Amazon Book Reviews Deleted in Purge Aimed at Manipulation | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Book Reviews Deleted in Purge Aimed at Manipulation

nytimes.com

18 pointsiProject11 comments

I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the number of stars, but rather to what the reviewers say.

Yes, it takes longer to decide which product is best, but I get more reliable results that way.

One of the niftiest features on Amazon is the ability to view the "most helpful" glowing and negative reviews. Frequently, you only need to read 2 reviews. The glowing one will highlight the product's best features, while the negative one will clearly outline its flaws. After that, you have a pretty clear picture.

Once I noticed this and start evaluating products via this angle I started feeling a lot more confident in my purchasing decisions.

I think they've been more successful too, not too sure though.

Typically one or two of the best, and several more of the worst, reviews.

I get e-mails all the time offering to submit fake rave reviews for my book, for a price. I also get e-mails offering the same "service" for my Android apps. It's a business -- a widespread, unethical business.

Meanwhile, one of the few real reviews of my book says, "This is a really terrific book, and I have read it more than once! By the way, can someone fix my mistake -- I accidentally gave it one star instead of five!"

I have what I think is an effective strategy for evaluating product reviews. I ignore the five star and four star reviews. In fact, I go right to the one and two star reviews. If most of the bad reviews are well-reasoned, thought-out and coherent criticisms of the product, then I consider competing products instead.

However, if the bad reviews are predominately written by morons, then I remain interested in the product. The more "bad" reviews I see with dumb complaints, bad grammar, ALL CAPS and irrelevant whining, the more I'm likely to buy. These are the anti-reviews, and so far, I've used them with great success.

EDIT: By the way, this also works well for picking movies on IMDB.

I give much more credibility to reviews that are marked "Amazon Verified Purchase". This at least weeds out bought reviews, people who received free review copies from the author, people who are supporters or detractors of the author or his ideology but haven't read the book, etc. And it's likely that someone who actually paid for the book actually read it. It would be nice if Amazon had a way of filtering out all reviews that weren't from a verified purchaser.

Same here, I also check to see whether this was the only book review this person did. Too many 5 star reviews for a new book is always suspicious, btw.

Look at this piece of crap book, for example: http://www.amazon.com/Iterating-Infusion-Clearer-Objects-Cla... It mostly has fake reviews.

Hopefully these reviews aren't categorized as "manipulative"

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/produ...

There is some amazing satire in Amazon reviews. It would be a shame if it was all lost.

What took them so long to move on this?

With so many people willing to contribute reviews, I see no reason to allow either anonymous reviews or reviews from people who have no direct familiarity with the product. Can there be some value from these two sources? Perhaps. But there's a lot more noise generated than value.

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