Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Are Amazon Vine Reviews of Technical Books a Joke?

Posted by timothy on from the you-should-try-the-craiglist-personals dept.

First time accepted submitter jasax writes "As an Amazon frequent buyer, I rely quite a lot on reviews of the books I want. However, some caution is in order: the (bad) quality of Amazon's reviews and reviewers under the Amazon Vine program has already been news in Slashdot. Today I was shocked by a practical result of that program. This second edition (published in 2012) of a very specialized system identification book has 12 reviews: the oldest (dated 2007) certainly targets the first edition. The remaining 11 reviews are all from 'Vine Reviewers' (VRs). All seem to be ignorant of what 'System Identification in the Frequency Domain' really is. None of the reviews is tagged with a 'Verified Amazon Purchase'; most (if not all) are 'small talk reviews' peppered with technical phrases cloning the publisher's book description, and some of the reviews are ridiculous, to say the least. If this sample of reviewing by VRs really is the norm, then the bottom line is that the Vine program is totally irrelevant and unreliable — at least for technical books."

1 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Binding, hardcover, etc. by MatheoDJ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perhaps there are Vine reviewers farming out their writing and receiving free products in exchange. I've been experimenting with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and a fair number of the assignments seem to be fake reviews of some sort, with improved SEO as the endgame. I've been offered HIT's (Amazon's shorthand for the small tasks often worth as little as $0.01) that require a person to write small articles or reviews, 150-500 words, using incredibly specific technical jargon or product lingo. Sometimes it's Ph.D. level stuff. I can't imagine anyone having the technical prowess and educational background necessary to write intelligently about such subjects being interested in making $0.75 to do so, but maybe that's enough money to inspire someone in Bangladesh to write meaningless positive reviews peppered with jargon, and small enough change to inspire someone in America to outsource a large number of reviews in order to increase their Vine ratings.