Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Well, this is odd: I find myself hardly giving a warm shit about Jessica's Painful Wind on Dune's overall Amazon ratings.

* Two years ago, I was livid at how Waterworms was getting so many shill votes.

* Last year, I frothed and ranted when Pauline was clearly having 1-star reviews deleted.

* This year ... I've barely noticed. I just don't care.

Maybe it's taken three full cycles for me to realize that Amazon's 5-star rating system is a COMPLETE travesty, and one not worth worrying about. Maybe I'm confident that people will also read the responses and the forums threads, where Breaking Wind is just being torched. Or maybe I just don't care.

Anyone else? Or are most of y'all still fighting The Man about those stars?

I glance at the total star rating, but I don't worry that much about it. I think I will keep a better tally of how many reviews are posted this time, so we know exactly how many are deleted.

I'm less worried about it given that the 5-star reviews are so obviously gushing fanboy reviews.

Anyone reading the page without a preconceived notion of these books will likely ignore those reviews anyway. So long as there are a *few* reasoned, dissenting voices in the mix, then I don't think the shill reviews will have a lot of effect.

HBJ

Amazon's rating system has been defunct for nearly as long as Amazon.com has existed and long before KJA books were sold on the site. Back in the early days of Amazon reviews, there were true product ratings which would find numerous crap products with the 1 or 2 stars they deserved. Once Amazon caught on with consumers just a few years later, nearly every major commercial product on the website was rated between 4-5 stars and retains that rating today. With nearly every product rated so highly, the ratings become effectively meaningless.

For some time after that, one could obtain useful information reading the individual customer reviews. They could have a thousand shill reviews, but as long as someone wrote an intelligent critique, that's typically all it would take to convince me this product warranted more investigation prior to buying. Then Amazon started deleting reviews for commercial reasons. That was pretty much the last hope for an already seriously compromised system.

Now even if the people form together to oppose snake oil, they are dealt with via vendor complaints and a capitulating Amazon.com. I will say this: I admire them for unabashedly treating their website like the synthetic consumer juggernaut of a business that it is. At least there's no illusions

Yeah, everything at Amazon is either 4 or 5 stars; it's like 3.5 is a low rating there. It's really skewed the scale.

I buy a lot of stuff there — too much, probably — but I tend to stay mostly within my comfort zones (authors, genres, games, music, or whatever that I'm already familiar with). I'm pretty leery of the reviews, in general.

I couldn't care less.

For hard to find books that have more than one review I sometimes find that the reviews are rightish, more or less. But if its a big release, SF of course, I never bother with them.