Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Serves 'em right. No such as anonymity on the 'net, right John Ashcroft?
Submitted reviews are also used by software companies to promote their products. Its pretty blatant usually.
You can't take the sky from me...
"theodp" is probably the NY Times journalist who wrote this article about astroturfing-- astroturfing his article here on slashdot. ;)
Slashdot never suffers a glitch when it comes to Anonymous Cowards like me.
Glowing reviews posted by the author of the book perverts the system. I would welcome such a useful and eye-opening feature.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
If Amazon would keep that "mistake", I'd be tempted to pay for it. It seems like the people (in the article) that confessed to writing good reviews in bad faith did so to "rebut" bad reviews. If the original reviews weren't anonymous, the authors wouldn't have had to use an underhanded tactic.
-Maher-
Hey, there's nothing wrong shameless self promotion. How else can an author get people to read his cappy books?
On an unrelated note, I will now mod this post as +2, 100% Insightful.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
...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...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Seriously, I'm sick and tired of every major website requiring me to either a.) register for an account or, b.) fill out all of my personal information, before I can actually take advantage of the website's features.
Yeah, yeah, yeah..I know: marketing. But, come on. Requiring an e-mail address (with an opt-out radio button) is fine; do they really need all the other crap?
Ugh.
Chicks dig my good /. karma.
I've actually written a couple of reviews myself, under my Internet name since I've only done a few. One of the authors actually published the review, so I think it is a neat way to get your name out in your industry if you really want to, especially since the books I reviewed dealt with my "real" job. Only he promoted my internet name. I also noticed that several authors I have met through work and know of them b/c of their books have openly wrote their own reviews on Amazon. Authors should not do that under a veil of secrecy. Just my two cents.
-Eric_Cartman_South_PaR#@J::: [MSSQL Error: Author "CmdrTaco", Action "PostAs: User 594330" not valid]
Would they?
Now I feel cheated !
I got a Britney Spears CD based on 18 rave Amazon reviews and really tried to like it !
I feel vindicated !
Britney, I'm sorry, but you suck ! (or does she blow ?)
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
For pitys sake does anyone take 'user reviews' seriously??? Even if there not written by interested partys, the chances of them being written by someone clueful are scant and its more trouble than its worth to establish any track record for a given reviewer.
A system of meta moderation would add credibility to the system, if someone buys a product get them to evaluate a few reviews (if encouragement is needed pay them in 'loyalty points')
Why would anybody posting a review on Amazon be afraid of putting their name to it? It's not like there going to mod'ed as "troll" or "flamebait" or something....
Oops I thought I was posting this as AC...
The Author who said: "That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," Rechy told the Times. "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them." is a fool.
It is the right of everyone in this country to have an opinion on the quality of work of art. There are always going to be people who enjoy something and people who will dislike it.
Get over it and start living in the real world.
Frankly I'm suspicious of anything or anyone who doesn't have a bad review of it. I'll buy from anyone who has a smidgeon of negative feedback on Ebay because I know that this is a real person who has had to (just as I have in my store) deal with some moron who cannot be pleased no matter how far you bend over backwards. I trust reviews that have a critic because many of thier points are valid ones. I may not agree that the point detracts from the work of art, but they are often valid points nonetheless.
You can't please everyone and these authors need to realize that, move on, and create to please themselves. If they do that there will always be someone to appriciate thier works.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
. . . I tend to discount the reviews of those people who use real names and are labeled as "Top 100" or "Top 500" reviewers on Amazon. I tend to think that those people are major wannabes who wish that they were professional reviewers and therefore try too hard to be clever or literary. As a result, I find the reviews of such people to be among the most pretentious, overblown, non-credible reviews on Amazon. I no longer read them and skip past them to the anonymous reviews, which I find much honest and credible.
On either count..
What person doesn't promote his or her own work? That's just normal..
Also, we all know there is no true anonymity out there, so why be surprised with *yet another* 'glitch' publishes peoples identities...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
I'm surprised it took this long to discover...
"Insightful! Trillian's comments show a true understanding of the situation!" -- Some Anonymous Reviewer.
"Interesting! Why didn't I think of that?" -- Some Other Anonymous Reviewer.
"Ha ha ha! +1 Funny!" -- A Third Anonymous Reviewer. Definitely not the same as the previous two. Oops!
When a similar error occured at Slashdot it was revealed that Cowboy Neal does in fact have 18,137 first posts with Goatse links.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I think it's unethical for authors to promote their own book in comments on amazon.com or some similar medium. Generally, I think reviews on amazon.com, Yahoo Movies, et al is unbiased. That the reviewer does not financially gain from the sale. When someone with bias tells me "this book is best book I've ever read" and I think they are unbiased, that's where the line of ethics is crossed.
In the same vein, it's why the media, if they report on something newsworthy happening that they might be tied to, they explain the tie to the company. For instance, if some news happens on say Sourceforge.net, Slashdot is ethically bound to say "Slashdot shares a parent company with Newsforge" so that we are told some biases might exist.
Flame on because I know I've probably missed some nuance...
Astroturfing
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
If I recall correctly, Sony got nailed for using a fake critic by the name of David Manning to doctor favorable reviews for their just released movies
It would not surprise me if authors were INDEED promoting their own works courtesy of public forums like amazon and the like.
Join the TWIT army now!
Of course, I'm sure some web sites aren't too careful about who gets their email list, but from my experience, the vast majority don't pass their list on to spammers, and the vast majority of addresses to spam comes from other sources.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
all 849 David Hasselhoff reviewers?
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.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Yeah, well anyone who posts anonymously is a coward who deserves to be outed anyway.
The same John Rechy who wrote "City of Night" and "The Sexual Outlaw" ?
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he was hustling reviews on Amazon the same way that his characters hustled and tricked their ways through his books.
Rechy's books disturbed me, which is a good quality in a book. How can I describe them for a Slashdot crowd? Start with William Gibson or Bruce Sterling; subtrace all the "cyber" part of "cyberpunk"; and replace it with gay sex. LOTS of gay sex.
A far nastier problem I've experienced firsthand on Amazon.com is the tendency of authors to go through the reviews and demand all of the "bad" ones be removed. Amazon.com's policy is to remove negative reviews upon author or publisher request, even if the points stated by the critic were clearly logical, reasonable, and within the guidelines. I know quite a few other people that have had it happen to as well.
The really disturbing thing in the case of the book I was reviewing was that it advocated emotionally & physically abusing adults with disabilities. Regardless of who pointed it out, the author would have any review that wasn't sterling removed, so the book still has a great rating. Most of the ones remaining are either mindless "I know the author and she's really nice" comments that have nothing to do with the book itself, or testimonials from other wives/husbands that feel it's cool to throw things at, scream in the face of, and emotionally one's disabled partner into feeling deeply inferior. VERY disturbing.
Among the reasons I left a certain former employer (besides gross incompetence) was that they had me implement a review system on one of our sites, then the phb proceeded to enter 2-4 glowing reviews for everything in the database, and pick those as the ones that showed on the front page. As of the time I left, not a single review on the site was legitimate. On the plus side, I'm not the only one who didn't like the site, it's a specialized meta-search engine which is now blocked from using all the largest search engines in it's category. It didn't even pull results, it sent the traffic on to the originating sites, so you know they were doing something seriously wrong to get blocked. Actually, looking at it again for the first time in a while, it looks like they've got some real reviews now, since every search engine has a bunch of negative 'This site sucks' reviews :)
I used to run the review system at Amazon (96-97) and we did get way too many fake author reviews and interviews, even back in 1997.
I had put in place a system later dropped that had the reviews checked by human beings for sense (not content) before they went live. Of course, with thousands of reviews posted each day, that became untenable.
There's no good way to build a system that can't be gamed.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
When you see a book with reviews of 1,1,2 and then a bunch of 5s with flowery, glowing-yet-ambiguous praise, it's pretty obvious they're shills. That's why I've always made it a practice to prioritize the most realistic reviews by clicking "yes" to "Did you find this review helpful?"
Beyond this, if you're going to write a review of your own book, the least you can do is register anonymously. That's too funny.
Once thing that annoys me about Amazon reviews is that they'll clear the slate for subsequent editions. I spent more than a month compiling notes on some Oracle manuals that really exposed their horribly-documented publications, and then they came out with a new edition that was more of the same crap, but Amazon obsoleted the reviews. I know sometimes new editions are really "new" but most of the time they're not. If there are reviews of previous editions of a book, they should be prominently featured on the latest edition review page.
If I post as an AC, you know that I'm an AC, nothing more, nothing less.
When you read a review on Amazon.com, you are expecting an unbiased review. The person making a self-interested post is actively decieving you.
There is a difference between wishing to preserve your anonimity, and trying to pretend that you are something that you are not.
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.
.. by its cover.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Didn't the story say that he was a reader from Chicago? If so, THIS is the review:
A reader's feast, October 19, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from Chicago, IL
This book is moving, hilarious, sad, laugh-aloud funny, touching, and very, very sexy--a feast. The characters are all memorable, Lyle the cowboy who never rode a horse; his Miss America mom--and the minor characters! A finicky female porn entrepreneur and her detested husband and their nasty director, Za-Z La Grande; a "poster" woman whose image is all over the city, "the sexy chicano." The names of the minor characters will knock you over--real names only slightly disguised. Also "Mr. Fielding," an eccentric gambler and the corrupt evangelists, who are vile and at the same time hilarious. Lyle, like Tom Jones, is in and out of unique situations--accidentally in a magician's show, at the playboy mansion "saving" Miss Universe," confronting an exploiter of Star Maps sellers, teenagers--(...) There are poigant moments, with Sister Matilda, gospel singer, and Clarita, the Mexican housekeeper. The song Amazing Grace recurs, and the ending is unforgettable, starting with an Academy Awards ceremony you won't forget.
And yes, funny joke there, but Amazon probably doesn't let you rate your own reviews (I could be wrong, though.)
blog & fiction: jd87
"...is only asking for objective criteria, such as plot, setting, and character info."
Information which is completely useless in determining whether I would actually enjoy reading the book.
Roger Ebert always says: "What's important is not what the movie is about; it's how it manages to be about it." I submit that this is even more true with fiction.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Amazon should seperate their reviews into two groups - one with a proof-positive name and contact info, making the writer liable for slander or lible, and another for 'anonymous cowards.'
If you aren't confident enough to stand behind your words, your words have much less value.
How many of you ACs that posted in the MS Source Code Leak story
the other day with your reports of what's in the code you downloaded
got a bit nervous when you read this story today?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
In spite of this obvious attempt to mislead readers, Amazon chose to do nothing. That recommendation is still up there!
-
Q: Why is Amazon doing any of this?
- A: To make a buck.
The "customer" reviews are just part of that purpose. For example, from my own experience I can assure you that Amazon does not want honest and negative reviews, because such reviews might discourage some people from buying the book. I've submitted a couple of such reviews, thoughtful pieces that covered both sides, but which ultimately came down on the negative side, and which were rejected with various doublespeak explanations. The REAL problem was that I made a persuasive case against buying those books.From their perspective, a totally bogus but glowing review is fine, just as long as it will sell more books.
Amazon claims an impartiality that is totally lacking in practice, but I say they are shooting themselves in the foot--or maybe in the head. I think the people who most want to buy and read books are the same people who most strongly object to censorship. Actually the desire of those people for access to all of the data is likely to cause them to read more books from all angles. (And I really don't think the fans of the goddess of hate could actually be reading more than one book a year.)
Amazon's money-grubbing slanted policies have so damaged their credibility that I actively avoid buying anything from them (unless I really can't find another source--but unfortunately they are also abusing their market influence to become an increasingly monopolistic sole source).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.