Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated
thebookseller.com
thebookseller.com
E.g. take reviews of business on Google, there's no link to actual purchases, but you get a star and a "Local guide level 4" or something if you do enough reviews. A family member runs a consulting business, he has a 2-star review, the only review. It's not made by a customer, just some random dude. What it looks like is that this dude just walked around reviewing business after business, based on look of their office perhaps. He's not customer of ANY of them. So now multiple business are trying to have these negative reviews removed, Google doesn't give a shit, so what are these reviews actually worth?
Most people who write reviews aren't exactly the most mentally stable people either. If you're not getting something in return, most people won't write a review, that just leave the nut jobs.
I see absolutely no way this incentive structure could be misused, after all, people wouldn't use bots to spam reviews out to hopefully farm upvotes, would they? Nope <:o)
https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam
tldr - the seller initiates the sale themselves for w/e it is they sell to a second account that they own registered to a random address. They then ship a near-worthless item to that address and use that secondary account to write a glowing review for their original account. You get something for free that would be a bargain at twice the price and they get a 5 star review on their account. The only victim is anyone who trusts the review system.
It seems a lot of companies value early reviews highly, or their prices are rather inflated.
Free x2?
It depends on the contents and the number of them. If multiple/many negative reviews for something all mention a similar defect, you can be pretty sure it is an actual issue with the thing. It is then up to you to determine if the thing is still worth your time/money.
I will say that for some things the motivations of the reviewers are something to take into account especially. For book reviews on Goodreads I've found that animosity towards the author causes heavy overstating of the 'defects' of a book.
I've had multiple Amazon negative reviews vanish over the years. Often, it happens a few weeks after posting. I've heard it's people bribing Amazon reps to do so, under the auspices of "bad review". I've even occasionally noticed others on Amazon, in reviews, complaining that their last review went missing.
Really sad.
That's a wild claim!
I'd argue that most people don't review anything, unless they are somehow encouraged to do so. Sometimes they are motivated by anger, but those reviews are quickly taken down on many platforms, or they are based on completely unrealistic expectations, but then we're frequently back at being slightly unstable.
Normal folks in normal situations simply couldn't be bothered, not in 2025. The only exception is when platform forces you to do so, and then the sea of dishonest shallow blah to reach certain word count ensues. That's now you get 4.8-4.9* average review out of 5, while judging an OK but not perfect place (and no place is ever perfect since many subjective aspects enter the game).
In my scale 3/5 is good (got what expected), 4/5 is very good (nice bargain), 5/5 is uniquely amazing. But I do understand that for some anything below 5/5 is bad.
Baseless, callous accusation. And the conclusion is wrong too. Without getting something in return, people write genuine reviews with multiple different intents: out of feeling of obligation, support, appreciation. Out of discontent. As a substitute or alternative for customer support. To help other people find the thing, or to dissuade them from an unworthy purchase.
But I believe open data sets will become as important as open source for the future. Filtering out the spam, fakes and slop will be similar work to what AdBlock filter people do today.
Strongly disagree.
IF there were a generally decent and functional and efficient review forum and IF it were painless and friction-free to leave a review, then I think reviewing a product insightfully is something that adds real value and makes the world a (slightly) better place.
Unfortunately, the fora for this kind of activity are either nonexistent or laden with pathological baggage. Reviews at Amazon are unusable at best, fraudulent at worst, and I hear nothing but bad things about "goodreads".
It was both a fun challenge (using vanilla JS to render) and has been fun to share with friends, Twitter mutuals etc.
Plus, people know it's MY reviews so if they like my suggestions/tweeting/poasting/etc, they know the review is from me and not some bot.
One way to look at what you've done is authenticated the source of your reviews. They're not anonymous people behind a fake username.
Yet another reason that the legitimate press still wins over the internet rabble.
I follow a couple of professional movie reviewers who have been doing it since before the internet took off, and their reviews are almost always better than the dross online.
The same is true for books. The New York Times book review, for example, is so good and trusted that you can actually subscribe to it separately, without getting the rest of the newspaper.
When they asked Yuval Noah Harari his opinion on AI deepfakes, I liked his answer (paraphrased):
"Fake information has always been a problem and my answer is the way we have always dealt with it: having trusted institutions."
I took this to mean things like newspapers (e.g. the New York Times as the 'paper of record').
One is there isn't a separate section for professional reviews (Polish movie/TV site Filmweb has that), so that right off the bat the first comment might be that someone doesn't like what the book is even about, it's a 1-star, liked by 15 people.
Two is they closed their API completely, so there's no way you can get any book info from their DB, not with limits and/or authorization, not if you pay, just not at all.
Same on IMDB, and even Rotten Tomatoes. There's a lot of money in movies. But books?
Online reviews don't have enough control over their reviewers and so it only takes a small number of unethical people to cause a big problem.
Generally less money, yes. But not all motives are financial. And there are loads of conflict, drama, and emotions in many parts of the writing world.
I wish there was a modern equivalent.
... But when you're an incumbent that's likely to be around for at least a quarter of a decade with a sizeable monopoly, later really is better than never.
Books were $28,100,000,000 last year in the United States alone.
Audiobooks: $1,800,000,000
e-Books: $191,000,000
https://www.statista.com/topics/1177/book-market/#topicOverv...
If the reviewer is consumer reports they for years were this independent reviews. (I've heard accusations they are no longer as independent - make your own decisions) They often don't know enough about the product to understand why long term the more expensive one might be better as opposed to just overpriced, so not perfect, but still better than buying everything yourself.
they have been doing this for decades. they fund themselves by selling a print magazine and paid online access. their reputation is so good that products that get good test results often use the result in their ads or print it on their packaging.
Likely a script that looks for the first x reviews and then starts generating fake ones, and some party that is just lazy. There's probably a market somewhere to short.
Is Goodreads not a review site but just a soapbox for readers? What kind of serious review site would allow reviews where the reviewer simply speculates whether they would like something or not? Seems strange Goodreads would allow these kinds of reviews, it completely undermines any credibility their ratings might have.
Does anyone take Amazon review scores seriously?
Feels similar to calorie tracking apps now. Having a database of food UPCs with nutritional data is actually useful. Then capitalism comes along and juices it for social media engagement until the site is riddled with junk features and paywalls
I guess there will always be market for a hobbies to make their own trackers.
But Amazon allows sellers to swap different products in under an existing listing so you don’t even know anymore if the review is for what you are buying. This allows sellers to cheat. It’s insanity.
It reminds me of the phone network. It’s so riddled with bad actors that entire generations now have been trained to never pick up the phone.
Why would a network operator allow caller ID to be so easily spoofed? For abusive callers to operate unrestricted? Even the audio quality of the calls seems to have gotten so bad in my parents rural backwater.
I don’t get it. Is engagement the only metric that matters?
Our protocols are descended from the postal system - the sender is a bit of text written on the wrapper.
Certifying that is out of the scope of delivering to the addressee. It would involve back and forth with an authority - e.g. showing someone your id before being allowed to post a letter.
Call centers want the ability to call "on behalf of" and are willing to pay for that. Unless strict id verification is mandated by a regulatory body, even in the presence of a network-wide agreement the first to defect eats the whole pie.
> But Amazon allows sellers <...> This allows sellers to cheat.
Things like this allow for a secondary market of "amazon experts" to be formed, which brings sellers to amazon in particular. Again, revenue.
> Is engagement the only metric that matters?
Yes. Welcome to the world of enshittification.
Unintentionally a hilarious statement, straight outta sci-fi.
Ah yes, the illustrious omniprescient reviewer.
I've published a novelette a few months ago on a large website with user ratings (ahem, as a novice writer of smut whose nom-de-plume shall remain a carefully guarded secret). What is interesting is that in the first fortnight there were some people giving a bad rating because, ostensibly (and judging from some comments), they just don't like that specific type of story, whereas in the long tail the average rating climbs upwards as people find your story using tags and keywords, etc, and then judge only the writing and story itself, rather than its subgenre, setting, or premise.
I wonder if real books reviewed on Goodreads follow that pattern too. Those early reviews can have an outsized influence.
One thing that also happens with reviews on Amazon, though, is that you get one star reviews from people who do nothing but leave one star reviews. Amazon won’t touch them
Same with Reddit and other places - seeing bunch of suspiciously positive "reviews" months before the book is even on sale.
Amazon reviews are unironically better, because you can see if somebody actually bought the book or not, and Amazon has very sophisticated anti-Astroturfing measures. (Good luck getting your friends and family to leave good reviews of your book -- they'll catch it and delete them.)
Goodreads is infested with marketing and publishing cliques and a lot of their reviews are fake or paid for. It has never been more over.
And yet they won't do anything about sellers who change their listing to a completely different product once it gets to the 4-5 star range. Can't tell you how many times I've been looking at some tool or gadget only to glance at the reviews and see people mentioning socks.
They just catch some of the easily detectable ones that some authors use (everyone following the same link or links from the same site rating books universally high, for instance).
They don't detect commercial review buying services which involve actual product purchases nearly as well or some of the other scams like ASIN laundering.
All one needs to do is look at 100% identical white labeled products that get vastly different reviews to see Amazon's measures are wholly insufficient.
Worse, people buy 4-5 star good reviews for their own products and 1-3 star bad reviews for competing products, so there's no easy way for a user to tell what is real and what is fake.
Amazon, like all review sites, can be gamed. But it takes quite a lot of effort, and credible fake reviews need to actually purchase the book in question -- and so, for the average book, fake reviews are practically a non-factor.
Goodreads is trivially easy to manipulate, and it's manipulated as a matter of course. Anybody with $45 can simply buy 10 Goodreads reviews. https://alphabetazone.com/buy-goodreads-reviews/
This is a significant factor, imo. Many great modern Russian artists are banned by the state. Meanwhile, the current imperialist Russian state is a group of professionally trained sandcastle kickers running wild.
I look forward to a day when the Russian people, and the world, have a Russian government that works for things other than destruction.
Okay that's bullshit. Let them duke it out!
I'd really like to see a hierarchy of trust. Get some certs signed by a reputable bank who has seen you in person, high trust. Self-signed certs, much less trust. Completely anonymous, you get basically shadowbanned; people who want it can go looking for it.
The Internet is an information flood (and so much worse now that we have LLMs). Filtering it has always been the key challenge. We should be able to filter on source, while still allowing people to say whatever it is they want. We just don't have to read it.
Environments where reprisals are possible simply have different dysfunctionality from ones where they generally aren't. And you can see how catastrophic suddenly turning on reprisals is, known as "doxxing".
As an extreme example, (multiple) POTUS have gone on national TV and flat out lied to the US without consequence.
What's more, governance processes for the forum shouldn't be anonymous at all. I mean flagging, voting, moderator action etc.
That's arguably the most important conversation here. Most in need of illumination by public discussion.
But so often (in these social media forums) it is taken one step beyond pseudonymity to full anonymity. Hidden from all eyes.
Why? I never heard a good argument.
Also, there are social media sites with real name policies; in what way are they better?
Secondly, I don't try to use my account to spew FUD. I'm not claiming to be anyone I am not. I don't say "I'm an expert on privacy with 20+ years experience" or falsely claim to be a well know industry leader in this field.
Lastly, I really try (especially on HN) to be nice. I'll state ideas and some facts I know, but I really try to stay clear of being mean. I do this because the rage/hate I see spewed on the interwebs is just sad and I really believe its a product of people being able to hide behind anonymity.
I dont know any social media sites with real name policies, but I do know from personal experience that people are much more civil when they cant hide behind a mask.
I would like to live in a world where everyone thinks about the repercussions of their actions, on and off line. IMHO, if everyone was their true self, it would be better - case and point, the fake book reviewer would probably not have posted their fake review.
That means it will not work!
Counterfeit goods on Amazon is a meme, everyone knows. There are YouTube channels that make a sport of it. Once the market just accepts that, it seems impossible to elevate something like reviews
Fair moderation encompasses a well defined vision on what to moderate, and good definitions of that - what is tolerated and what not. Enforcement needs to be swift and fair. There needs to be a barrier of entry, to combat cheating the moderation by quickly re-joining.
If these are successfully upheld, bots, trolling, and abuse has little chance. Not being anonymous can raise the barrier of entry, but it's very far from a working solution; see how horrible people act of facebook, with their name and photo attached. And this site, for example, has very little publicly visible badness going on, because of how effective the moderation is.
But sometimes the comment section is just a bunch of people with axes to grind.