless, and be disregarded. What we have instead is singularly dumb. Is there room for a startup here? Google page rank was obvious in hindsight. Won't this too be obvious in hindsight?

fireflash38 3y ago
> Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. I don't quite see how that applies? Those are straight up/down/tie. And not subjective at all, like book quality.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I thought there were some studies done that showed that 5-star rating systems can give worse results than a simple thumbs up/down rating. IIRC that's why Netflix moved to a simpler rating system (though they added a "two thumbs up" at some point). While on first glance it might seem useful to have the nuance of being able to award between 1 and 5 stars, those intermediate star rankings tend to mean different things to different people, so a 2-star rating from one person might mean something fairly different coming from someone else. Also consider how Uber/Lyft ratings are decidedly nonlinear. Anything below 5 stars -- even 4 stars -- essentially means there was a fairly large problem, and drivers will get "fired" by the platform well before their average even drops to 4.0. If any platform would benefit from a simple thumbs up/down rating system, I think it's that one. > And not subjective at all, like book quality. Certainly in chess and tennis they're not subjective, but a simple thumbs up/down just means "I liked this" or "I didn't like this". Sure, if you only have a handful of reviews, that maybe doesn't tell you much, but as you accumulate more, the average starts being more useful. And of course this doesn't preclude the option of allowing people to write something in addition to the binary choice.

Throwthrowbob 3y ago

As a heads up, Goodreads was also subject to fake books by authors back in August of 2023, though these were removed. https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated/ https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated...

anon-feaata2311 3y ago

I wrote a book https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Machine-Learning-Projects-Deployment/dp/163343902X https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Machine-Learning-Projects-De... and despite really pushing I've only had three people review it. I asked all my friends, all my contacts, no one would review it! So, it's frustrating.

INTPenis 3y ago

If they cared I think they should adopt a combination of Valve's review graphs, and stackexchange's system of upvoting privileges. That combined with moderation is a pretty good system.

Invictus0 3y ago

They just had to stick some racebait in there: > Corrain's downfall came after internet sleuths published a Google document detailing a number of Goodreads accounts praising Crown of Starlight and giving low reviews to works by other writers, many of them people of color.

averageRoyalty 3y ago
I had the same reaction, however if you read the linked Google Doc from the article, "Lily" (the author under a pseudonym) even mentions how racist "her" account is. That does strike me as the author being aware of her own choices and 'getting ahead' of the story.

none_to_remain 3y ago

Feels like these sort of social dynamics are the main attraction for those who remain in this realm of publishing.

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