Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Turned Goodreads into Authors Worst Nightmare | Hacker News Reader

Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Turned Goodreads into Authors Worst Nightmare

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19 pointsappleiigs2 comments

I care increasingly less about "crowd sourced" reviews. Realizing their (usual absence of) quality, I already started only looking at the bad reviews, with a critical eye to check if the concern is a) sensible in the first place, and b) relevant to me. But as the article demonstrates, those bad reviews might just be extortion anyway. Similarly, the good ones may be gaming metrics, and even for those that are genuine, I just don't see much value in a one paragraph blurb from "random user 1337".

I now tend to get my reviews from e.g. Wirecutter (for products), critics that I seem to be aligned with in taste (for books and media), or generally whatever source I consider trustworthy and relevant for a given subject. The important part is that there usually is an identity of sorts attached, with editorial guidelines or maybe just a certain consistent personality. And if I see that that source increasingly diverges from what I'm looking for, I can drop it from what I consider relevant.

For authors, and maybe generally, the problem is that crowd sourced reviews have largely gotten the norm, and their success is at least partly dependent on pleasing (or placating) that crowd.

I agree with this sentiment entirely. I generally only check the poor reviews of a place and then try to corroborate them/see if it's something I can live with. This is especially true on Amazon, but I trust Amazon less and less as time goes on. I especially appreciate more now the idea of Zagat's guide or similar things of that ilk where the incentive structure is clear: I pay for good reviews. Weirdly enough, I think some reviewers have found ways where they are wealthy enough that they are much less likely to be corrupted. Like Marques Brownlee for example IMO seems like you'll get whatever he's personally biased by but I don't feel like some company can just buy a good review from him

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