Ratings Pollution
Mar 21st, 2010 by James Murty
I’m thinking of buying Michael Lewis’ new book, The Big Short. So I visit the Amazon site and see a pretty terrible average review of only 2.5 stars. What gives?
Turns out a bunch of douches have given the book one-star reviews because the book is not yet available on the Kindle.
Not only are they submitting low reviews because they cannot yet buy the book in their preferred form — a decision that is most likely made by the publisher not the author — but they are doing so without even reading the book. This is a whiny and pathetic form of “protest” that does nothing but pollute the digital commons. Grow up folks!
I recently read a post on Kottke.org that dealt with this very topic, http://kottke.org/10/03/the-new-rules-for-reviewing-media. He takes a different tack though in commenting on how these review of media rather than content also adds utility to people looking for products.
It certainly makes me rethink the value of ratings systems in assessing whether a product is something that will serve my needs.
I guess the question comes down to what exactly people are reviewing? It might be reasonable to have additional star ratings for products that deal with all kinds of things other than the “raw” product itself — things like media format and quality, packaging, prompt delivery (or otherwise), value for money, whatever. I agree a more diverse range of rating criteria would be useful.
In this case though I naively expected the ratings should reflect the quality of the product — the book’s content — more so than anything else. The campaign to down-vote the book was a deliberate strategy to pollute the ratings in order to blackmail the publisher into offering a Kindle version. The strategy might even work, but if it does it would be precisely because the low ratings damage book sales when potential customers are misled. However, since these voters are completely candid about their reasons the actual damage may not be so bad, assuming anyone actually reads the comments that accompany ratings. It will be interesting to see.
It’s just unfortunate to see yet another example where the real producers of content — the authors, musicians, and artists — are caught in the crossfire between media companies that don’t get it and vengeful spurned consumers.