A harassment campaign on Goodreads

Some people are trying to battle against negative fake reviews by posting positive fake reviews. It's not clear to me that they are as morally superior as they evidently believe.

Edit: The solution is to fix the voting system, not to abuse it further because you believe you are virtuous.

I hope you see the difference between fake praise and harrassment.

"Both sides are wrong" doesn't mean they are equally bad.

That's why I used relative language such as "as morally superior as they evidently believe"

Edit: If someone is caught posting fake positive reviews to boost a rating[1], that doesn't make it okay to post fake negative reviews 'to fight the good fight'.

[1] As opposed to impugning someone's character via impersonation, as appears to be happening here

Yes, but:

> The solution is to fix the voting system

How do the people posting positive fake reviews do that? They're responding to fake reviews in the only way they can, by offsetting them. Yes, there's a better solution that Goodreads can implement, but only Goodreads can implement it; not any of the commenters you criticize here.

Since they can't fix the voting system, and absent any motivation from Goodreads to fix it, is it really bad for them to respond the best way they can using the only tools they have available? After all, if the voting system is widely abused by everyone to the point where it becomes a dumpster fire, maybe that will force Goodreads to care.

I did not claim they were bad. From their own words, some of them evidently believe they are not just morally superior to the people posting fake negative reviews, but vastly morally superior. It is not obvious that this is the case.

What is the morally correct action if fake positive reviews outnumber fake negative reviews?

Should we then post more fake negative reviews to offset the fake positive reviews?

Let me rephrase that -- is there a more moral action they could take?

If burning the review section to the ground with garbage content forces Goodreads to take notice, I could see someone arguing that it is a morally productive, good action to take -- not just neutral, but in fact morally superior to any of the complaining we're doing on HN, since Goodreads is 100% not going to care about anything we write here.

I'm not certain I agree with that perspective, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. I'm somewhat cautious about making a strong claim that offsetting fake reviews isn't a morally desirable action.

It's not fake praise vs harassment, it's fake praise vs fake criticism.

In any case this will make for an excellent marketing campaign. I don't even know what the book is about (I assume something politically charged because of this campaign) but now I know the book!

> Let me rephrase that -- is there a more moral action they could take?

This depends on your basic values, but one could definitely argue that doing nothing is morally superior to abusing the voting system. Only sometimes do two wrongs make a right, and I'm not convinced this is one of those times.

It can be [and is] fake criticism and harassment at the same time. These are not mutually exclusive in the slightest.

> If burning the review section to the ground with garbage content forces Goodreads to take notice, I could see someone arguing that it is a morally productive, good action to take -- not just neutral, but in fact morally superior to

People who post fake negative reviews also use this argument, combined with allegations of moral inferiority of their target.

I do not believe that the author has faked their own fake criticism in this case, but this marketing tactic has been used successfully before by others.

Ok so lets say they do nothing, the business receiving fake negative reviews closes as a result and people lose their jobs. Was that the morally superior choice?

Cherry picking unlikely hypothetical scenarios (this is GR, not yelp) is a bad strategy for making a binary determination of the morality of a choice.

When you ask "Was that the morally superior choice", what set of options are you considering? In my prior statement, I simply claimed that it can be argued that doing nothing is morally superior to abusing the voting system.

That's completely true. Even though I don't agree with fake positive reviews, I have seen enough harassment against authors and books

Excerpt from the article: "Jason: I saw one troll spoofing your name and picture post an extremely nasty, long-winded comment on Goodreads, discussing intimate details of your family life and making it sound like you want to kill yourself. None of this could be considered a review of your book by any conceivable means, yet Goodreads still hasn't removed it. What's going on here?"

I'm really curious how anybody thinks this isn't harassment.