It took me two tries too; my first guess was "I think the problem is not as bad as fake books and worse than Amazon's fundamentally broken review system", but that didn't make sense.

The symbols < and > are being used as substitutes for the English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of < and >.