A harassment campaign on Goodreads
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Wow, that's devious. I wonder if any of the fake product reviews I've seen are obvious fake endorsements placed there by the competition.
And that's the answer that GR doesn't want to hear - clear patterns of abuse are apparent and they need to allocate more manual labour into moderation - automatic moderation can get pretty decent accuracy, but there's always a grey zone where you need some manual review - as much as we shrink that zone I don't think we'll ever make it disappear.
"Yes, when are you available?"
> Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.
Surely can't be that hard to find out if the business owner set up that sign, right?
Go watch Zodiac to get an idea of how circumstantial evidence is insufficient
[1] https://www.dummies.com/education/science/forensics/direct-v...
While I'm at it, I leave your business card at the scene of a heist.
Suppose I were operating such a business with legal advertisements only and the detective asked me "Hey I saw a sign on a telephone pole saying you buy houses for cash, is that right?" why would I answer in the affirmative?
> "No, it's weird that you saw that. I don't post signs on any telephone poles, this is a highly reputable business.
They'd only say that if they're smart. Many of them probably aren't, and their guard will be down if the detective can do a passable "desperate alcoholic" impression over the phone. But regardless, I agree that false negatives are more likely than false positives.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/psychologist-explain...
If I didn't advertise on telephone poles but somebody else was trying to frame me, and then I proceeded to act as though those signs were my own, then why would I not deserve punishment? If those signs advertised my business and I neglected to disown the signs because I was greedy, I think I'd deserve to be fined by the city. If I admitted on a recorded telephone call with a detective that the signs were mine, even if they weren't, then I've screwed myself with my own greed, which is fitting and just.
If a detective merely asks you "do you post signs with your name and number with an offer to buy houses", a lot more steps have to take place before reaching the point where you, personally and individually would see a fine for what is in more cases than not going to be a civil infraction that I would imagine, one can take photos of, go to your municipality and contest and say "those signs are illegal but are not mine, these signs are legal and belong to me".
You're missing the point were the detective specifically asks you if you placed signs on telephone poles and got a voice recording of you admitting you did place illegal signs. The real reason this doesn't happen is simply because detectives can't be bothered, not because it's an impossible case to make in court.
And because it's highly improbable that "yes, those are my signs" over the phone is enough to result in an infraction if they did.
Chances are, you're not even going to get the phone call in the hypothetical you're propping up, even from a clerk's office. If your name and phone number is on it, you'll likely just end up getting it in the mail without even the courtesy of a phone call to ask how your morning is going.
The possibility of a false negative does exist, but the possibility of a false positive seems greatly overstated and I do not believe aversion to false positives motivates the lack of enforcement as was suggested above.
I was talking about clerks of the local government agency who would have an issue with illegal sign placements...
"No, it's weird that you saw that. I don't post signs on any telephone poles, this is a highly reputable business. However, as long as you're here, I definitely do buy houses for cash, and it sounds like you're interested in that."
This way police is free to handle actual crime.
Like seriously, do you expect an employee to go "oh I don't know of any signs we advertise on, so I guess we can't buy your house"? Even if they know for a fact that the company doesn't have any sign-based advertising they're still not going to turn away the customer.
I was thinking more as tool for insurance and/or attempting to force the company to pay for the cost of an exterior detailing of your car since they plastered something to it (with the help of the weather).
In many US areas there are online police reports for minor incidents and the purpose of the report is almost solely so that you have a record for insurance.
It may also help if you call up the company (or publicly shame them with a tweet) to ask for reimbursement for the cost of a car detailer to remove their litter from your car without damage. Having a police report means you could put it all in the hands of your insurance company who have lawyers on staff or use it as part of the negotiation with the company.
Maybe enough police reports about a given company and you could petition the council to revoke that company's ability to flyer any longer?
I know I'm probably dreaming that it would make a difference. The only time I've had an experience with this a friend used twitter and got a public apology from the company along with some monetary compensation around the removal of the ink residue from the windshield.
People that put the flyers on the windshields are just a step from insolvency, so no use to go against them. The "company" behind them, just a little step up the food chain.
Decreasing effectiveness is kinda hard, so for short term putting on a trash can I guess, for the long run littering the street can be better option (can maybe push city to increase fines etc for this kind of advertisement)
It is moral to clean up after yourself. Cleaning up after others is a job that demands payment. Cities must tax advertisers so they can employ people to clean up after them.
Throw the card in the trash, like a decent human being.
They are counting on people being decent human beings who do what they're supposed to do without complaint. That's exactly what enables them and lets them get away with their unacceptable behavior. If nobody did that, maybe the situation would become unmanageable and the city would be forced to deal with it.
The right thing to do is to put an end to all advertising. That's the true solution. Nobody's gonna do it because the money speaks much louder than right and wrong.
The reason the police don't do what the parent says is not because of difficulties with attribution of the act, it's because they care so little about the offense that they're not going to expend even the slightest effort to prosecute it. If they saw someone putting out signs, they might tell them to stop. Maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...
Of course that doesn't work for other search engines though.
My iconic example is that Marin county with some of the highest levels of tertiary education are also the highest in terms of not getting their kids vaccinated.
Also seen in campaigns against drunk driving and campaigns for eating balanced diets. People become aware of the pros and cons (after exposure) but continue unabated in their behavior.
I’m a pessimist on this.
If you're a pessimist, maybe my pessimism has experienced integer overflow into optimism.
One, there are very aggressive negative consequences --this has an impact on some people.
Two, we have a better chance of changing behavior if we do it in a coordinated manner with good methods when we start young. So, I may be a bit too pessimistic since I think we can make a difference if we start young but with good persistence practices. Given we indoctrinate kids against this since middle school, I think it's made a difference.
People my age grew up with the internet and had to learn all of this the hard way, but we could really benefit from purposefully educating other people about these things based on our own experiences.
A lot of people who grew up with the internet wised up and learned to tolerate/ignore troll behavior. This mostly comes with age, but we can do a better job teaching young internet users that the racist commenter is just looking for attention and should be ignored, that the 200 messages could be coming from a single anti-social person, and that a slew of 1-star reviews may not be coming from a reputable source. This would also involve warnings on the repercussions of handling a hostile situation the wrong way (by engaging in a troll and showing obvious signs of stress or by blithely trusting a DM who appears to be on your side) and more effective ways to cope.
Even as somebody that's used the Internet frequently for 25+ years, I was guilty of falling for some of the traps outlined in this article. I think something like this being taught in schools would shift the state of conversation on the Web dramatically.
edit: a more complete article on this https://the-cauldron.com/you-can-t-just-ignore-the-trolls-8f...
It's some sort of cultural phenomenon. FTA:
> As to why they're doing it, well, this has been their entire culture for years, picking random innocent people to cyberbully past the breaking point.
From these low-lives to the highest reaches of government, you see people gleefully, and without shame, engaging in cruelty for entertainment. It's decadent, hollow, (self-)destructive.
What would help? No idea... I'd think a bit of philosophy in school might actually help: Stoicism and the like at least model the concept of thinking about purpose and emotions. The other side is probably social.
I'm sure that many of these trolls have friends and family in the real world who would never expect this kind of behavior.
The internet has been around for many decades now. The world hasn't ended.
> arm adolescents with a proper mentality for handling online harassment under the assumption that it is likely to occur.
Most teens are already armed with proper mentality. The only teens who aren't armed are those who have been coddled in safe spaces their entire lives. Maybe spending time in some "toxic community" would help toughen them up.
How about we worry about teaching kids the basics and stop wasting time with nonsense? I'm told by the "chicken littles" that schools are a complete mess. You want add more time wasting nonsense to schools? It's always the controlling old people who thinks the younger generation needs their help.
> since the problem of policing online speech without creating a locked-down surveillance nightmare seems unlikely to be solved any time soon
People like you scare me so much. I still don't understand how you ended up in a forum called "hacker news".
Also, the ability to whitelist an author or book for extra moderation seems like a no-brainer. After there is evidence of harassment then all user content needs to be approved before it is made public. Enable trusted moderators from the community to help with this if paid moderators cannot keep up.
This seems like it could get so so much worse than it currently is. The target of harassment seems to be taking it well but what happens on a platform like this to someone that isn't as prepared to deal with it?
It's comparatively easy to determine if any single post is using banned language, is abusive, etc. The single post can then be removed.
False reviews, on the other hand, are virtually impossible to identify individually. People's opinions on a book legitimately differ. There isn't an obvious way to distinguish between a review that's part of a harrassment campaign or paid brigade, versus one that's genuine. It's only in aggregate that something seems to be wrong -- but how do you fix it? How do you select which individual reviews get removed?
Moderation is not really a solution here, because all individual reviews will be approved.
It is definitely a difficult problem - I'll agree with you there. There are some other good suggestions in the thread on making it easier to flag the false reviews/moderate reviews beyond "community standards"
I like the idea of using a captcha that prompts you to enter a random word from a random chapter in the book.
Another system could just hide reviews that are not verified - and tie into amazon purchases to verify them - I don't know why Amazon would not lean on the fact that they own Goodreads to do this... Make all the reviews visible if the user prompts to see the unverified ones, but as the default just shows the reviews for people that bought the book through Amazon.
E.g. more likely to be genuine if purchased, if not prepublication (except some people really do receive and review books in advance), if has many reviews, if reviews follow common statistical patterns both per-author and per-book, and so on.
The trouble with all of this is just that it's really, really hard to get right. There's a tremendous amount of 'tuning' involved.
It's probably not possible, but it really would be great if someone could come up with some general elegant theory to solve particularly the 'does this reviewer seem statistically trustworthy', in a way that effectively identifies brigading and harrassment, while still allowing for genuine 'oddballs' whose reviews and ratings go against the crowd.
Basically, instead of an economic currency unit being mined, the value being protected is instead some form of reputational trust-token; 30 seconds of Googling leads to articles like this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shermanlee/2018/08/13/a-decentr...
Thinking about things this way essentially boils the fundamental problem into what IMO is a pretty "general elegant theory", which is simply to construct a properly balanced incentive structure, which asymmetrically disincentivizes "bad" behavior while encouraging "good" behavior, in much the same way that Bitcoin's core ledger-validation/mining abstraction rewards miners for securing the network while also discouraging prohibitively expensive attack scenarios.
I'm not saying it's easy or obvious, but I think this is exactly the sort of decentralized trust problem that blockchains are well-suited for.
1990s DOS games were ahead of their times I guess.
This is an "obvious in hindsight" example but do we expect mods to google search every single name/photo of every review or comment, and then determine if it's legit or not?
This quickly becomes an escalation game where the effort to identify fakes just gets more and more tedious, and it's been repeatedly proven that trolls have way more time and energy to spend on this game than volunteer moderators, and will simply out-grind them to keep up their harassment.
Any solution that involves putting in more human effort than the trolls is likely to fail.
I'm scanning my memory banks and Stackoverflow is the only "earned privilege" community that comes to mind and my experience with it has been uniformly unpleasant, let's say "bordering on toxic". If anything, automatically earned privilege creates competition which makes everything worst and nastier.
In contrast, I moderate a medium sized FB group in a topic that often has trolling. We eliminate it entirely through hand-picked moderators and a zero tolerance statement. There's no competition to be a moderator and there's actually little for the moderators to do since making things clear mostly works. So there's no competition for anything and people spend their time discussing issues instead.
HN seems to be closer to that situation also - with karma hidden, competition is pretty limited. And anonymous posters can make fine contributions here.
As far as "positive earned privilege examples", some come to mind:
* HN, where downvoting requires a certain amount of karma (although there's plenty of human moderation too)
* MetaFilter [1], which has a reputation of good content due to their one-time $5 charge for signing up.
* The /r/AskHistorians subreddit, where you only get to answer once you have in-depth knowledge of a specific topic.
It doesn't need to be an automated system like StackOverflow, though I do think that is a good starting point for Goodreads and this specific problem.
The real problem here is that Amazon doesn't want to put any money into it.
Your solution makes a lot of sense, but would require effort, and I doubt anyone involved in running GR cares enough to do it.
But they completely own any Google search for an author or books, well beyond any dedicated fan forum, publisher, Wikipedia, or the author's own site. They're a cancer on the Internet and search engines.
I finally got tired of the emails, so I told the site I forgot the password, changed the password to something long and random, then deleted all the content. I remember having to do something unusual to delete the content, like spoof my useragent to pretend to be a mobile device, or something like that. I've never used Instagram before or since, but it really annoyed me that I have a problem due to their lax controls.
Instagram never should have activated the account and allowed any activity until the email address was verified, which I never did. If a big site like Instagram can't get this right, it doesn't surprise me that a small site like Goodreads can't either.
Epic Games also doesn't verify the email address, because my email account "had" an account there too. Worse, it had a credit card saved and appeared to be ready to allow me to use the card after I did the "forgot password" and gained access to the account.
I ended-up deleting both accounts.
Essentially zero services on the internet operate this way because it increases the friction to signing up & getting started with the service.
Some services do somewhat better by including a "this wasn't me" link in the email verification email to make it as easy as possible to remove your email from the account in question. IMHO, this is a fine way to handle the problem.
No, dear sites, kindly deal with a little bit of sign-up friction and stop offloading to others the fallout from people abusing your services.
That's a lot of friction. Too much.
How is it misleading or "linkbait"?
Here, the change is okay. Other times, the change rendered the title nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog".
I would default to a much stronger preference for the original article-the author/editor probably put more thought into the title, and destroying their creative work shouldn't be routine.
And what's with the bias-paranoia? People, including journalists, are allowed to have opinions and emotions. They do not have to equivocate: "The sanitary situation in the camp is becoming dangerous" does not require "...but someone on YouTube believes germ theory is a hoax, so who is to say if sleeping in feces isn't just a good way to stay warm".
My understanding of this policy is that the editorializing should be done in the comments rather than the submission of the title. -- A submission (and presumably number of upvotes/comments from others) already indicates that the article has some importance, and opinions about it have a 'level playing field' in the comments.
I think this also supports that the comment section is the place for interesting/insightful discussion.
And what's routine? How often are titles changed? How often is this viewed as beneficial to the majority, and how often is it viewed as detrimental?
If you're looking for a set of rules that result in the best solution every time, you're going to be disappointed. Whatever solution you come up with, even if it perfectly matched your sensibilities, would be misapplied in some instances because people are responsible for applying it.
The real question is how good of a job is being done on editorializing the submission titles already, and going off what we can remember of past instances is IMO worse than useless, it's likely rife with multiple forms of cognitive bias.
There's probably a good discussion to be had as to how well the title editorializing is here, but it rarely happens in response to someone posting about a specific title. If I had to guess, the discussion resulting from the post in the recent past about the site that tracked all HN submission name changes (which I never got a chance to read closely) might have some good discussions (as that data set is probably a good base to explore this topic usefully).
I'm pretty sure their work remains intact.
The more online everyone and everything becomes the more prevalent these generalised and distributed lynch mobs are likely to be. The also function with impunity (eg kiwi farms).
Not needing to start from scratch would make building a competing service a lot easier. Sites like Stackoverflow have reasonably open licenses on user data, so you could theoretically use that data and build an alternative if the site fell apart. I'm guessing that's not the case for Goodreads though, at least for things like reviews.
But even pulling in basic category information would be easier than starting from scratch.
My family was recently shocked to discover that adding a book as read and rating it doesn't automatically set the read date. I don't think it needs to do so, but these people are computer-literate and have entered > 1,000 books a piece. And they didn't know how it works. That suggests poor UX.
As someone who DID know this and and always manually add Date Read...here's how to do it on desktop: hover over the shelf dropdown until a little popup appears above, move up to that popup without it vanishing, and click "Write a review", which secretly means "write a review or enter date read."
2. It's slow.
Loading just the html of the front page is > 3 seconds. Loading My Books is > 5 seconds. Again, this is JUST the html, excluding no js, css, and images.
3. Nav is bad
This combines poorly with the site speed. One thing I do most frequently is to look at my most recently read books:
- Go to goodreads.com (3+ seconds)
- Click "My Books" (5+ seconds)
- Click "Read" (It defaults to books read and on your to-read list all mixed together.)
- Sort the list by Date Finished (5+ seconds)
- Re-sort the list by Date Finished because it did ascending the first time. (5+ seconds)
(Obviously, I could just bookmark that page with the desired params, but if I'm bookmarking to avoid having to use your site navigation, that's a UX issue.)
4. The recommendation engine is bad.
Various people have mentioned this. I will grant that recommendations are hard. But basically, don't use the recommendations. Use the lists manually built by users. (But note that on most lists the top spots will be pointless recommendations that you read Harry Potter. Gee, never heard of THAT book before, thanks!)
5. Lists aren't super-accessible
As I mentioned, the lists are much more useful than the recommendation engine. They're under Browse->Lists.
There's a search at the top of every single page. It searches books and authors. Not lists.
If you're in the lists section, it...still won't search lists. There's a tiny search box on the lists page for this.
6. Search Breaks Middle-Click
When I search a book, it populates the results without me having to click through to the results page. If I want to open those results in a new tab, though...nope! It'll just re-open the current page in a new tab.
7. Their export tool doesn't work right.
This is a minor quibble--it's VERY nice that they let you export your data at all--but I recently discovered that a lot (most?) of rows in the export are missing the Date Read field even if you entered them. Not all though. I don't know what the pattern is, but it's annoying.
Basically, I think Goodreads has approximately one engineer, whose job is to do some tweaks for the marketing team as needed (they renamed Giveaways recently-ish). There's clearly no designer, as UX has been essentially touched in the 12 years since I joined.
It doesn't need a sweeping redesign, but there are obvious UX tweaks they could have made at any point in the past decade and instead didn't. And some performance work, please!
You could argue that is necessary to get engagement from reviewers, but in trying to be both, goodreads doesn't do either very well. Throw in the fact that they haven't improved much since Amazon acquired them, and they've become a sort of static site targeted at acquisitions for ebooks.
A competing site that is focused on surfacing books that the reader likes, with links to more than just a single purchase point would likely gain enough traction to be useful.
I imagine that scraping a user's GoodReads profile every now and again with authorization would also allow the user to update status in their Kindle / eReader while still populating another site, which would be interesting.
For example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1836622-dandelion-cap...
It's a book that my brother and I recently re-read, and the recommendations are...four other books that I and my brother read recently. Granted, the majority are the same genre, but two aren't. They're just...books we both recently gave 4 stars.
Dislikes over likes does sound interesting though.
Besides the dark growth patterns, overall Goodreads feels like a clunky product suffering from feature bloat and poor usability. Unfortunately, because of the network effects and the Kindle integration, it's very hard for a competitor to get off the ground.
[1] screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh4rr6mvey1lbfh/Screenshot%202020-... (it's been like this for at least a year)
(Facebook's API has been locked down in the meantime and Goodreads now only has access to your FB friends that also linked Goodreads...which they use to send a friend requests to each one)
Sadly, any Goodreads competitor will need to miraculously gain the network effect; everyone you know is on Goodreads, so it'll just be you and whoever you can convince to move to a new platform.
As for the downsides for Goodreads, this blatant lack of moderation is troublesome. I also dislike that Kindle / Amazon are the only visible links to purchase books by default. Amazon already dominates the ebook/audiobook market, so I also simply dislike Goodreads due to their acquisition by Amazon.
I like a simpler and more transparent relationship.
Once upon a time I bought something online for about $10 from what was a legitimate business with an address in San Francisco. About 14 months later they claimed I subscribed to some service and started making huge charges to my card ($150/week). Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process.
That's why I have a knee-jerk reaction - not a cold, logical reaction - to online purchases from companies I haven't used before, and I'm not the only person like that.
I've had incorrect subscription charges on one of my cards, and while it was minorly annoying (a search on the card website, fill out a form, repeat one more time the second month it happened) I can't imagine a scenario where it would be "enormously stressful and difficult".
Your card issuer is required to respond when you report fraudulent charges, and if they don't you need a new bank.
I've had no negative fallout from purchasing a subscription, and they have very good privacy controls for those who don't want the social aspect (so you can basically turn off other user interactions in many ways). It's there when I need it, doesn't seem to spam me and I probably paid with Paypal (I use Paypal as a way to not give 3rd parties my CC info, a proxy if you will) like most things.
It may look old school and appear at a glance like it's not maintained, but it's updated and run actively, there are a bajillion people using LibraryThing. Logging in to look at my account, there's a link on the right for the latest news posted today about "The January ER Batch is up! We've got 2,960 copies of 89 titles this month." (early reviewer books) https://www.librarything.com/er/list
They thing is, on another level: they're done. They offer excellent cataloguing and the ability to share your reviews and so on and so forth. What more do they need to add? A visual refresh every few years? At this point I'd rather they spend the money their customers pay them on keeping things running, not adding crap no-one cares about, surveillance capitalism anti-features, or whatever.
These days though, the FB API has been locked down and basically can't be used for growing your userbase anymore. Any new startups in this space won't have the social graph advantage that Goodreads did. Sad.
Anyway, I wish them best of luck. This problem is widespread, see: Amazon, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, et al.
“Thanks for posting your review on goodreads! As a final step, please enter the fourth word on page 93 of the book you’ve just reviewed”
Edit: "What's the second word of chapter 4" would work better but that's assuming harassers can't source an ebook and share it around... it'd prevent pre-release spam like this but so would disabling reviews until the book is actually released
The first thing Goodreads asks you to do when you create a new account is to list and rate a bunch of books you've read and either liked or hated. This is important, because they (ostensibly) want to recommend other books to you.
When I first created an account, I quickly rated maybe 50 books on a 1-5 scale I had read over the years. I didn't have most of them handy.
Ironically, most of the other one star reviews claim the book is full of "thinly-veiled, progressive tropes"
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Repo-Patrick-S-Tomlinson/dp/...
>Many of the spoofed accounts use the identities of Tomlinson’s friends and peers in the author community, creating the illusion that people he knows are giving one-star reviews and saying bad things about him. Dozens of authors have been spoofed in this manner, including the entire board of directors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
>Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo and sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings. These spoofed reviews often also show Tomlinson falsely saying things which would hurt his own reputation.
>Gareth L. Powell and Beth Cato were among the authors spoofed, with their photos and names used to create fake accounts to attack Tomlinson’s books.
I think calling these "trolls" doesn't go far enough. I am sure this crosses criminal lines, or at the very least probably several laws.
The victims should sue or the government should pursue actions that rise to this level. It's not just "trolling" to do this, in my opinion.
Fake reviews on Amazon, vote bombing on youtube, fake upvotes on reddit, fake likes on facebook. I'd even extend this tangentially to cyber squatting DNS records, email spam, and robo callers.
It's a matter of trust. We think we can just make a big polling station somewhere and get the communities opinion on something, one person one vote. "Here's the big central aggregate, take the law of averages and you have a good sense of how good something is". But on the internet the Sybil attack reigns supreme. This assumption doesn't hold.
Whenever I read articles on problems like these the topic of "Why it's happening and how to fix it" invariable drifts to "We need better moderation". I never think that. I think "Stop trusting Sybil". Not even THAT! Stop asking me to trust random people I don't trust!
What if instead of having an single aggregate review, we "web of trust" it instead? Here's the system as I imagine it, and it's not fully thought out at this point, please chime in with criticisms if you have them.
The jist: Every user has their own list of ratings for books in the system, and a list of people they "trust". The rated list of books you see the average rating of the people you trust, recursing out through the web of trust. The ratings are calculated live, on demand. With the only thing held in constant being each individuals personal ratings.
I'm leaving a lot undefined right now, but an example of how I imagine such a system to work:
Lets say you know Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the perfect book. You go to the books page and review the ratings. Your rate is obviously 5. You see lots of other people in your list who have rated it 5 (naturally). But you also see that there are some 3's in there. You can click on the 3's and see how they reached you through the web of trust. It turns out a bunch of 3's are coming from your someone named Bob, Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has trusted a bunch of people from some kind of Harry Potter hating cabal of philistines. You could blacklist the cabal, but there's too many of them, so instead you blacklist Alice. All the 3's are gone, and so are all the other reviews from the cabal. Your list of reviews now more accurately reflects views that you would trust.
In this way, your effort to moderate away the opinions of people you don't trust has done double duty, it has cleared views you disagree with and do not trust, and it has also done so for the people who trust you as well.
It is decentralized moderation.
There's some challenges here, for example, how to bootstrap the system for new users? What is the best way to calculate the average reviews in a timely manner? How much weight should be applied to a friend of a friend of a friend? What kind of feedback could we give to users to incentivize them against trusting people like the philistine cabal? etc.
I have some thoughts on this, I'll spare you.
Like any decentralized system, it's more work, it's more complex, and it has some surprising and ugly edge cases. I also don't think I'm some genius for coming up for this, it's just an application of Web of Trust. But I have not seen a system such as this in practice. Nor do I ever seem to see people talk about it when the topic of moderation and spam come up. If you know of any such case studies, let me know!
Edit: The solution is to fix the voting system, not to abuse it further because you believe you are virtuous.
"Both sides are wrong" doesn't mean they are equally bad.
Edit: If someone is caught posting fake positive reviews to boost a rating[1], that doesn't make it okay to post fake negative reviews 'to fight the good fight'.
[1] As opposed to impugning someone's character via impersonation, as appears to be happening here
In any case this will make for an excellent marketing campaign. I don't even know what the book is about (I assume something politically charged because of this campaign) but now I know the book!
I'm really curious how anybody thinks this isn't harassment.
> The solution is to fix the voting system
How do the people posting positive fake reviews do that? They're responding to fake reviews in the only way they can, by offsetting them. Yes, there's a better solution that Goodreads can implement, but only Goodreads can implement it; not any of the commenters you criticize here.
Since they can't fix the voting system, and absent any motivation from Goodreads to fix it, is it really bad for them to respond the best way they can using the only tools they have available? After all, if the voting system is widely abused by everyone to the point where it becomes a dumpster fire, maybe that will force Goodreads to care.
If burning the review section to the ground with garbage content forces Goodreads to take notice, I could see someone arguing that it is a morally productive, good action to take -- not just neutral, but in fact morally superior to any of the complaining we're doing on HN, since Goodreads is 100% not going to care about anything we write here.
I'm not certain I agree with that perspective, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. I'm somewhat cautious about making a strong claim that offsetting fake reviews isn't a morally desirable action.
This depends on your basic values, but one could definitely argue that doing nothing is morally superior to abusing the voting system. Only sometimes do two wrongs make a right, and I'm not convinced this is one of those times.
When you ask "Was that the morally superior choice", what set of options are you considering? In my prior statement, I simply claimed that it can be argued that doing nothing is morally superior to abusing the voting system.
People who post fake negative reviews also use this argument, combined with allegations of moral inferiority of their target.
Should we then post more fake negative reviews to offset the fake positive reviews?