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Comment by thefurdrake | Hacker News Reader

I feel like sometimes gatekeeping is acceptable. The end of the article provides the perfect solution:

"Do not review a book you haven’t read."

People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick.

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Goodreads, like any social network, attracts a lot of perpetually-online people involved in activism, the sort where it is acceptable and even encouraged to shout down authors whom one’s community regards as detrimental to society. No need to read the book first, because judgment has already been cast. Therefore, those users can’t be expected to feel ashamed for their behavior, rather their behaviour might even serve as a form of social currency with their in-group.

Book bannings seem pretty popular in the offline-world of the US as well, not sure it's an online-only thing.

The level of effort is lower online.

In real life this stuff is usually limited to more backwards places more vulnerable to phony political and “religious” figures fanning flames.

Every book I don’t like should be banned.

Worse, every book from people that someone told me not to like.

The solution is trust. Crowd sourced reviews are junk because you don’t know who wrote them, what their intentions are, or if they are in any way qualified (whatever that means to you) to review a book. With well known and trusted reviewer, you understand their biases and can adjust accordingly.

I don't think the issue here is about mmm individual being able to trust reviews. It's more about authors being pressured to write along certain lines due to hordes of basically bots upvoting/downvoting.

Almost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes? It’s been a learning experience for me as an author. The first chapter should not be special, it should be like the rest of the book.

> Almost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes?

Just to provide an alternative point of view from a reader, this is fine behavior. So long as you mention this in your review.

I’ve DNFed both movies and books in 10% or less. And that’s ok. There’s a ton of excellent books and movies to justify pushing yourself through content you don’t like. As someone put it, we’re not looking for needles in haystacks, we’re looking for needles in mountains of needles.

So, it’s not personal, but a review at 10% is still a valid review, if it’s honest about the slice read.

Sure, as long as it doesn't assume the other 90% is the same as the first 10%.

> Sure, as long as it doesn't assume the other 90% is the same as the first 10%.

Is the author writing badly just for fun, then? Is this potboiler going to turn into something thought-provoking after the first chapter of cardboard characters and cliché exposition? That wouldn't be a bad idea, like an updating of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" with riffs on modern fiction styles, but I doubt "The <Greek Letter> <Ominous Noun>" ("The Omega Directive" "The Alpha Sanction") is going to turn into into a parody of airline novels after starting out as merely a poor example of same.

We're not talking about "for fun" or "style" as much as content. Does the content get better? Does the film improve as it progresses? If the review is only based on style, then I guess, sure. But as far as content, well how would one know unless they read the rest of it?

There are plenty of novels that change quite significantly in character partway through. There are plenty of films with a weird first act before you get into it.

If a book is popular and has thousands of people reviewing it, why not let the people with enough context (i.e. those who actually read all of it or at least the majority of it) review it? Is one so smart that their review based on only partial information is necessary and needs to add to the chorus of all of the other reviews?

Would you trust the review of a professional movie critic if they said well they didn't like the first 15 minutes so they just quit. Well today because we all have a megaphone through review sites, we are all on the level of professional critics to more of an extent than anyone would be in 1990 so we all have some responsibility to write informed reviews.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. “I hated the writing and couldn’t finish” is a perfectly fine review.

Sure, if you hate the writing style and explain that, that's fair. The problem is if you assume what the rest of the content, that you didn't read, is about. Suppose you picked up the novel Jane Eyre not knowing anything about it, and gave up after the first chapter because you thought it was just a book about children and that didn't appeal to you. That's fine, but then don't leave a review assuming the whole book is about children. You didn't read the book, you read a tiny subset, so you're not qualified to review all of its content. But you could certainly say, "I read the first chapter and hated the writing style."

If the first chapter it first ten minutes are bad, then yeah, you should review it. Especially if, as you say, the first chapter should be like the rest of the book... And the first chapter is bad, then how do you think the rest of the book is going to be?

> "Do not review a book you haven’t read."

> People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick.

Replace books with games and the whole gaming community will be in pitchforks after you.

> The end of the article provides the perfect solution:

> "Do not review a book you haven’t read."

No, that isn't the perfect solution. Andrew Gelman stated the issue better here ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/07/02/the_moral_... ):

> I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.

I’m not at all convinced. How would you review a book you haven’t read? At least you could point out some specifics to maybe convince some people

Why would it be necessary to read the autobiography of Uri Geller before pointing out that it's full of crap? That's a waste of everyone's time.

Here is a proud "I haven't read the book review" from a highly ranked reviewer on Goodreads :

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2325928726

He's #6 in Australia.

If hundreds of people like a review which clearly states that the reviewer hasn't read the book what are you meant to do.

I once felt driven to leave a review of a book that I hadn't read.

I had purchased and read several books from a particular author - all reasonably enjoyable, but extremely badly written pulp sci-fi, and I was desperately trying to find some way to stop Amazon repeatedly promoting this garbage to me through notifications 2-3 times a week...

So not even a review as such, just a fruitless attempt to influence Amazon's algorithms!

That sounds optimistic. I write as someone who wish that people in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read.

> I write as someone who wish that people in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read.

That is weird expectation to me. At my book club we decide on what books we are interested in reading by voting. That of course means that sometimes what we end up reading something which turns out to be a dud, and then we discuss why or how it felt short of our expectations. Would you expect someone to pre-vet the books you embark on reading?

In my opinion picking a book for book club is not endorsement, but just an expression that it interests the book club.

I thought that was how book clubs worked: they picked a book, the members then read it over a reasonable period, then reconvened to discuss it and pick the next.

Unlike picking a book you haven't read for book group, there is literally nothing to gain from reviewing a book you haven't read.

Presumably many individuals do this to engage in the culture wars.

Except engagement, likes and fake internet points on social media - it seems.

Which part sounds optimistic?

People suck, so this is a non-solution. Review sites that accept fraudulent reviews are worthless so this should be seen as an existential crisis. I think should delete any reviews that were found to come out before a book could have been read, delete any other reviews they've written, and permaban their accounts.

Potential solve: Amazon owns Goodreads. Amazon has a way of tagging reviews with “certified purchaser,” and they could start filtering for only these reviews, rather than just flagging and boosting them (as the article says they are doing now). Of course this means you must buy the book from Amazon

Edit: don’t downvote me just because you hate this idea, haha. Obviously there are tradeoffs

Not only might you not have purchased from Amazon and instead bought it some other way, but

* Most early reviews are via ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) which you get through netgalley and similar sites, or directly from the author/publisher

* It is quite likely that you're reading something (legally) without having bought it because libraries exist

* Just because you bought it, doesn't mean you read it, and you might be tempted to leave a one-star review based on the fact that it shipped slowly and arrived late

Goodreads is much more international than Amazon, foreign users won’t realistically order from Amazon.com and might not have a local Amazon.xy site. For a time, one of the most active demographics on Goodreads was young female Iranians.

"Solution" is a fine word. And no, I don't want Goodreads to invalidate my review on the grounds that I didn't buy it on Amazon.

As noted in the article they already do this.

The irony to make this suggestion on this article about people commenting on things they didn't read.

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