
Why Most Amazon Reader Reviews Are Worthless - ilamont
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/71891-why-most-amazon-reader-reviews-are-worthless.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=aad5fde6eb-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-aad5fde6eb-305331585
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rampage101
"For instance, if you have ever, at any time, become a friend of an author on
Facebook or Goodreads, your honest review will be expunged."

That sounds pretty strange and extreme. So Amazon is checking up on who's
friends with who on Facebook?

There are so many 1-star reviews which are obvious that the reader did not
read the book; I do not get why they cannot remove those. It's not just people
promoting one book, they also have many cases where someone sabotages a book.

In one case I saw a programming book had a first review which was 1-star that
said: "code examples didn't work". I still purchased he the book, and it was
an awesome book with no errors that I found over 500 pages. I am sure that
review killed the author's sales though as his book is rated 4-stars
currently... three 5-star reviews, and one 1-star review.

~~~
gozur88
>That sounds pretty strange and extreme. So Amazon is checking up on who's
friends with who on Facebook?

That portion of the article was unclear. The sentence from Amazon he's
referencing says "Our data shows elements of your Amazon account match
elements of other Amazon accounts reviewing the same products. In these cases,
we remove the review to maintain trust in our customer reviews and avoid any
perception of bias."

That doesn't imply GoodReads or Facebook to me. That sounds like they're
trying to stop people from creating multiple Amazon accounts in order to
review the same products multiple times.

>It's not just people promoting one book, they also have many cases where
someone sabotages a book.

I'd always assumed the fake one star reviews were mostly political books being
panned by ideological enemies and such, but I read a blog post in which a
published author claimed competing authors do this because a book is more
likely to be recommended if it's rated highly relative to others in the same
category. So it's just the flip side of creating a bunch of accounts to give
your own books good reviews.

