4 ms·

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

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.
    - yardstick 3y ago
      Sounds like there is a need for identity verified reviews. Ie the account doing the review has provided some government issued id during their registration process. Then add in another criteria that they can’t post reviews unless their account is say 3 months old (or some timeframe). You could still record unverified reviews, but hide them and their ratings by default until the user explicitly wants to see them.
      - Larrikin 3y ago
        Who is going to scan in their government ID and send it to a book review site except for the people on the pay roll of a book publishing company that requires their employees to register an account on their first day of work so they can "review" books in three months.
        yardstick 3y ago
        If modern computer games have shown us anything, people will go out of their way (grind, pay) for shiny badges by their names, fancy skins, etc. I’m sure many reviewers will enjoy having a special badge against their name. Not all, sure. We don’t need everyone’s reviews in this situation.
        Larrikin 3y ago
        Sorry but your idea is terrible. You're only incentiving the exact people nobody wants a review from with a bad analogy.
      - chongli 3y ago
        I'm a legit user of Amazon. My account is probably over 20 years old. I've ordered tons and tons of products. I've never reviewed anything, however I have received products containing "gift certificates" promising me a $10 reward for leaving a fake review (of the product I just purchased). How does Amazon stop me from accepting this bribe?
  - creer 3y ago
    That Steam idea of giving the viewer more options on how to filter the reviews sounds great actually: Let reviews come in, but allow the viewer to filter against accounts that burst reviews, or by country, etc. Pretty cool idea (because in particular it allows privacy.) Although really the current concept of "review" is terrible. Few reviews are detailed and specific enough and multi-dimensional enough. They cannot be searched well enough (Although we might be nearly there with LLMs - asking them to critique a book from our point of view and preferences.) It's hard to follow reviewers that you have learned to trust (hard enough to notice them in the first place). Star ratings are not useful in the intended way and only a few sites ask for multi-dimensional star ratings (generally asking to rate irrelevant things :-) Bleh!
fbdab103 3y ago
Not just reviews, I thought it was a well established practice to purchase one's own book to ram it up the rankings. I have also heard that it is a backdoor way of spending political campaign money. Candidate "writes" a book, the Campaign to Elect X buys a warehouse of the books, candidate then gets the profits.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  I had a brief vision of a warehouse filled with e-books. But seriously, I have a similar feeling about book deals. That is, it's a great - and legal - way to pay (off) someone for "prior service", meanwhile the book's sales are shite. But selling books was never really the point.
creer 3y ago
So far "verified" has run into the issue of how to verify while maintaining privacy and while allowing "not purchased on this platform". Verified sounds gtreat in theory but it's very hard to imagine how it would work. Separating account verification and restricting the amount of reviews allowed - separated from privacy-respecting reviews might be a direction. But currently it's hard to trust anyone's "privacy-respecting" features. (My impression is that in consequence, currently, "verified" means "mostly positive".)

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.
  - yardstick 3y ago
    Sounds like there is a need for identity verified reviews. Ie the account doing the review has provided some government issued id during their registration process. Then add in another criteria that they can’t post reviews unless their account is say 3 months old (or some timeframe). You could still record unverified reviews, but hide them and their ratings by default until the user explicitly wants to see them.
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      Who is going to scan in their government ID and send it to a book review site except for the people on the pay roll of a book publishing company that requires their employees to register an account on their first day of work so they can "review" books in three months.
      - yardstick 3y ago
        If modern computer games have shown us anything, people will go out of their way (grind, pay) for shiny badges by their names, fancy skins, etc. I’m sure many reviewers will enjoy having a special badge against their name. Not all, sure. We don’t need everyone’s reviews in this situation.
        Larrikin 3y ago
        Sorry but your idea is terrible. You're only incentiving the exact people nobody wants a review from with a bad analogy.
    - chongli 3y ago
      I'm a legit user of Amazon. My account is probably over 20 years old. I've ordered tons and tons of products. I've never reviewed anything, however I have received products containing "gift certificates" promising me a $10 reward for leaving a fake review (of the product I just purchased). How does Amazon stop me from accepting this bribe?
- creer 3y ago
  That Steam idea of giving the viewer more options on how to filter the reviews sounds great actually: Let reviews come in, but allow the viewer to filter against accounts that burst reviews, or by country, etc. Pretty cool idea (because in particular it allows privacy.) Although really the current concept of "review" is terrible. Few reviews are detailed and specific enough and multi-dimensional enough. They cannot be searched well enough (Although we might be nearly there with LLMs - asking them to critique a book from our point of view and preferences.) It's hard to follow reviewers that you have learned to trust (hard enough to notice them in the first place). Star ratings are not useful in the intended way and only a few sites ask for multi-dimensional star ratings (generally asking to rate irrelevant things :-) Bleh!

fbdab103 3y ago

Not just reviews, I thought it was a well established practice to purchase one's own book to ram it up the rankings. I have also heard that it is a backdoor way of spending political campaign money. Candidate "writes" a book, the Campaign to Elect X buys a warehouse of the books, candidate then gets the profits.

chiefalchemist 3y ago
I had a brief vision of a warehouse filled with e-books. But seriously, I have a similar feeling about book deals. That is, it's a great - and legal - way to pay (off) someone for "prior service", meanwhile the book's sales are shite. But selling books was never really the point.

creer 3y ago

So far "verified" has run into the issue of how to verify while maintaining privacy and while allowing "not purchased on this platform". Verified sounds gtreat in theory but it's very hard to imagine how it would work. Separating account verification and restricting the amount of reviews allowed - separated from privacy-respecting reviews might be a direction. But currently it's hard to trust anyone's "privacy-respecting" features. (My impression is that in consequence, currently, "verified" means "mostly positive".)