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A harassment campaign on Goodreads

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270 points ilamont | 2 comments | 06 Jan 20 20:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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jshevek ◴[06 Jan 20 21:54 UTC] No.21973815[source]▶
It's absurd that pre-release reviews are available to the general public. This should be easy to fix, if GR cared to do so.
replies(3): >>21973864 #>>21973924 #>>21975665 #
halfcreative ◴[06 Jan 20 22:03 UTC] No.21973924[source]▶
Pre-release reviews is a problem on more than just books too. I wish there were more systems to verify that you've at least bought the book, movie, or the product in general before you can review it.
replies(1): >>21974378 #
klez ◴[06 Jan 20 22:50 UTC] No.21974378[source]▶
How can I prove that if I borrowed it from a friend or a library?
replies(2): >>21974764 #>>21979126 #
jasondclinton ◴[06 Jan 20 23:31 UTC] No.21974764[source]▶
A number of copy-protection systems for mid-80's to mid-90's computer games asked that you opened the printed manual that came with the game and go to—e.g.—page 32 and type in the first word of the third paragraph. Doesn't seem that hard to automate doing that for ebooks, these days. After all, Goodreads is owned by Amazon so they have the corpus. Just use chapters instead of pages; that will work across all formats.
replies(1): >>21975028 #
1. sarah180 ◴[06 Jan 20 23:59 UTC] No.21975028[source]▶
I'm not sure that would help with organized brigading campaigns like this. In the Internet age, one person with the book could supply answers to these questions for hundreds of people posting fake reviews with only a nominal investment of time.
replies(1): >>21975184 #
2. djrogers ◴[07 Jan 20 00:17 UTC] No.21975184[source]▶
If each prompt were unique (and given the number of pages and words in a book, they could be) then no - it wouldn't be a nominal investment of time to answer all of them.