Hacking the Goodreads Review System

Thanks for sharing this. I take goodread reviews very lightly, especially for new books which I figure are either done by folks who get early access, book bloggers, etc.. (which I assume comes with their own bias at the pleasure of early access) and now throwing in 'bots' into the mix..gross!

I did enjoy 'The Humans' and 'How to stop time' but would never mark either of them as 5 star books, mainly because I would count books like 'Madam Bovary' or 'Rebecca'or 'Crime and Punishment' as a 5-star book. Nonetheless the praise for Midnight Library irked me before I even took a look at it. Folks are so keen on jumping to 5-stars without a critical approach to it.

Rather than a single 1-5 star system, a questionnaire with 1-5 stars for aspects of a book could be a better way to rate.

From 1-5 how would you rate: 1. the plot 2. enjoyability 3. character development 4. etc...

and then average out the scores across each aspect to get the user's score on the book.

Obviously there is incentive for goodreads to push for 5-star reviews all around, for the most part, because who wants to buy a 1-3.5 star book from Amazon? Also a larger scale or more options to choose from with rating would lead to lower conversion of rating submissions.

I won't claim to be perfect about rating books either, but its appalling when a book like 'The Midnight Library' (4.3 as of this time) has a higher rating than 'Crime and Punishment' (4.2).