Amazon removed the collection of 1-star reviews that showed up yesterday, both here in the States and in the UK. I’m rather amazed at how fast and efficient they are. After all, with the amount of traffic they must get, it must generate a horrendous number of complaints per minute. I’m a tiny minnow (no, a solitary plankton) in their sea, yet they reacted fast to my emails.
Anyway, I’m very relieved, to say the least.
I’m intrigued, however, at the effect of review star averages on Amazon. The books in question have had very predictable behavior over the last couple of months. If I averaged their rankings and sales behavior over any random seven-day period, there was pretty much no deviation from any other random seven-day period. The 1-star sock puppet attack altered their behavior.
Phew. Definitely a relief. And yes, an interesting demonstration of the effect of uncontrolled democracy…
That’s good to hear. It’s unfortunate that people try to mess with the system like that.
Yeah, it’s a downside of the Amazon system. It isn’t that difficult to game the system, either via crashing someone’s ratings, or stuffing with 5-stars. I suppose it might be an improvement if they required every reviewer to have a verified identity, but Amazon obviously thinks otherwise.
In retrospect, even just requiring the “amazon verified purchase” for items only available online might be helpful in these cases too.
I’ve always thought that myself as well.