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Amazon: Authors Can't Review Books
In an effort to step up its fight against astroturfers, Amazon has barred authors from reviewing books. It's not simply that authors can't review their own books — they can't review any book in a similar genre to something they've published. "This means that thriller writers are prevented from commenting on works by other authors who write similar books. Critics suggest this system is flawed because many authors are impartial and are experts on novels." British author Joanne Harris had a simpler solution in mind: "To be honest I would just rather Amazon delete all their reviews as it... has caused so much trouble. It is a pity. Originally it was a good idea but it is has become such an issue now. The star rating has become how people view if a book is a success and it has become inherently corrupt." How would you improve the online review system?
You have a system that reviews the reviewers, allowing for weighted values of reviews. Not that slashdot users would have heard of mod points or metamoderating.
One blindingly obvious way to cut down on fake and artificial reviews: only allow reviews from people who have actually purchased the product.
Amazon already highlights reviews by people who have purchased the product, so the functionality already exists. Why not take the next step and only allow those people to write reviews in the first place?
Alternately, Amazon could allow anyone to write a review, but would only calculate the star rating based on purchasers' reviews.
Slashdot commenters not being able to moderate other's comments in stories they commented in?
Oh wait....
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You are obtuse.
Good-bye
Reviews are only valid from people that maintain that as their profession. There is a level of experience that comes with reviewing and editing that can't be achieved casually.
I assume you mean "things like books", because if I am buying a mouse, non-professional reviews are highly valid. Perhaps more so than professional ones.
Even for books (movies, etc), I am a tad suspicious of "professional" bullet by bullet reviews. I think there is a higher chance that the professional reviewer has been somehow bribed. Personally, If I were to hire astroturfers, I'd reach out to the professional reviewers first, even if it cost more.
http://xkcd.com/937/
This has often reflected my experience an any online store (and for anything, not just books). People don't seem to employ much perspective when assigning an overall rank. I recently saw a one star rank given to an app where the review stated the app did exactly what it was supposed to do... but he wasn't happy a particular feature wasn't present.
#DeleteChrome
This is idiotic at best, blatantly bigoted at worst. Collective reviews are changing the dynamic of consumer reporting. The only time that reviews wind up being skewed and unreliable is when something hasn't really been sampled and reviewed by many people.
Consider Google Maps reviews on restaurants. As a consumer I have found them highly valuable in avoiding restaurants that are poorly run and provide substandard food. The same is true for products that I should avoid on Amazon and other online retailers.
I do find that the higher the degree of intelligence and education required to understand and appreciate a product (examples: a book or technical item) the more it seems that the reviews are skewed by the individual competence of the reviewer,but that doesn't make the reviews worthless merely potentially misleading.
When I am reading consumer reviews of products, especially, movies, books and games/apps, I take this into consideration and look for telltale signs of ignorance in the review itself.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Reviews are only valid from people that maintain that as their profession. There is a level of experience that comes with reviewing and editing that can't be achieved casually. Even many professional critics don't have this skills.
You are obtuse.
What are your qualifications in making that assessment?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm reminded somewhat of two pertinent XKCD comics:
TornadoGuard/937
Star Ratings/1098
Interesting how they're kind of at odds with each other, but both true.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
I like Newegg's system of Pros/Cons/Other Thoughts. For items with just a few reviews, the words are more important than the egg/star system. For items with hundreds of reviews, I usually lump all of the 4 and 5 egg/star reviews together to compare products but I still like to read the Pros/Cons... especially the cons given by the 4/5 star reviewers and the pros given by the 1/2 star reviewers. There have been a number of poorly rated products that I bought anyway because I found the main con people mentioned was something that I didn't care about (IE: a power supply with excessive fan noise has knocked many a decent PSU down to 3 eggs or less. I'm half deaf, so even the loudest fans are barely audible unless there's something actually wrong).
Other decent rating systems I've seen given four or five criteria, such as value, quality, support, etc, and the reviewer rates it on each category. If an item is rated on value, quality and support and it's a great item with crappy support then it only gets a 67%. If you are a a techie and prefer to support yourself, you won't care about that rating and will just look for items with high marks in the other categories.
There's no perfect rating system, especially when you're dealing with a marketplace selling thousands of different things. The star system works for weeding out the crappiest and the reviews usually give you an idea of why people rated an item like they did so you can tell if it is crap or if poor reviews are the result of a quality that doesn't matter to you.
Like ban them from Amazon reviews forever. So the next time someone posts a 1 star review because the editor didn't catch a comma or the kindle version is not formatted perfectly for the very first kindle device ever made.. I think it would clean it up some.
"Reviews are only valid from people that maintain that as their profession"
Reviews are only valid if the reviewer is professional? Obtuse. I don't generally value the opinions of people paid to have opinions, because I've found that they are generally (as a group) a prostitute in disguise. Please note: there are exceptions, though I can't think of any off the top of my head.
The best reviews* are done by average public, because they skip all the "nuanced" verbiage of opinion writers and say it like it is.
*50 Shades fans excluded, because they are a brain damaged lot.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Stross's blog said it all a couple days ago. For those living under a rock, he's a pretty good modern sci-fi / horror type author. Disclaimer, probably biased toward him for having similar religious beliefs.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/12/understanding-reviewers.html
TLDR poorly done summary interpretation:
Dumb people don't like feeling dumb, so most 1 star reviews are illiterate trailer trash... and the writing quality clearly reflects it. Ignore.
Hard core fans will rate everything you do as 5 stars. Meaningless. Ignore. So he doesn't like my reviews. Whatever.
A U shaped curve indicates nothing about quality and everything about high impact, also the opposite n shaped curve indicates apathy and low impact.
So.... applied to the article, first, analyze the shape of the "star" curve. Next, toss out any reviews that appear to be written in crayon by illiterates. Toss out any review where everything the author has ever written gets 5 stars. Analyze the remaining reviews by content... "apathy words" in the 3-star column of the histogram are bad news, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Simple: Reputation of the reviewer.
First, don't let anyone review until they've had an Amazon account for at least six months and made at least three purchases (on different days) in that time.
Second, post the reviewer's name (their real name, not a handle). Don't like that? Don't review anything.
Third, don't allow people to review products they haven't bought through Amazon.
Fourth, if someone has more than ten percent of their reviews deleted as spam or abusive, block that account from any more reviews.
Fourth-and-a-half, if a product has a large percent of its reviews deleted, "lock" it to only allow reviews by much more reputable users.
I would relax those a little for simply giving a star rating rather than writing a review, but not by much. I would also use a weighted rating system, based on the user's average rating. Not only would this get around the "No-star Nancy"s, it would work to avoid the useless inverse-exponential ratings we see on 99% of products, thus moving the "real" average rating to a three - So a five-star product would really mean a five-star product.
I wouldn't say that reviews from random people have no value. But their value is less than that of reviews that have been... reviewed. By someone known to have no reason to scam the system. That's the role that editors used to perform, back when reviewers were professionals who wrote for publications. The New York Times didn't just take open submissions, screen them for profanity and advertising, and print them all; they selected reviewers who demonstrated that they were knowledgeable, fair, and helpful, and only published those reviews. If you wanted to know which books were merely popular... that's what the "bestseller" list was for.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
But reviews online are certainly corrupt. I don't use the star ratings for anything, unless an item only has a few reviews and all bad, and rely almost entirely on the BAD reviews for everything I purchase. If the bad reviews follow a common theme, it's a believable problem, and if I care about that problem vs. the price of the item, then I look for another item. Honestly I put less faith in the good reviews than the bad ones, especially when they're all glurge - no book, no product is perfect.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
pros: expedient replacement service
cons: broke when i opened the package with a sledgehammer
other thoughts: the packing peanuts taste great.
The best reviews* are done by average public, because they skip all the "nuanced" verbiage of opinion writers and say it like it is.
I have to disagree - the average public are barely qualified to review anything beyond saying that it's garbage/adequate. Even then there's plenty of people who are apparently incapable of reading the product description before purchase and then give horrible reviews because their new pizza slicer makes a lousy HDTV antenna. Or down-rate a product because the particular supplier they purchased from took six weeks to deliver it, or the UPS guy decided to play street hockey with the box, etc.
Ideally you'd pick out the reviews by people that actually have something worthwhile to say and give them a higher weight - which will typically be those from people with some expertise in the product domain (but not too much). Tech reviews from IT folk will probably give you the best idea of how well a device's functionality and reliability stacks up against the competition, but probably won't tell you much about whether the Average Joe will be able to do anything with it. Amazon currently does something like that with the "most helpful" reviews, but it's not hard to find examples of "helpful" reviews written by people who obviously have no idea what they're talking about, and I don't think it has any effect on the star rating.
Allowing meta-reviews of reviewers by which to weight their comments might help, but most such mechanisms seem to favor the loudest voices, whereas the best voices to listen to are often the ones that only speak up only rarely, when they have something particularly significant to say. I'd think an automated system to recognize and highlight those voices would be quite challenging to develop, but worthwhile in many venues (perhaps it could be profitably applied to political discourse? Seems like the ideological blowhards are the only ones who currently get much of an audience)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It depends; what people are looking for in a review is relative. For example, this Netflix review has basically nothing in terms of analysis and criticism, but a 100% helpfulness rating. And I defy anyone who is looking at possibly watching Nat'l Lampoon's Barely Legal to say that review didn't hit the nail on the head in terms of what they wanted to know. But, no professional reviewer/critic would ever in their right mind write such a thing.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
Unfortunately Amazon does not. I recently got in an argument with someone who (IMO) gave out 4/5 star reviews. The reviewer countered that no, she had given out 1 star reviews. She had reviewed hundreds of items, and Amazon's lame interface displays 10 reviews at a time, with no ability to sort by number of stars (or other useful filters). I finally found her 1-star review of a self-published e-book, but by that time didn't have the energy to pursue it further.
A histogram of reviews by star would be extremely useful. Obviously Amazon doesn't care about the consumer's ability to rate the reviews, though, given how little thought they've put into it.
Elsewhere I posted about bogus five-star reviews. I suspect publishers simply hand out money to shills to create bogus Amazon accounts and post 5-star reviews of their books that suck. I'm not why so many here think that limiting reviews to purchasers would solve things. Also, I always read books at libraries before I buy them. So, you'd cut down on the number of negative reviews from people like me.
You've made my point for me better than I could.
It may not have been your intention to review Dairy Queen, but the above rant reads an awful lot like many (most) user-generated reviews out there. It was a nit-picky anecdote, which told the reader nothing about the quality of the food, the price, the setting, etc. Just one person's isolated bad experience with the restaurant owner. I give it a 99% chance that if I happen to walk into that Dairy Queen, I won't even know who the manager, let alone have an altercation with him.
Most "one star" amateur online reviews are grumpy customers who want to stick it to the man for some perceived slight against them, not honest comprehensive assessments of the business and product. Most "five star" amateur online reviews are simply fans who personally like the business reviewed. Neither really give me an idea of what the business will be like.
What's important is what the reader's experience will be, not what the writer's experience was. An amateur reviewer will tell me why they loved or hated something. A professional reviewer will tell me why I will love or hate it.
Aren't Amazon's "most helpful" reviews simply reviews of reviews and thus suffer the exact same issue as you complain about?