
A harassment campaign on Goodreads - ilamont
https://www.patreon.com/posts/32921860
======
wyldfire
> Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other
> highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of
> them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by
> Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo
> and sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings.

Wow, that's devious. I wonder if any of the fake product reviews I've seen are
obvious fake endorsements placed there by the competition.

~~~
degenerate
This problem isn't one born with the internet. Think about all those "WE BUY
HOUSES 4 CASH" signs you see at stop lights. Why can't the city simply look up
the phone number on them and convict the business owner for breaking
advertisement laws? Because there is no proof he put the sign there. It could
be the competition trying to frame him! Thus, the signs are simply thrown
out... and he can put new ones out tomorrow.

~~~
burundi_coffee
"Hello, I saw a sign that says you buy houses for cash, can I set up a
meeting?"

"Yes, when are you available?"

> Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

Surely can't be that hard to find out if the business owner set up that sign,
right?

~~~
whatshisface
Let's say you buy houses for cash and I put up a sign with your number on it.
The police call you and find out that you do, indeed, buy houses for cash.
They throw you in jail and I snicker, knowing that by breaking the advertising
law myself but with your name I have put you out of business.

While I'm at it, I leave your business card at the scene of a heist.

~~~
catalogia
> _" Let's say you buy houses for cash and I put up a sign with your number on
> it. The police call you and find out that you do, indeed, buy houses for
> cash."_

Suppose I were operating such a business with _legal_ advertisements only and
the detective asked me _" Hey I saw a sign on a telephone pole saying you buy
houses for cash, is that right?"_ why would I answer in the affirmative?

> _" No, it's weird that you saw that. I don't post signs on any telephone
> poles, this is a highly reputable business._

They'd only say that if they're smart. Many of them probably aren't, and their
guard will be down if the detective can do a passable _" desperate alcoholic"_
impression over the phone. But regardless, I agree that false negatives are
more likely than false positives.

~~~
danShumway
If you're advertising on a telephone pole and a potential customer (or police
officer) contacts you, here's how that conversation goes:

"No, it's weird that you saw that. I don't post signs on any telephone poles,
this is a highly reputable business. However, as long as you're here, I
definitely do buy houses for cash, and it sounds like you're interested in
that."

~~~
qrbLPHiKpiux
If I were a cop, I’d go full on Dexter Morgan and DNA, fingerprint the flyer.

------
Brain_Thief
Situations like this make me think that public educational systems should
experiment with some form of "digital literacy" courses / exercises for young
children with the goal of humanizing the processes of online communication.
Teaching standards for how to treat others (and how to respond to observed and
experienced abuses) may provide some reduction in the number of individuals
that seem to be finding their ways to toxic online communities. From a lay
perspective it really does seem that people who participate in extremely toxic
online communities are exhibiting signs of serious personality deformations;
since the internet acts as a significant force multiplier on an individual's
ability to spread their perspective, and since the problem of policing online
speech without creating a locked-down surveillance nightmare seems unlikely to
be solved any time soon, perhaps one of the better options would be to arm
adolescents with a proper mentality for handling online harassment under the
assumption that it is likely to occur.

~~~
schnevets
There is definitely value to gain from Digital Literacy as well as Digital
Etiquette, but I'd take your suggestion a step forward and teach more people
how to handle the mind games that stem from toxic internet cultures with
lessons on Digital Fortitude.

A lot of people who grew up with the internet wised up and learned to
tolerate/ignore troll behavior. This mostly comes with age, but we can do a
better job teaching young internet users that the racist commenter is just
looking for attention and should be ignored, that the 200 messages could be
coming from a single anti-social person, and that a slew of 1-star reviews may
not be coming from a reputable source. This would also involve warnings on the
repercussions of handling a hostile situation the wrong way (by engaging in a
troll and showing obvious signs of stress or by blithely trusting a DM who
appears to be on your side) and more effective ways to cope.

~~~
lazyasciiart
So long as your lessons include the information that this advice only works
when you're dealing with low-level harassment. It fails catastrophically when
you're dealing with a mob. It's like the advice to "eat healthy foods" \-
while it's probably right for a random person, when you share that advice with
someone who has cancer, you are an insensitive ignorant dick. So if you share
it as "basic approaches to normal life", fine, but when you hear "x hasn't
been well", maybe you should avoid responding with this helpful simplistic
nonsense.

edit: a more complete article on this [https://the-cauldron.com/you-can-t-
just-ignore-the-trolls-8f...](https://the-cauldron.com/you-can-t-just-ignore-
the-trolls-8fbee3391349)

------
harrisonjackson
There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned
privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do
more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow
seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside.

Also, the ability to whitelist an author or book for extra moderation seems
like a no-brainer. After there is evidence of harassment then all user content
needs to be approved before it is made public. Enable trusted moderators from
the community to help with this if paid moderators cannot keep up.

This seems like it could get so so much worse than it currently is. The target
of harassment seems to be taking it well but what happens on a platform like
this to someone that isn't as prepared to deal with it?

~~~
joe_the_user
_There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned
privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do
more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow
seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside._

I'm scanning my memory banks and Stackoverflow is the only "earned privilege"
community that comes to mind and my experience with it has been uniformly
unpleasant, let's say "bordering on toxic". If anything, automatically earned
privilege creates competition which makes everything worst and nastier.

In contrast, I moderate a medium sized FB group in a topic that often has
trolling. We eliminate it entirely through hand-picked moderators and a zero
tolerance statement. There's no competition to be a moderator and there's
actually little for the moderators to do since making things clear mostly
works. So there's no competition for anything and people spend their time
discussing issues instead.

HN seems to be closer to that situation also - with karma hidden, competition
is pretty limited. And anonymous posters can make fine contributions here.

~~~
probably_wrong
> _I 'm scanning my memory banks and Stackoverflow is the only "earned
> privilege" community that comes to mind_

As far as "positive earned privilege examples", some come to mind:

    
    
      * HN, where downvoting requires a certain amount of karma (although there's plenty of human moderation too)
    
      * MetaFilter [1], which has a reputation of good content due to their one-time $5 charge for signing up.
    
      * The /r/AskHistorians subreddit, where you only get to answer once you have in-depth knowledge of a specific topic.
    

[1] [https://www.metafilter.com/](https://www.metafilter.com/)

------
SignalsFromBob
Instagram is another site with this problem. Someone supplied my email address
when creating an account in late 2018. I only know this because I started
receiving emails to confirm my email address. Then I started to get a bunch of
emails telling me about new posts from other users. Gmail account history only
showed logins from my browser and IP address, so I don't believe my account
was compromised.

I finally got tired of the emails, so I told the site I forgot the password,
changed the password to something long and random, then deleted all the
content. I remember having to do something unusual to delete the content, like
spoof my useragent to pretend to be a mobile device, or something like that.
I've never used Instagram before or since, but it really annoyed me that I
have a problem due to their lax controls.

Instagram never should have activated the account and allowed any activity
until the email address was verified, which I never did. If a big site like
Instagram can't get this right, it doesn't surprise me that a small site like
Goodreads can't either.

~~~
harryh
_Instagram never should have activated the account and allowed any activity
until the email address was verified_

Essentially zero services on the internet operate this way because it
increases the friction to signing up & getting started with the service.

Some services do somewhat better by including a "this wasn't me" link in the
email verification email to make it as easy as possible to remove your email
from the account in question. IMHO, this is a fine way to handle the problem.

~~~
pferde
Except that users are (or should be) trained NOT to click on any links in
spurious e-mails they receive.

No, dear sites, kindly deal with a little bit of sign-up friction and stop
offloading to others the fallout from people abusing your services.

~~~
harryh
It's not just the sites you are asking to deal with that friction, but also
every single individual user who ever signs up for anything on the internet.

That's a lot of friction. Too much.

------
wayneftw
The original title, "Lax Security and Moderation at Goodreads Allows Trolls to
Spoof People, Harass Authors" seemed pretty straightforward to me.

How is it misleading or "linkbait"?

~~~
gravitas
In my observation of the edit patterns being used by moderators, titles are
frequently edited when they contain emotionally charged words ("spoof"
"trolls" "harass" in this one) to create bland, boring titles no matter what
the source article is titled (not violating guidelines).

~~~
kbenson
One person's idea of making titles more boring is probably another person's
idea of removing bias. Bland might not necessarily be bad in these cases.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
People who read the article will be exposed to this "bias" anyway. Leaving the
title as-is would then be more informative.

Here, the change is okay. Other times, the change rendered the title
nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog".

I would default to a much stronger preference for the original article-the
author/editor probably put more thought into the title, and destroying their
creative work shouldn't be routine.

And what's with the bias-paranoia? People, including journalists, are allowed
to have opinions and emotions. They do not have to equivocate: "The sanitary
situation in the camp is becoming dangerous" does not require "...but someone
on YouTube believes germ theory is a hoax, so who is to say if sleeping in
feces isn't just a good way to stay warm".

~~~
kbenson
> I would default to a much stronger preference for the original article-the
> author/editor probably put more thought into the title, and destroying their
> creative work shouldn't be routine.

And what's routine? How often are titles changed? How often is this viewed as
beneficial to the majority, and how often is it viewed as detrimental?

If you're looking for a set of rules that result in the best solution every
time, you're going to be disappointed. Whatever solution you come up with,
even if it perfectly matched your sensibilities, would be misapplied in some
instances because people are responsible for applying it.

The real question is how good of a job is being done on editorializing the
submission titles already, and going off what we can remember of past
instances is IMO worse than useless, it's likely rife with multiple forms of
cognitive bias.

There's probably a good discussion to be had as to how well the title
editorializing is here, but it rarely happens in response to someone posting
about a specific title. If I had to guess, the discussion resulting from the
post in the recent past about the site that tracked all HN submission name
changes (which I never got a chance to read closely) might have some good
discussions (as that data set is probably a good base to explore this topic
usefully).

------
joncp
Well, goodreads _is_ owned by Amazon. I'm not at all surprised that their
lackadaisical attitude toward abuse cuts across the whole business.

------
Gatsky
Right, another online group of people conducting orchestrated campaigns of
harassment. They seem to come together with highly tenuous pretexts (eg some
random radio show that isn't even on the air any more) yet the members are
highly motivated and resourceful. It is a very strange phenomenon, like a cult
worshipping nastiness as the supreme expression of existence. These groups
seem particularly against art and creativity, their targets are often
novelists, artists and performers. I suppose if you are deeply unhappy and
disempowered then any form of art must seem like an affront. Only if all
creative acts are stupid may you feel good about your own life chewing cud on
a forum somewhere.

The more online everyone and everything becomes the more prevalent these
generalised and distributed lynch mobs are likely to be. The also function
with impunity (eg kiwi farms).

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Was Gamergate the index case, or merely the first time people outside the
intel community took notice?

------
jasonpbecker
Goodreads is desperately in need of a strong competitor.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Aside from the spoofing issues what are the main drawbacks and benefits of
GoodReads from your perspective - what's the worst of times, what's the best
of times?

~~~
xioxox
The ratings are useless - any author with a devoted following gets endless 5
star reviews and YA books are stuffed with 5 star reviews. The website is
clunky beyond belief and never seems to get improvements. The recommendation
engine is terrible. The search facilities are weak and inconsistent. It could
be so much better, but it never improves.

~~~
occamsrazorwit
How would you fix the ratings issue? That's a common issue with ratings
systems in general (that they reflect popularity instead of quality).

~~~
stubish
You start by allowing people to rate the ratings. For instance, flag
individual titles or tags 'not interested' such as on Steam. Even just a way
to hide individual titles would make a system like Netflix much better to use,
and bring product customers are more likely to pay for to the foreground. And
then you can feed the data to the recommendation engines, which might start to
learn about what demographics are using the system rather than relying on
assumptions. My personal belief (as someone with zero actual experience here),
is that dislikes and disinterest would be much better for generating
recommendations over likes and interest. 'likes' just gives you what is
popular in your familiar genres. 'dislikes' expresses your tastes.

~~~
occamsrazorwit
If you allow people to rate the ratings, you come back to the original issue
that people are unreliable raters.

Dislikes over likes does sound interesting though.

------
jshevek
It's absurd that pre-release reviews are available to the general public. This
should be easy to fix, if GR cared to do so.

~~~
bduerst
Goodreads is owned by Amazon, who is incentivized by the pre-release purchases
that these reviews drive. They're not going to put a lock on pre-release
reviews (nor should they) to solve a trolling/bad actor issue.

~~~
halfcreative
Why shouldn't they? I think it's ridiculous to be able to review something
which you have not experienced and I don't see a good reason why they should
be allowed. The lockout should be until at least one person (ideally more)
have experienced the fully released product.

~~~
bduerst
Authors and publishers ship pre-release advance copies to popular reviewers,
as part a part of the promotion leading up to launch, like movies do with
prescreenings. Goodreads is notorious for having these types of reviewers, in
fact, it's one of the carrots that serial reviewers go after.

------
withinrafael
I'm not familiar with the backend of Goodreads but perhaps one tiny step
forward would be for the book page to not open for ratings/comments prior to
review copy distribution. And because review copy users already have to on-
board (in some way) to get those copies, Goodreads could provide an
integration point for authors to plug that reader list in and only let those
folks respond initially, with restrictions lifting at launch.

Anyway, I wish them best of luck. This problem is widespread, see: Amazon,
Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, et al.

~~~
larnmar
My solution:

“Thanks for posting your review on goodreads! As a final step, please enter
the fourth word on page 93 of the book you’ve just reviewed”

~~~
johnnyo
Page 93 of the Kindle version? The hardback? the paperback? or the large print
version?

~~~
anon73044
Maybe something like "The last sentence in Chapter 8" "Fourth sentence in
chapter 9" and so on.

~~~
johnnyo
I still think GoodReads would have issues there.

The first thing Goodreads asks you to do when you create a new account is to
list and rate a bunch of books you've read and either liked or hated. This is
important, because they (ostensibly) want to recommend other books to you.

When I first created an account, I quickly rated maybe 50 books on a 1-5 scale
I had read over the years. I didn't have most of them handy.

------
nl
I read with some surprise his claims that Amazon wouldn't take down a fake
review (which posted fake anti-Semitic quotes, even when the publisher sent
them the pages the quotes were supposed to be from). So I checked Amazon
myself, and sure enough there is the number one review[1] claiming _this tome
continues the unfortunate slide of Patrick S. Tomlinson into an alt-right
provocateur with blatant anti-Semitic tropes and characters littered
throughout the book._

Ironically, most of the other one star reviews claim the book is full of
"thinly-veiled, progressive tropes"

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Repo-Patrick-S-
Tomlinson/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Repo-Patrick-S-
Tomlinson/dp/1250302714)

------
anotherevan
How does [https://www.librarything.com/](https://www.librarything.com/)
compare these days?

------
throwno
I can't imagine how frustrating this is for business owners. There are a bunch
of obviously fake reviews by people in India on the local GNC branch. If you
just look at the star rating, you'll think "Wow, that place must suck!". Then
you read the reviews and it's from people who have never set foot in the
United States never mind GNC. Reviews are basically useless.

------
qndreoi
In Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", a woman becomes a victim of
organized online harassment. The harassers keep repeating the same accusation.
She has a rich tech friend who invents "Organized Proxies for Execration" or
APEs that overwhelm the internet with huge volumes of contradictory messages.
As the inventor says: "-why, even the most credulous user will be inoculated
with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as
to raise doubts in their minds as to the veracity of any one characterization,
and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole." Here "Miasma" is
Stephenson's word for the cesspool that is social networks. The strategy works
more or less for the victim, but (spoiler) has unintended consequences.

------
logicallee
This definitely seems to cross the line from troll to criminal:

>Many of the spoofed accounts use the identities of Tomlinson’s friends and
peers in the author community, creating the illusion that people he knows are
giving one-star reviews and saying bad things about him. Dozens of authors
have been spoofed in this manner, including the entire board of directors of
the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

>Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other
highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of
them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by
Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo and
sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings. These spoofed reviews often
also show Tomlinson falsely saying things which would hurt his own reputation.

>Gareth L. Powell and Beth Cato were among the authors spoofed, with their
photos and names used to create fake accounts to attack Tomlinson’s books.

I think calling these "trolls" doesn't go far enough. I am sure this crosses
criminal lines, or at the very least probably several laws.

The victims should sue or the government should pursue actions that rise to
this level. It's not just "trolling" to do this, in my opinion.

------
Vrondi
This has been a problem on Goodreads for a few years now.

------
campee
The pests are at it again, classic O&A fans.

------
oehpr
I find topics like this very interesting.

Fake reviews on Amazon, vote bombing on youtube, fake upvotes on reddit, fake
likes on facebook. I'd even extend this tangentially to cyber squatting DNS
records, email spam, and robo callers.

It's a matter of trust. We think we can just make a big polling station
somewhere and get the communities opinion on something, one person one vote.
"Here's the big central aggregate, take the law of averages and you have a
good sense of how good something is". But on the internet the Sybil attack
reigns supreme. This assumption doesn't hold.

Whenever I read articles on problems like these the topic of "Why it's
happening and how to fix it" invariable drifts to "We need better moderation".
I _never_ think that. I think "Stop trusting Sybil". Not even THAT! Stop
asking me to trust random people I don't trust!

What if instead of having an single aggregate review, we "web of trust" it
instead? Here's the system as I imagine it, and it's not fully thought out at
this point, please chime in with criticisms if you have them.

The jist: Every user has their own list of ratings for books in the system,
and a list of people they "trust". The rated list of books you see the average
rating of the people you trust, recursing out through the web of trust. The
ratings are calculated live, on demand. With the only thing held in constant
being each individuals personal ratings.

I'm leaving a lot undefined right now, but an example of how I imagine such a
system to work:

Lets say you know Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the perfect book.
You go to the books page and review the ratings. Your rate is obviously 5. You
see lots of other people in your list who have rated it 5 (naturally). But you
also see that there are some 3's in there. You can click on the 3's and see
how they reached you through the web of trust. It turns out a bunch of 3's are
coming from your someone named Bob, Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has trusted a
bunch of people from some kind of Harry Potter hating cabal of philistines.
You could blacklist the cabal, but there's too many of them, so instead you
blacklist Alice. All the 3's are gone, and so are all the other reviews from
the cabal. Your list of reviews now more accurately reflects views that you
would trust.

In this way, your effort to moderate away the opinions of people you don't
trust has done double duty, it has cleared views you disagree with and do not
trust, and it has also done so for the people who trust you as well.

It is decentralized moderation.

There's some challenges here, for example, how to bootstrap the system for new
users? What is the best way to calculate the average reviews in a timely
manner? How much weight should be applied to a friend of a friend of a friend?
What kind of feedback could we give to users to incentivize them against
trusting people like the philistine cabal? etc.

I have some thoughts on this, I'll spare you.

Like any decentralized system, it's more work, it's more complex, and it has
some surprising and ugly edge cases. I also don't think I'm some genius for
coming up for this, it's just an application of Web of Trust. But I have not
seen a system such as this in practice. Nor do I ever seem to see people talk
about it when the topic of moderation and spam come up. If you know of any
such case studies, let me know!

~~~
inimino
Generally the problem with systems like this is that you need a critical mass
of users to rate books for a site to have any value. If the only ratings you
see are from people you trust, this becomes a lot worse. Once you add UI
friction, adoption drops even more. Generally because of network effects,
sites that use dark patterns and prioritize engagement over trustworthiness
will tend to thrive. Just look at the history of social media.

------
deepsun
Don't forget that it may be an ad campaign to promote a book, though.

------
jshevek
Some people are trying to battle against negative fake reviews by posting
positive fake reviews. It's not clear to me that they are as morally superior
as they evidently believe.

Edit: The solution is to fix the voting system, not to abuse it further
because you believe you are virtuous.

~~~
matsemann
I hope you see the difference between fake praise and harrassment.

"Both sides are wrong" doesn't mean they are equally bad.

~~~
deith
It's not fake praise vs harassment, it's fake praise vs fake criticism.

In any case this will make for an excellent marketing campaign. I don't even
know what the book is about (I assume something politically charged because of
this campaign) but now I know the book!

~~~
catalogia
It can be [and is] fake criticism and harassment at the same time. These are
not mutually exclusive in the slightest.

~~~
catalogia
Excerpt from the article: _" Jason: I saw one troll spoofing your name and
picture post an extremely nasty, long-winded comment on Goodreads, discussing
intimate details of your family life and making it sound like you want to kill
yourself. None of this could be considered a review of your book by any
conceivable means, yet Goodreads still hasn't removed it. What's going on
here?"_

I'm really curious how anybody thinks this isn't harassment.

