The influential user review site has suffered a year of controversies, from cancelled book deals to review-bombing, and exposed a dark side to the industry
I think sorting out actual quality reviews is harder than people think. Even something like Steam, where the cumulative user rating is relatively respected, surfaces a lot of junk reviews, because people respond to meme-ing and jokey shitposts more than actual high quality reviews. The signals even for a behemoth like Amazon to train an AI on just really aren’t amazing. I know fakespot looks for outright fraud Amazon doesn’t, but I think part of their success is that they’re not the benchmark cheaters are trying to beat. In any case, “genuine” reviews and “quality” reviews aren’t the same thing, and the latter is really hard to measure.
I think a more robust set of curation tools would have some value. Flipboard has been mentioned a bit lately for articles, and while I haven’t used it, my impression is that the premise is that you subscribe to curated lists of different interests. Something like that for reviewers who catch the eye of curators could be interesting for a federated book platform.
My main issue with the article is the premise that “professional” reviewers are objectively any higher quality on average than user reviews. A sizable proportion of them are very detached from what real people care about. I absolutely critically read non-fiction, and am somewhat judgy if a certain rigor isn’t applied, but for fiction? How is that fun? It’s OK for a story just to be cheap fun. It’s OK for different authors to have different writing styles and different levels of attention to detail and different levels of grittiness to their stories. There is absolutely actual bad writing out there, and some gets published, but a story not being for you doesn’t mean that voice doesn’t connect with someone else. A lot of book critics are huge snobs.
Great points. Does Steam get around this slightly by having different tags intended for meme reviews? I.e. I think I’ve seen ‘10 people said this review made them laugh’ or something along those lines. That at least makes it a bit easier to filter out the ‘actual’ reviews. I wonder if the cumulative total (on both Steam and Goodreads) averages out the joke/genuine reviews, assuming that a) enough people have left a review and b) there hasn’t been any review bombing.
And yeah there are plenty of books, games and shows out there that I’ve absolutely loved but they’ve been reviewed terribly by professional reviewers. I think on the whole people assign too much weight to arbitrary totals - “Oh this book is a 6/10 so I shouldn’t waste my time on it”. But if you think like this, you’ll miss out on so much.
They do have more that just the thumbs up/down, but for the most part I have to read several reviews and pick out the ones that actually tell me what I care about. Even high effort well done reviews just might not mean anything to me if they’re focused on elements that I don’t care about. I think the joke reviews still are “accurate” in the sense that the reviewer goes up or down based on how they feel about the game; they just don’t have useful text.
I personally tend just not to review fiction. I will absolutely tell you what I like about an author or a series, but I have no interest in breaking down the plot or picking apart individual books. (As an example, my favorite author is Karen Rose. I think all of the books in her Romantic Suspense series are straight up masterfully done, own them all on audiobook, and listen 3+ times a year. I will happily give a couple paragraphs about what traits draw me to her writing. I won’t pick and choose between the books and say “this is four star, this is five star”. I happen to find Into The Dark particularly compelling out of the Cincinnati arc, but I’m not going to ever individually break down books in the series to give individual reviews. I basically consider them a single work and read them as such.)
I almost never give fiction less than 4 stars, either. 4 stars is my baseline. 5 is standout. There are some (including wildly popular or cult classics) that I just don’t find interesting, but I’ll just not rate/review them if I don’t have anything to say. On a semi-related note, I see “overrated book” discussions every once in a while and so many of the comments are people falling into the same trap critics do. In a lot of cases they’re picking apart books clearly targeted for kids to maybe YA and reading them like they’re grad students analyzing some classic in an era where every line had 15 different allegories thrown in. You don’t have to pick everything apart like that.
Picking out parts of reviews that you find relevant is a good idea; your enjoyment of any kind of media is subjective and therefore unique to every person. I guess if you can find a particular reviewer with similar tastes, who also happens to have read a lot of the books you’re interested in, their reviews could be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy a book. And yes a 4 tends to be my baseline for book reviews; anything less and I didn’t enjoy it that much. 5 is pretty much perfect.
Over-analysis is definitely an issue. It’s inappropriate a lot of the time like you say. Writing a good review is tricky! You have to take into account the target audience, when it was written, whether it’s part of a larger series and so on. Authors and readers are too often obsessed with their overall rating for a book, but the real indicator is what people have actually written in genuine reviews, and whether you agree with that opinion. Unfortunately websites like Goodreads don’t make those reviews easy to find.
I think sorting out actual quality reviews is harder than people think. Even something like Steam, where the cumulative user rating is relatively respected, surfaces a lot of junk reviews, because people respond to meme-ing and jokey shitposts more than actual high quality reviews. The signals even for a behemoth like Amazon to train an AI on just really aren’t amazing. I know fakespot looks for outright fraud Amazon doesn’t, but I think part of their success is that they’re not the benchmark cheaters are trying to beat. In any case, “genuine” reviews and “quality” reviews aren’t the same thing, and the latter is really hard to measure.
I think a more robust set of curation tools would have some value. Flipboard has been mentioned a bit lately for articles, and while I haven’t used it, my impression is that the premise is that you subscribe to curated lists of different interests. Something like that for reviewers who catch the eye of curators could be interesting for a federated book platform.
My main issue with the article is the premise that “professional” reviewers are objectively any higher quality on average than user reviews. A sizable proportion of them are very detached from what real people care about. I absolutely critically read non-fiction, and am somewhat judgy if a certain rigor isn’t applied, but for fiction? How is that fun? It’s OK for a story just to be cheap fun. It’s OK for different authors to have different writing styles and different levels of attention to detail and different levels of grittiness to their stories. There is absolutely actual bad writing out there, and some gets published, but a story not being for you doesn’t mean that voice doesn’t connect with someone else. A lot of book critics are huge snobs.
Great points. Does Steam get around this slightly by having different tags intended for meme reviews? I.e. I think I’ve seen ‘10 people said this review made them laugh’ or something along those lines. That at least makes it a bit easier to filter out the ‘actual’ reviews. I wonder if the cumulative total (on both Steam and Goodreads) averages out the joke/genuine reviews, assuming that a) enough people have left a review and b) there hasn’t been any review bombing.
And yeah there are plenty of books, games and shows out there that I’ve absolutely loved but they’ve been reviewed terribly by professional reviewers. I think on the whole people assign too much weight to arbitrary totals - “Oh this book is a 6/10 so I shouldn’t waste my time on it”. But if you think like this, you’ll miss out on so much.
They do have more that just the thumbs up/down, but for the most part I have to read several reviews and pick out the ones that actually tell me what I care about. Even high effort well done reviews just might not mean anything to me if they’re focused on elements that I don’t care about. I think the joke reviews still are “accurate” in the sense that the reviewer goes up or down based on how they feel about the game; they just don’t have useful text.
I personally tend just not to review fiction. I will absolutely tell you what I like about an author or a series, but I have no interest in breaking down the plot or picking apart individual books. (As an example, my favorite author is Karen Rose. I think all of the books in her Romantic Suspense series are straight up masterfully done, own them all on audiobook, and listen 3+ times a year. I will happily give a couple paragraphs about what traits draw me to her writing. I won’t pick and choose between the books and say “this is four star, this is five star”. I happen to find Into The Dark particularly compelling out of the Cincinnati arc, but I’m not going to ever individually break down books in the series to give individual reviews. I basically consider them a single work and read them as such.)
I almost never give fiction less than 4 stars, either. 4 stars is my baseline. 5 is standout. There are some (including wildly popular or cult classics) that I just don’t find interesting, but I’ll just not rate/review them if I don’t have anything to say. On a semi-related note, I see “overrated book” discussions every once in a while and so many of the comments are people falling into the same trap critics do. In a lot of cases they’re picking apart books clearly targeted for kids to maybe YA and reading them like they’re grad students analyzing some classic in an era where every line had 15 different allegories thrown in. You don’t have to pick everything apart like that.
Picking out parts of reviews that you find relevant is a good idea; your enjoyment of any kind of media is subjective and therefore unique to every person. I guess if you can find a particular reviewer with similar tastes, who also happens to have read a lot of the books you’re interested in, their reviews could be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy a book. And yes a 4 tends to be my baseline for book reviews; anything less and I didn’t enjoy it that much. 5 is pretty much perfect.
Over-analysis is definitely an issue. It’s inappropriate a lot of the time like you say. Writing a good review is tricky! You have to take into account the target audience, when it was written, whether it’s part of a larger series and so on. Authors and readers are too often obsessed with their overall rating for a book, but the real indicator is what people have actually written in genuine reviews, and whether you agree with that opinion. Unfortunately websites like Goodreads don’t make those reviews easy to find.