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.

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.

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.