Amazon.com Pierces Reviewer Anonymity

theodp writes "Amazon reviewers who anonymously posted book reviews or signed their critiques only as 'a reader from (fill in the city)' lost their anonymity this week when their identities were revealed on Amazon's site. Among those named were prominent authors who posted glowing five-star reviews of their own work. The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan books when they think no one is watching. An Amazon spokeswoman told the NY Times the problem was 'an unfortunate error.'"

Comments

Software

[Scrameustache]

Submitted reviews are also used by software companies to promote their products. Its pretty blatant usually.

Re:Software

[S.Lemmon]

CNET's download.com is really bad for this. If you ever wonder how some of the ultra-crappy spyware-loaded apps get such a high rating, just look carefully. You'll see an endless stream of almost identical reviews singing it's praises intermixed with a few honest ones warning people it's a load of e-turds. I'm sure the number of downloads (which companies and news articles love to quote) is similarly inflated.

Really, it makes me wonder if there's some "service" out there that specializes in spamming reviews.

Likewise...

[Chordonblue]

...nasty reviews made by rivals should be revealable as well. The one author interviewed said that he did it to couteract rivals who he felt were trashing his book.

What to do, what to do...

I've begun to notice this phenomenon...

[0m3gaMan]

Unfortunately, this type of screwup is a good thing. I've read way too many glowing, breathless reviews of absolute CRAP books, and was beginning to suspect the fix was in on these reviews...especially the reviews of those inane, fluffy 'financial-self-help' and marketing/management books.

Astroturf everywhere

[Salamander]

Unfortunately, astroturf is common on Amazon. I've long known and tracked one author (Robert Stanek) who has written dozens of glowing reviews for his own incredibly-bad books, and adds reviews of other books "casually" mentioning himself in the company of Tolkien or Martin. He even Googles regularly for comments about himself elsewhere, which is how I found him on my own site once, trying to discredit me because I had written about his unethical behavior. I recently noticed another example, where an excellent book by Charles Perkins got several identically 40-column-formatted slag reviews in quick succession - probably an author or publisher of a competing book.

The problem is that it's too easy to establish multiple identities on Amazon. It would be trivial for me to create a hundred identities and use them to have a significant effect on the ratings of books I like or dislike. . .and you'd better believe I'd be less obvious about it than Stanek. Any claim Amazon might make about policing such abuse is a joke. Let's face it, folks: anywhere that online identities can be created basically out of thin air, fraud will be rampant. Yeah, that means Slashdot too. Pseudonymity is great, but anonymity is too often a cloak for abusers.

Re:But they don't lead to spam!

[orthogonal]

I've done the same [given email addresses that incorporate the web site's name to web sites asking for email addresses] for several years, and find that none of the spam I've ever checked has come from a web site.

Me too. If a web site wants my address it's always website.tld@mydomain.tld.

And like you, I've almost never gotten spam back -- the only mail to these addresses is from the web sites I've given them to.

But. Let's adjust our tinfoil hats.... ;)

Does that mean that the we sites don't sell the email addresses they get to third parties, or does it mean they don't sell the addresses that contain their site name, and would serve to tip off where a spammer got the address?