Some netizens recently posted that they saw ratings from Goodreads on Amazon’s book products. Goodreads is a third-party book review software that was acquired by Amazon in 2013, but Amazon hasn’t used the software’s features much since then. .
For most books, the number of ratings on Goodreads is much higher than on Amazon, and the average rating for the same book on the two platforms is likely to be different. Goodreads' grading policy is very loose, and there is no identity verification when registering an account, so anyone can create multiple accounts to rate a book, which in turn affects the overall rating of the book.
In addition, Goodreads has no strict restrictions on grading books , and some people can write reviews without buying or even reading a book at all. What's more, some books have been flooded with bad reviews before they were published.
In fact, whether it's on Goodreads or Amazon, "rating bombing" of a product is a very common situation: a large group of people give a product or a book one star to reduce it. overall rating. This may be because the author of the book has made radical comments on Twitter, or there is "gay" related content in the book, anyway, it has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself.
Some people even use this to blackmail the author, saying that if they don’t take money, they will organize people to review bad reviews , which can be said to be ruined.
Currently, not all book products on Amazon display Goodreads ratings. According to insiders, this feature is still in the testing stage, and may be fully applied in the future.
Also, while both Amazon and Goodreads ratings are displayed on some products, the pattern displayed is different: Amazon ratings are mostly expressed in stars, while Goodreads ratings currently only show numbers.
However, since most books have far more ratings on Goodreads, Goodreads ratings are more reliable in the eyes of consumers.
In fact, although this update of the scoring system is mainly aimed at book products, it is very likely that Amazon will introduce a third-party scoring system for all categories in the future. This may be another attempt by Amazon to crack down on fake product reviews. Earlier this year, Amazon sued a number of companies that help sellers review reviews, even the review group on Facebook.
At present, Amazon has not made any official reply to this, and the follow-up development of the incident is worthy of attention.