Amazon Antics

[Misfit]

This is a hot one and I am only reporting back for any of you that might be interested. I've been watching this one from the sidelines and things really heated up this week when all of the accused reviews were deleted en masse, apparently by Amazon.

Original thread at Amazon. I know it's long but you should be able to skim and catch up well enough. Probably the last few pages should give you the gist of it. As I understand it, a very highly ranked reviewer was accused of plagiarizing his reviews, taking from other sources (product page, IMDB, etc), rewording them a tad and posting his own reviews.

Several posters went digging and found the original sources for many of these reviews and have been commenting with great regularity on his reviews. While you can no longer see the comments, nor the reviews from the Amazon profile you can see them here.

Scroll down to review for I Spit on Your Grave, which is *dedicated* to his detractors.

The reviews were deleted about two days ago (well over 3,000) and were done so quickly only Amazon could have done it. I was watching for a bit and all I had to do was hit the refresh button and they just melted away. Almost all the helpful votes were removed and his approval percentage changed as well, and was constantly changing as the reviews disappeared.

Again, I'm making no judgment one way or the other because I'm too chicken to get involved in such a hot potato. Just thought this might be of interest.

[Michy]

A question for you Amazon aficionados (Misfit?)...... someone recently commented on several of my reviews, and said that his votes unfortunately don't count because he is my "fan." I've never heard of this - what exactly does it mean to become someone's "fan" on Amazon?

[Divia]

As a reviewer you can get groupies. I dunno what else to call them. I guess fan works. I know that I am a fan of misfit since we have similar tastes. However, I don't think I can vote and say her review was helpful because I have already done so on 6 other reviews.

[Michy]

[quote=""Divia""]As a reviewer you can get groupies. [/quote] Oh, boy, just what I've always wanted. I think this must have been what he meant, though, because he said his positive votes for my reviews will no longer "stick."

How do you become someone's fan/groupie? Do you select them somehow? Or does it automatically happen after you post 6 positive votes for a particular reviewer?

Another question I've wondered for a while....... what is to prevent someone from voting for the same review (either positively or negatively) over and over? Stuffing the ballot box as it were?

[Misfit]

Oooh, one of Amazon's big mysteries. There is a thing called a *fan voter*, or one who regularly follows your reviews. In theory (or as I understand it), if you vote for someone so many times (the general concensus is five votes), then your votes are not supposed to count towards ranking. Fair enough, but some of us have found that those votes don't *stick* either, which is a bit maddening.


I've seen votes I've placed come and go, and sometimes never show at all. Lots of people vote Harriet's reviews down and they rarely show.

There have been voting groups before (along with negative voting trolls), which is why this software is in place. There used to be some heavy voting groups, and since they knew one person's votes only went so far towards ranking they were always trolling for new friends to vote each other up. I was getting friend invites out of nowhere, and would find these innocuous comments that would pretty much let me know they'd voted with the expectation I'd go over and comment and vote for them. There were some seriously bad reviewers in that group. I declined to play.

[Divia]

Yeah its a negative side effect of the trolls. I know Amazon vine had a huge issue with this. If you posted something on the message board people who didn't like what you said would fine your reviews and give you negative votes. They were so catty.

But also just because you were a vine member you would get negative votes so they wanted to stop this.

[Misfit]

I had a worse troll than that, and I wasn't the only one. Post a new review, watch 5-10 negative votes appear like magic sometimes within minutes. Whatever Amazon instituted in '08, that really curbed the trolls but also had an impact on the regular votes/voters like Michy described. Personally I and many others would rather see the negative vote done away with altogether, but it's Ammy's playpen after all.

After the '08 shake up, the trolls found a new way to negative vote. Lists and images (as in book covers uploaded) were still easy to vote negative on and the campaign voting software doesn't catch it (at least not yet). It won't affect ranking (I asked), but does seem to affect approval percentage. Since they won't fix it, I won't start new lists, nor upload any covers

[Divia]

They can neg your listamanias and it hurts your ratings?

[Michy]

Forgive my ignorance here, but ..... it's baffling to me why people get so uptight and ugly about reviewer rankings. It's not like there's money involved. Or, wait, maybe there is money involved, since nothing else can bring out people's ugly side like $$$$$$$. Is there some reward -- besides getting free stuff from Amazon -- for being a top reviewer?

[annis]

I think it's an ego thing, Michy.

Plagiarism is a curse of the internet and pretty much impossible to control. I've several times come across my own words in someone else's post, which is irritating, disturbing and sort of flattering in a not-so-good way! Luckily Margaret at Historical novels Info has her website pages copyrighted so she can push for the offending material to be withdrawn if it's been taken from stuff I originally wrote for her website. If it's stuff I've posted off my own bat I just have to wear it, or take the offending posters to task myself. This isn't as effective, though it embarrasses people a bit and hopefully might make them think twice about what they crib in future. I've been taken aback by the fact that some of the "borrowers" are pretty well known, and shouldn't need to be nicking my thoughts!