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Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated
- rurban 1y agoFrequent experience with movies also. letterboxd is rife with ratings on movies, which didn't pre-screen at all yet. Most of them by paid shills. A24 being the worst, but Warner also amongst them. And lb fails to hit them. Same on IMDB, and even Rotten Tomatoes. There's a lot of money in movies. But books?
- hobs 1y agoRight, but those are positive reviews.
- rurban 1y agoNo, sometimes they are also brigading competitors. Lot's of 0 star ratings also en masse.
- soco 1y agoI was shocked to read the new rules for the Academy Awards jury members: newly they must watch the movies before giving their verdict. As in, before they didn't have to...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bluGill 1y agoPerhaps in the past people had ethics and so it didn't need to be stated. I'm surprised they need it in the rules, as I would expect since they pick the jury they pick people with ethics. But then I'll admit complete ignorance to how they do anything (and no care either since I'm not a movie person) Online reviews don't have enough control over their reviewers and so it only takes a small number of unethical people to cause a big problem.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThey've discontinued mailing out screeners and members have to watch them through the private Academy Screening Room streaming service. The academy now knows who watched what and can use that data for fair voting.
- snarf21 1y agoThe same exact thing happens on BoardGameGeek for board games. A game is announced and people rate it 1 out of 10 because they hate the theme or the it has a digital app to help you play or ..... The game isn't released and no one has a copy besides the publisher.
- bell-cot 1y ago> There's a lot of money in movies. But books? Generally less money, yes. But not all motives are financial. And there are loads of conflict, drama, and emotions in many parts of the writing world.
- ableal 1y agoSpy Magazine in its time (mid 80s to mid 90s) had an amusing section titled "Logrolling in our time". Usually featuring mutually favorable blurbs by pairs of writers.
- reaperducer 1y agoWell, now there are two people who remember Spy. I wish there was a modern equivalent.
- anotheruser13 1y agoMake that three! I'd vote for a modern equivalent, too.
- kmfrk 1y agoGuess you could say it happens everywhere by default - absent any checks and balances. Steam had terrible review bombing issues, but they finally decided to do something about it far too many years too late. ... But when you're an incumbent that's likely to be around for at least a quarter of a decade with a sizeable monopoly, later really is better than never.
- reaperducer 1y agoThere's a lot of money in movies. But books? Books were $28,100,000,000 last year in the United States alone. Audiobooks: $1,800,000,000 e-Books: $191,000,000 https://www.statista.com/topics/1177/book-market/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/1177/book-market/#topicOverv...
- nkrisc 1y ago> Long-time romance author Milly Johnson said: “I had a one-star rating for a book that hadn’t even been seen by my copy editor. When I raised it with Goodreads they wouldn’t interfere as they said the reviewer had a perfect right to predict if they’d enjoy it or not. I’m afraid at that point I washed my hands of them as a serious review site that should have some code of conduct. We all get bad reviews but at least we should expect any review to be fair." Is Goodreads not a review site but just a soapbox for readers? What kind of serious review site would allow reviews where the reviewer simply speculates whether they would like something or not? Seems strange Goodreads would allow these kinds of reviews, it completely undermines any credibility their ratings might have. Does anyone take Amazon review scores seriously?
- nemomarx 1y agoI think technically good reads is a social platform micro blog site now, so soapbox is about right.
- mingus88 1y agoGoodreads was a useful tool to track the books I’d read to my kids every night. Nice to have a log book of what I’d already read backed by a real database of ISBNs Feels similar to calorie tracking apps now. Having a database of food UPCs with nutritional data is actually useful. Then capitalism comes along and juices it for social media engagement until the site is riddled with junk features and paywalls I guess there will always be market for a hobbies to make their own trackers.
- nkrisc 1y agoThen labeling those as "reviews" on the site is pretty disingenuous and misleading, but that's life.
- soco 1y agoGoodreads used to be a good site. Then big tech came in and with it enshittification. I use StoryGraph lately to record my books, but I wouldn't recommend their reviews either, or in general any reviews - everything will be between 3 and 4 stars in the end, regardless of genre or quality.
- saintblasphemer 1y agoWhy is the book available for review on the site if review copies haven't yet been sent out? Isn't that just asking for trolling?
- Freak_NL 1y agoI guess authors and publishers do like being able to show that a certain title is forthcoming.
- bityard 1y agoCan they do that without allowing third party reviews before the publication date?
- bluGill 1y agoSure, but that doesn't solve the problem. How things are makes the problem obvious. If they put a countdown everyone leaving bad reviews just waits until reviews open and then it becomes much harder to know it isn't an honest review as it is possible that they really read it.
- nemomarx 1y agoAnd it lets people add it to reading list plans early etc. But you could probably have a read only entry with a countdown without enormous efforts?
- bityard 1y agoThat appears to be the unspoken thrust of the piece once you've waded through all of the mock surprise and intrigue.
- boesboes 1y agoHow is that rellevant, this just show how broken reviews are. How much of a scamm it is
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- Freak_NL 1y ago> When I raised it with Goodreads they wouldn’t interfere as they said the reviewer had a perfect right to predict if they’d enjoy it or not. Ah yes, the illustrious omniprescient reviewer. I've published a novelette a few months ago on a large website with user ratings (ahem, as a novice writer of smut whose nom-de-plume shall remain a carefully guarded secret). What is interesting is that in the first fortnight there were some people giving a bad rating because, ostensibly (and judging from some comments), they just don't like that specific type of story, whereas in the long tail the average rating climbs upwards as people find your story using tags and keywords, etc, and then judge only the writing and story itself, rather than its subgenre, setting, or premise. I wonder if real books reviewed on Goodreads follow that pattern too. Those early reviews can have an outsized influence.
- pjc50 1y agoYou've highlighted an additional problem, roving bands of morality police (various colours) who go on campaigns against books they've never read and authors they don't like.
- sidewndr46 1y agoIf the book was about clairvoyants, I could see them allowing the review to be added before the books publication date.
- alexpotato 1y agoA few years back, inspired by Derek Sivers [0], I decided to just make my own filterable book review list [1]. It was both a fun challenge (using vanilla JS to render) and has been fun to share with friends, Twitter mutuals etc. Plus, people know it's MY reviews so if they like my suggestions/tweeting/poasting/etc, they know the review is from me and not some bot. 0 - https://sive.rs/book https://sive.rs/book 1 - https://alexpotato.com/books/?xl=hn https://alexpotato.com/books/?xl=hn
- quirino 1y agoSivers' list has introduced me to many great books. I can recommend "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives - by David Eagleman" which is the fourth book on the page you linked.
- phkahler 1y ago>> Plus, people know it's MY reviews One way to look at what you've done is authenticated the source of your reviews. They're not anonymous people behind a fake username.
- reaperducer 1y agoOne way to look at what you've done is authenticated the source of your reviews. They're not anonymous people behind a fake username. Yet another reason that the legitimate press still wins over the internet rabble. I follow a couple of professional movie reviewers who have been doing it since before the internet took off, and their reviews are almost always better than the dross online. The same is true for books. The New York Times book review, for example, is so good and trusted that you can actually subscribe to it separately, without getting the rest of the newspaper.
- alexpotato 1y ago> Yet another reason that the legitimate press still wins over the internet rabble. When they asked Yuval Noah Harari his opinion on AI deepfakes, I liked his answer (paraphrased): "Fake information has always been a problem and my answer is the way we have always dealt with it: having trusted institutions." I took this to mean things like newspapers (e.g. the New York Times as the 'paper of record').
- encom 1y agoI think at this point, any sort of online review aggregators have been ruined for good - from Amazon to Imdb to Google. All of them. Find a professional reviewer you trust, whose taste aligns with your own. For me, I like The Critical Drinker. Most of what he recommends, I like. Except Arcane, that was horrible.
- voidUpdate 1y agoOut of interest, what did you dislike about Arcane?
- encom 1y agoOkay I shouldn't have said horrible, that was too harsh. But it just didn't click with me at all, and I abandoned it after 1 or 2 episodes. It's been a few months, so I can't remember specifically why. It's not that I don't like animation - I really enjoyed Blue Eyed Samurai for example.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoArcane wasn't bad, but I really liked how the villains were fleshed out as complete humans with vices, virtues, and relatable motivations.
- SkipperCat 1y agoI'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but most if the Internet should not be anonymous. Anonymity has led to bots, awful cases of trolling and abuse. There should definitely be ways to communicated peer-to-peer anonymously, but posting on Social Media should not be one of them.
- smokel 1y agoHere, have an upvote from this anonymous coward.
- speed_spread 1y agoThere is a zone of shade between full anonymity and exact identification. There could be a service that provide time limited anonymous tokens that still provide guarantee that you're not a bot. So you can claim you're a real person without having to reveal _who_ you are.
- jfengel 1y agoI'm all for anonymity, but anonymous identities should be taken with extreme skepticism. I'd really like to see a hierarchy of trust. Get some certs signed by a reputable bank who has seen you in person, high trust. Self-signed certs, much less trust. Completely anonymous, you get basically shadowbanned; people who want it can go looking for it. The Internet is an information flood (and so much worse now that we have LLMs). Filtering it has always been the key challenge. We should be able to filter on source, while still allowing people to say whatever it is they want. We just don't have to read it.
- pjc50 1y agoPeople will post terrible lies in national newspapers under their own photograph and byline. Accountability is .. not evenly distributed. Environments where reprisals are possible simply have different dysfunctionality from ones where they generally aren't. And you can see how catastrophic suddenly turning on reprisals is, known as "doxxing".
- zimpenfish 1y ago
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoGoodreads is the worst. At this point, Amazon should just shut it down. Amazon reviews are unironically better, because you can see if somebody actually bought the book or not, and Amazon has very sophisticated anti-Astroturfing measures. (Good luck getting your friends and family to leave good reviews of your book -- they'll catch it and delete them.) Goodreads is infested with marketing and publishing cliques and a lot of their reviews are fake or paid for. It has never been more over.
- cratermoon 1y agoDo you trust Amazon to be honest and accurate about who bought the product?
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoI buy lots of books and write lots of reviews on Amazon, and mine always say "verified purchase." I also see other reviews which were solicited by giving readers free copies (ARCs) a la Goodreads, and they never say "verified purchase." (And some reviews that were written by people who never read the book at all...) So yeah. Unless you have evidence to the contrary -- which would be evidence of a crime -- I think they can be trusted on this point.
- skarz 1y ago>Amazon has very sophisticated anti-Astroturfing measures. And yet they won't do anything about sellers who change their listing to a completely different product once it gets to the 4-5 star range. Can't tell you how many times I've been looking at some tool or gadget only to glance at the reviews and see people mentioning socks.
- Aloisius 1y agoAmazon is packed full of fake reviews. They just catch some of the easily detectable ones that some authors use (everyone following the same link or links from the same site rating books universally high, for instance). They don't detect commercial review buying services which involve actual product purchases nearly as well or some of the other scams like ASIN laundering. All one needs to do is look at 100% identical white labeled products that get vastly different reviews to see Amazon's measures are wholly insufficient. Worse, people buy 4-5 star good reviews for their own products and 1-3 star bad reviews for competing products, so there's no easy way for a user to tell what is real and what is fake.
- patcon 1y agoTrolls from the Russian federation is interesting. Maybe high bang for buck in destroying livelihoods and cultural capital, re: adversarial statescraft
- consumer451 1y ago> cultural capital This is a significant factor, imo. Many great modern Russian artists are banned by the state. Meanwhile, the current imperialist Russian state is a group of professionally trained sandcastle kickers running wild. I look forward to a day when the Russian people, and the world, have a Russian government that works for things other than destruction.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoI think the thing I have the most difficulty with in this discussion is that it seems virtually unthinkable to stop taking semi-anonymous ratings seriously? I know there will be intense loss aversion to such a crazy idea. But sometimes the comment section is just a bunch of people with axes to grind.
- MBCook 1y agoI remember this happening on Amazon more than 20 years ago. People reviewing books from authors they like (or hate) long before they were available to buy.
- izacus 1y agoWell, those sites are also filled with 5 star reviews for books that won't be on sale for 6 months+, so it kinda balances out, doesn't it. Same with Reddit and other places - seeing bunch of suspiciously positive "reviews" months before the book is even on sale.
- NelsonMinar 1y agoGoodreads is a case study in the natural monopoly of social networks. The product has been terrible for years now, with Amazon investing the bare minimum to keep it online and one slight design change every few years. But competitors like TheStoryGraph can't get traction because all the people are still on Goodreads.
- mslansn 1y agoI keep reading complaints about how bad it is and I just don’t see it. The last redesign is tremendously slow though.
- NelsonMinar 1y agoWell, start here with the article being discussed. They made a product decision to allow fake reviewers to trash books before they are even released.
- PokerFacowaty 1y agoOff the top of my head there's two things that rub me the wrong way about Goodreads. One is there isn't a separate section for professional reviews (Polish movie/TV site Filmweb has that), so that right off the bat the first comment might be that someone doesn't like what the book is even about, it's a 1-star, liked by 15 people. Two is they closed their API completely, so there's no way you can get any book info from their DB, not with limits and/or authorization, not if you pay, just not at all.
- npteljes 1y agoYes, the network effect is huge with social network - if not the biggest thing about them. People tolerate a lot just to participate where the people they want to be closer with participate.
- jrockway 1y agoThis kind of exposes how valuable reviews actually are -- likely not very. People like reviews, but some person you don't know using some unknown set of criteria to evaluate a product turns out to not actually offer any value. Taking the mean of this data ("4.5 stars on Goodreads!") also doesn't improve the quality of the data.
- fennecbutt 1y agoI'd disagree. Real, honest reviews are genuinely useful to me as a consumer particularly if the review outlines what type of person the reviewer is, too.
- bluGill 1y agoThat is the whole point of the review scams - often I'm not an expert and I know it. I need some widget, and there are 10 choices. I want someone independent to review all 10 choices and tell me which is best so I don't waste my money buying a bad one. Lacking someone with the money and time to buy all 10, at least seeing the reviews of someone who has one is a suggestion on if that one is really as good as they say. Though if someone only has one they tend to review it well because nobody wants to admit they bought something that wasn't the best. If the reviewer is consumer reports they for years were this independent reviews. (I've heard accusations they are no longer as independent - make your own decisions) They often don't know enough about the product to understand why long term the more expensive one might be better as opposed to just overpriced, so not perfect, but still better than buying everything yourself.
- em-bee 1y agoin germany there is stiftung warentest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest they have been doing this for decades. they fund themselves by selling a print magazine and paid online access. their reputation is so good that products that get good test results often use the result in their ads or print it on their packaging.
- mrweasel 1y agoOnline reviews in general are pretty useless these days. We know that sites like Trustpilot will take down negative reviews if you pay them, Amazon reviews are mostly bots and some sites have weird incentives for users to write reviews. E.g. take reviews of business on Google, there's no link to actual purchases, but you get a star and a "Local guide level 4" or something if you do enough reviews. A family member runs a consulting business, he has a 2-star review, the only review. It's not made by a customer, just some random dude. What it looks like is that this dude just walked around reviewing business after business, based on look of their office perhaps. He's not customer of ANY of them. So now multiple business are trying to have these negative reviews removed, Google doesn't give a shit, so what are these reviews actually worth? Most people who write reviews aren't exactly the most mentally stable people either. If you're not getting something in return, most people won't write a review, that just leave the nut jobs.
- dev_l1x_be 1y agoFunnily enough this is the perfect usecase for a blockchain. We could get rid off both the issue of removed reviews and the illegitimate reviews.
- margalabargala 1y agoRight, because it will be impossible to remove lying reviews, and they will all be illegitimate?
- automatic6131 1y agoBecause you'd have to pay to leave a review. And maybe get paid to leave a review by people that pay to upvote that review. I see absolutely no way this incentive structure could be misused, after all, people wouldn't use bots to spam reviews out to hopefully farm upvotes, would they? Nope <:o)
- threetonesun 1y agoFunny enough this is the perfect use case for the old web, where people just review things on their blog and you either know them or trust them from previous content.
- scrapheap 1y agoWhen it comes to books I mostly ignore the reviews on sites like Goodreads. I'm much more likely to pick books based on recommendations from friends, or because they've been nominated for one or more awards. At a pinch I'm even more likely to pick a book based on it's publisher than I am to base the choice on Goodreads reviews.
- hoseja 1y ago>email from Goodreads explaining that it advises authors to "refrain from confronting users who give their books a low rating" Okay that's bullshit. Let them duke it out!
- lupusreal 1y agoReminder to use LibraryThing.
- kmfrk 1y agoThe combination of a terribly run social platform together with a crippled API that can't be used to audit it through third parties is an all too familiar story by now.
- HK-NC 1y agoTime for a trustpilot review bomb campaign against goodreads. Never used the site, but I have a perfect right to predict if I'd enjoy it or not.
- Techrecovery 1y ago[dead]
- richardatlarge 1y agoMaybe Goodreads is just what it should be, a place to quarantine all the nonsense concerning books. Amazon polices reviews heavily, such that a reviewer found to be in some way paid can cause their reviews to be removed from earlier, and sometimes authors see many reviews removed from their books. This is with books, not other Amazon products One thing that also happens with reviews on Amazon, though, is that you get one star reviews from people who do nothing but leave one star reviews. Amazon won’t touch them
- debesyla 1y agoIn my scale 3/5 is good (got what expected), 4/5 is very good (nice bargain), 5/5 is uniquely amazing. But I do understand that for some anything below 5/5 is bad.
- kassner 1y agoYou’d get so many Uber drivers de-platformed. I’d say majority of people only go below 5/5 if they had problems.
- kaycey2022 1y agoThere are so many text books in tech that you just have to dive into blind. There is nothing available to evaluate the quality at all.