Last time, on Violetta Vane's Imaginarium...
Earlier this week, a horde of sock puppets descended like Wagnerian valkyries to lift a certain m/m romance to the top of multiple Goodreads lists. Accounts numbering in the triple digits, all with no friends, only one or two books added, and generic (and sometimes identical!) user icons, came out of the woodwork to lavish praise on a little-known book. Five and four star ratings without reviews crowded out genuine Goodread user reviews and shelves.Now, this is hardly the first time a wannabe author has pumped up their star rating by rating their own books, asking friends to rate, or making socks. Doing so is ultimately misguided, silly, and ethically questionable, but it doesn’t really hurt anyone: after all, most internet users have been around the block enough times to question unanimous praise of anything, from exercise equipment to computer brands to books.
In reality, even cherished classics get a few two and even one-star reviews: after all, taste is subjective, and contrarians are just a part of the internet experience. The average Goodreads user will look at a book with a high star rating, see a slew of questionable ratings, and hit the backbutton. This kind of game-playing really hurts no one but the author, who quickly (especially in a small genre like m/m) gains a reputation for untrustworthiness.
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| The original icons weren't much more subtle than this. |
However, this last incident sets itself apart because it wasn’t just the book’s own page getting underhandedly tampered with, but popular (and generally helpful!) m/m "best of" lists.
Here’s the issue: seeing who votes on individual books in a list isn’t as immediately visible as its star rating. It’s much more likely the average user will take a book’s ranking at face value without investigating further. The multiple list-tampering meant that newcomers to the genre looking for a quick way to guide their next purchase might decide to buy the book at the top of the list. That book then becomes their determinant to the quality of the entire genre. After all, three hundred people voted it as the best the genre has, twice as many as the second-place entry. It’s gotta be good, right? Right?
As readers, we may not always like the number one listed book. Perhaps it doesn’t fit our personal taste, and sometimes popularity doesn’t always exactly correlate with quality. Just think of the many, many critics of bestsellers like Twilight or The Davinci Code. Taste is subjective, but when a book is at the top of a user-voted list, you know there’s something about it that appeals to a lot of people, and that certain something helps to understand what other books in the genre might also be like. As well, universal appeal is its own praise. Whether or not firefighters are your thing, knowing how much Hot Head has resonated with readers speaks to the talent of its author, the timeliness of the story, etc. So seeing some unknown book angling in for Hot Head’s well-earned top spot on the “Best of 2011” list is shameful.
The puppeting in this case was so blatantly obvious to experienced readers that list maintainers took swift action, booting the book from the lists and reporting the puppeting to Goodreads, which began annihilating sock accounts like a vengeful washing machine. And as a final universal balancing, the book is now rising (the honest way) in another list: the genre’s worst covers. As they say, the truth will out.
However, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and so on. In the future, there may be automatic ways and algorithms invented to discover false reviews. This recent NY Times article mentions a computer science professor named Bing Liu who’s hard at work on a mathematical model that will counter this kind of harmful review inflation. But in the meantime, the best defense against puppeting is a core of watchful and experienced readers, wary of just this kind of tomfoolery. Now, this book’s top reviews are one stars from real goodreads users warning future browsers of the unsavory goings-on.
Which could be bad news for the author. Nothing’s come out to suggest it yet (and Occam’s Razor says it’s much more likely for an unknown author to have an overinflated ego than an obsessed fan or even a hater to concoct such an elaborate con to sully their reputation), but it could still be possible that the author isn’t behind these fake reviews and votes in the first place. In which case, they’re losing credibility and thus readers every day that goes by that they don’t publicly address the problem.
Let this be a warning to us all, though. We can’t all be runaway hits. We can’t all be best-sellers. We can’t all be number one. Success is all the sweeter when it’s honestly earned. Much better for a middling book to slowly gain traction or even to fade away quietly into obscurity than to attempt to manufacture popularity—it might blow up in your face in the worst possible way. Leave the socks on your feet. Respect your readers. If you do well then, you know you deserve it.
As readers, we may not always like the number one listed book. Perhaps it doesn’t fit our personal taste, and sometimes popularity doesn’t always exactly correlate with quality. Just think of the many, many critics of bestsellers like Twilight or The Davinci Code. Taste is subjective, but when a book is at the top of a user-voted list, you know there’s something about it that appeals to a lot of people, and that certain something helps to understand what other books in the genre might also be like. As well, universal appeal is its own praise. Whether or not firefighters are your thing, knowing how much Hot Head has resonated with readers speaks to the talent of its author, the timeliness of the story, etc. So seeing some unknown book angling in for Hot Head’s well-earned top spot on the “Best of 2011” list is shameful.
The puppeting in this case was so blatantly obvious to experienced readers that list maintainers took swift action, booting the book from the lists and reporting the puppeting to Goodreads, which began annihilating sock accounts like a vengeful washing machine. And as a final universal balancing, the book is now rising (the honest way) in another list: the genre’s worst covers. As they say, the truth will out.
However, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and so on. In the future, there may be automatic ways and algorithms invented to discover false reviews. This recent NY Times article mentions a computer science professor named Bing Liu who’s hard at work on a mathematical model that will counter this kind of harmful review inflation. But in the meantime, the best defense against puppeting is a core of watchful and experienced readers, wary of just this kind of tomfoolery. Now, this book’s top reviews are one stars from real goodreads users warning future browsers of the unsavory goings-on.
Which could be bad news for the author. Nothing’s come out to suggest it yet (and Occam’s Razor says it’s much more likely for an unknown author to have an overinflated ego than an obsessed fan or even a hater to concoct such an elaborate con to sully their reputation), but it could still be possible that the author isn’t behind these fake reviews and votes in the first place. In which case, they’re losing credibility and thus readers every day that goes by that they don’t publicly address the problem.
Let this be a warning to us all, though. We can’t all be runaway hits. We can’t all be best-sellers. We can’t all be number one. Success is all the sweeter when it’s honestly earned. Much better for a middling book to slowly gain traction or even to fade away quietly into obscurity than to attempt to manufacture popularity—it might blow up in your face in the worst possible way. Leave the socks on your feet. Respect your readers. If you do well then, you know you deserve it.
We can’t all be runaway hits. We can’t all be best-sellers. We can’t all be number one. Success is all the sweeter when it’s honestly earned. Much better for a middling book to slowly gain traction or even to fade away quietly into obscurity than to attempt to manufacture popularity—it might blow up in your face in the worst possible way. Leave the socks on your feet. Respect your readers. If you do well then, you know you deserve it.
ReplyDeleteAmen!