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Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated

(www.thebookseller.com)
97 points healsdata | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 11:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.528s | source
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A_D_E_P_T ◴[25 Jun 25 12:52 UTC] No.44376732[source]▶
Goodreads is the worst. At this point, Amazon should just shut it down.

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.

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1. Aloisius ◴[26 Jun 25 00:16 UTC] No.44383043[source]▶
Amazon is packed full of fake reviews.

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.

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2. A_D_E_P_T ◴[26 Jun 25 09:11 UTC] No.44385581[source]▶
I wholeheartedly agree that Amazon needs to fix how they handle product reviews in general. For a lot of non-book products, their system is totally broken. But for book reviews in particular, as bad as it is, it's better than whatever Goodreads is doing.

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/