A few years back, inspired by Derek Sivers [0], I decided to just make my own filterable book review list [1].
It was both a fun challenge (using vanilla JS to render) and has been fun to share with friends, Twitter mutuals etc.
Plus, people know it's MY reviews so if they like my suggestions/tweeting/poasting/etc, they know the review is from me and not some bot.
Goodreads is a case study in the natural monopoly of social networks. The product has been terrible for years now, with Amazon investing the bare minimum to keep it online and one slight design change every few years. But competitors like TheStoryGraph can't get traction because all the people are still on Goodreads.
Frequent experience with movies also. letterboxd is rife with ratings on movies, which didn't pre-screen at all yet. Most of them by paid shills. A24 being the worst, but Warner also amongst them. And lb fails to hit them.
Same on IMDB, and even Rotten Tomatoes. There's a lot of money in movies. But books?
This kind of exposes how valuable reviews actually are -- likely not very. People like reviews, but some person you don't know using some unknown set of criteria to evaluate a product turns out to not actually offer any value. Taking the mean of this data ("4.5 stars on Goodreads!") also doesn't improve the quality of the data.
Why is the book available for review on the site if review copies haven't yet been sent out? Isn't that just asking for trolling?
> Long-time romance author Milly Johnson said: “I had a one-star rating for a book that hadn’t even been seen by my copy editor. When I raised it with Goodreads they wouldn’t interfere as they said the reviewer had a perfect right to predict if they’d enjoy it or not. I’m afraid at that point I washed my hands of them as a serious review site that should have some code of conduct. We all get bad reviews but at least we should expect any review to be fair."
Is Goodreads not a review site but just a soapbox for readers? What kind of serious review site would allow reviews where the reviewer simply speculates whether they would like something or not? Seems strange Goodreads would allow these kinds of reviews, it completely undermines any credibility their ratings might have.
Does anyone take Amazon review scores seriously?
> When I raised it with Goodreads they wouldn’t interfere as they said the reviewer had a perfect right to predict if they’d enjoy it or not.
Ah yes, the illustrious omniprescient reviewer.
I've published a novelette a few months ago on a large website with user ratings (ahem, as a novice writer of smut whose nom-de-plume shall remain a carefully guarded secret). What is interesting is that in the first fortnight there were some people giving a bad rating because, ostensibly (and judging from some comments), they just don't like that specific type of story, whereas in the long tail the average rating climbs upwards as people find your story using tags and keywords, etc, and then judge only the writing and story itself, rather than its subgenre, setting, or premise.
I wonder if real books reviewed on Goodreads follow that pattern too. Those early reviews can have an outsized influence.
The combination of a terribly run social platform together with a crippled API that can't be used to audit it through third parties is an all too familiar story by now.
When it comes to books I mostly ignore the reviews on sites like Goodreads. I'm much more likely to pick books based on recommendations from friends, or because they've been nominated for one or more awards. At a pinch I'm even more likely to pick a book based on it's publisher than I am to base the choice on Goodreads reviews.
Well, those sites are also filled with 5 star reviews for books that won't be on sale for 6 months+, so it kinda balances out, doesn't it.
Same with Reddit and other places - seeing bunch of suspiciously positive "reviews" months before the book is even on sale.
Time for a trustpilot review bomb campaign against goodreads. Never used the site, but I have a perfect right to predict if I'd enjoy it or not.
Goodreads is the worst. At this point, Amazon should just shut it down.
Amazon reviews are unironically better, because you can see if somebody actually bought the book or not, and Amazon has very sophisticated anti-Astroturfing measures. (Good luck getting your friends and family to leave good reviews of your book -- they'll catch it and delete them.)
Goodreads is infested with marketing and publishing cliques and a lot of their reviews are fake or paid for. It has never been more over.
I remember this happening on Amazon more than 20 years ago. People reviewing books from authors they like (or hate) long before they were available to buy.
Trolls from the Russian federation is interesting. Maybe high bang for buck in destroying livelihoods and cultural capital, re: adversarial statescraft
I think the thing I have the most difficulty with in this discussion is that it seems virtually unthinkable to stop taking semi-anonymous ratings seriously? I know there will be intense loss aversion to such a crazy idea.
But sometimes the comment section is just a bunch of people with axes to grind.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but most if the Internet should not be anonymous. Anonymity has led to bots, awful cases of trolling and abuse. There should definitely be ways to communicated peer-to-peer anonymously, but posting on Social Media should not be one of them.
Reminder to use LibraryThing.
I think at this point, any sort of online review aggregators have been ruined for good - from Amazon to Imdb to Google. All of them. Find a professional reviewer you trust, whose taste aligns with your own. For me, I like The Critical Drinker. Most of what he recommends, I like. Except Arcane, that was horrible.
>email from Goodreads explaining that it advises authors to "refrain from confronting users who give their books a low rating"
Okay that's bullshit. Let them duke it out!
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Online reviews in general are pretty useless these days. We know that sites like Trustpilot will take down negative reviews if you pay them, Amazon reviews are mostly bots and some sites have weird incentives for users to write reviews.
E.g. take reviews of business on Google, there's no link to actual purchases, but you get a star and a "Local guide level 4" or something if you do enough reviews. A family member runs a consulting business, he has a 2-star review, the only review. It's not made by a customer, just some random dude. What it looks like is that this dude just walked around reviewing business after business, based on look of their office perhaps. He's not customer of ANY of them. So now multiple business are trying to have these negative reviews removed, Google doesn't give a shit, so what are these reviews actually worth?
Most people who write reviews aren't exactly the most mentally stable people either. If you're not getting something in return, most people won't write a review, that just leave the nut jobs.