Review Sites — The Latest Troll Weapon

Beware of the ratings.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

I recently stumbled upon this article that discusses the latest phenomenon of ‘review bombing’ on Goodreads. Trolls and scammers threaten authors with negative or 1-star reviews if they refuse to give in to their demands.

It was scary and upsetting to read this. Goodreads is the largest book review platform out there. Since launching in 2007, it has grown into a mammoth social networking site for readers with over 120M members globally. When a platform acquires that kind of a scale, it starts being perceived as a single source of truth. Lookup any book on google, and you’ll see Goodreads and Amazon dominating the search results. It is how people discover new authors and books.

Book reading is an investment of time and effort. Readers want to make sure that they do their due diligence before committing that time. Review sites are where they go to (or where google takes them). In most cases, that’s their single source of information. Hence, these platforms must provide an accurate picture. That’s the reason most of these platforms claim to have a robust review and content policy. In reality, that’s the farthest from the truth.

Let’s look at the business models of these review sites. They are heavily incentivized to garner quantity over quality. The more eyeballs they get, the more valuable their business becomes. To get more eyeballs, they need to dish out a ton of content every day, and to achieve that; they keep minimal barriers to posting reviews and content.

Take Glassdoor, for example. You can post a review for any company in a minute. It doesn’t matter if you work there or no. The same is the case with Google reviews, Yelp reviews, and even Amazon ratings. These platforms are designed to take any friction out of this review/rating creation process. They do that to increase their footprint and then sell this user base to prospective customers either for advertisements (Yelp, Amazon, App Stores) or for premium versions of their offerings (Glassdoor) or increase traffic to other areas of their business (Goodreads)

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Except, this same ease of use promotes trolls and scammers to game the system against the lesser-known, vulnerable stakeholders. However, before getting into the trolling business, let’s look at the inherent problems with these review sites.

When was the last time you write a review on a public platform? When I look back, here are the things that prompted me to give a review

1. I was extremely happy (delighted) with a service/product
2. I was upset (even if slightly) with the service/product
3. I was asked (repeatedly) to give a review, and the service/product was decent.

I have seen a similar trend with folks I’ve spoken to — We write reviews when we are delighted with a product/service or upset. A nudge improves the chances but doesn’t guarantee a review.

More often than not, we don’t review stuff not because we don’t want to but because we are indifferent about it.

This indifference is what plays directly into the hands of these scammers and trolls. In the absence of the original reviews, they flood the system with fake reviews and provide a completely distorted picture to the potential buyers.

For an average consumer, this may not seem like a big deal. However, there are both short and long-term consequences to this ignorance. In the short run, you’ll miss out on genuinely good (but no so well known) creations, and in the long run, our indifference combined with these scams can drive some of the best emerging creators away.

If you think that’s too far-fetched, think again. We’ve seen way too many ‘dystopian’ scenarios play out recently. Trolls and planted news and reviews can be extremely powerful (Remember Cambridge Analytica?).

Is there a solution or a way out of this? To be fully honest, I am not sure if there is. However, there are ways to mitigate some of the impacts.

Here are some steps creators and consumers can take to avoid these scenarios playing out and making review sites reliable again.

Strategies for Creators

1. Seek reviews: Be as proactive as you can be when asking for reviews. I’ve seen some amazing things that companies do in this space. Remember that most consumers don’t put a review not because they don’t want to but because it’s easy to ignore those review requests.
2. Engage with the audience: A couple of years back, when I purchased a gift for my mom, the Amazon seller sent a handwritten card (wishing her birthday) along with the gift. Not only that, they now have an amazing physical mailing campaign going on with me. It isn’t easy to replicate this for bigger brands and larger audiences, but there are ways for sellers to engage with the audience to improve their recall value.
3. Report suspicious activity: No matter how good your work is, there will always be those one-off nasty reviews. Learn from them (if they are genuine and there is a lesson there) or just ignore them. However, if you see these fake reviews just piling on, alert the authorities as soon as you can so that they can act on these. The unfortunate reality of today is that no matter how good you are, your reviews can end up determining how audiences perceive you. Even huge brands haven’t been able to escape this completely.

Here’s what the consumers can do to minimize these incidents

1. Give Reviews: It costs nothing but can mean a lot to the creators. Your reviews help other consumers and potential buyers and provide the creator feedback that they can incorporate while working on their next creation. As we've seen above, most websites have made it ridiculously simple to give feedback and leave ratings.
2. Spread the word: Whenever I’ve liked a book, I recommend it to my network. I do that because I feel they’d gain great insights from reading this book and as a mark of respect to the creator. References and word of mouth are powerful tools to help others make a decision. Utilize that to overcome the fake review hump.
3. Look for other sources: Our overdependence on these platforms is what makes them so powerful and such a hot target for scammers. We believe everything that we see on Google trust our Facebook feeds as the single source of truth and make big decisions after glancing at a single review website. That needs to change. Try to find other sources of info on these products/creations before buying something. Look at some of their past work and creations and also check with friends or network.

We live in a world where reviews and ratings are considered a single source of truth, whether we like it or not. Let’s help maintain the sanity of these platforms and sources.