Amazonians Who GoodRead discussion

I find is stunning what happened at Amazon. Discussion groups don't work; the whole "Friends" system was simply terminated. I found it quite nice to communicate with friends through postings and so on. A pretty cold environment. More than that, I have lost track of some former friends whom I'd still like to communicate with from time to time.

I think many of us feel like that. Great shame indeed! Amazon reviewers were the first and longest-lasting (informal) online group I joined; to this date, most of my online friends are/were fellow Amazon reviewers, even though the GR community is picking up in numbers. Ammy had a great thing going there ... pity they themselves no longer seem to appreciate the thing they once created!

P.S. Who did you lose contact with? I'm not sure I'd be able to help, but you never know!

Themis-Athena wrote: "I think many of us feel like that. Great shame indeed! Amazon reviewers were the first and longest-lasting (informal) online group I joined; to this date, most of my online friends are/were fello..."

Good question. I am quite sure that there are some friends whom I have forgotten about--but I have no record of my listing of friends and would not even know. Quite frustrating.

I think part of the problem with Amazon's negative Reviewer culture now is that they 'punish' friends of reviewers by not allowing Friends to vote. Have you noticed that? I think they feel that reviewers should not have loyal followers who care about the time it takes to place reviews there - unless of course it is for granola bars or deordorant or such like. The comment section seems to be reserved for the trolls who have nothing better to do than quash those who consistently contribute. It used to be fun - now it's like being confined to a reparative summer camp! Goodreads is much more personal

GR is ALL about trusting your friends, in fact (Otis Chandler said in an interview somewhere when the site was created that that was one of the key incentives for its launch -- "because who are you going to trust MORE than your friends?"). But then, GR isn't making money, at least not directly, from selling books. Amazon is.

I personally abhor the new Amazon system and haven't posted a single new review there ever since it was put in place, chiefly because I feel that it encourages negativity (towards reviewers first and foremost). It would appear that Amazon's discouragement of "loyalty votes" (above and beyond the the old system's, though never officially acknowledged, inofficially known and accepted limitations) was instituted in an effort to enhance the overall standard and credibility of their customer reviews, which I assume Amazon concluded make their customer reviews more meaningful in terms of marketing. But leaving aside whether or not they achieved that goal in the first place (my personal sense is that they actually didn't), they couldn't have botched up the job more successfully than they actually did, because in the process they also managed to destroy the Amazon reviewer community as such, never realizing what an asset they had there in the first place ... and it's THAT which irks me most of all.

'Ditto ditto my song' to quote Gilbert and Sullivan......I do feel an obligation to the authors and publishers who request reviews and that results in an incomprehensibly huge stack of books. Perhaps I'll just stop agreeing to review.......

I never accepted review requests -- didn't do it on Amazon and don't do it on GR; and my focus on GR isn't primarily reviews in the first place: I simply don't have enough time for that at the moment, and GR opens up plenty of other ways to discuss books, which I actually enjoy ... even on Amazon, hadn't it been for all the negativity and spite, I would have preferred my reviews to be the starting point of a discussion, not simply a forum to voice my opinion.

But I do miss the community and the fellowship of the other reviewers; both on a personal level and because my feeling was that by and large we set ourself pretty high standards, and because discussing reviewing-related topics contributed to the overall quality of the reviews (it certainly did to mine) ...

A thought. . . The person responsible for the community (friends, etc.) was Russell Dicker. He introduced us to himself on one of the discussion boards, as I recall. His academic background? Industrial Management and Economics. In terms of the old "friends" and discussion boards arena, I think a sociologist or psychologist would have been much better. There was a social side to the friends network that someone in management, economics, or engineering is unlikely to understand. So, the selection of someone who did not understand social networks, etc. was most unfortunate. The social element was lost. Now, Amazon is a pretty cold place.

Yes -- certainly the previous moderators had more of a sense for what the reviewers' community AS SUCH meant; on a personal level as well as for Amazon. (Nadine Y. in particular comes to mind, but the same was true for many of them.)

I'm not sure it's just tied to one person, or to Amazon's group of community liaison people, though -- the changes taken together are much too broad to just have been Russell's (or the community liaison folks') sole responsibility and initiative. To me they have all the hallmarks of a concerted change in corporate strategy, which would mean some sort of panel/committee/board involvement (though Russell, who according to his LinkedIn profile was Amazon's "Director of Community" when he took over and is now "Director of Cloud Drive," probably did have his say in this context as well).

The real issue behind all of the changes instituted by Amazon seems to be the flood of fake/spam positive reviews and sock puppetry that has swept over pretty much all websites operating (even if only inter alia) as a public opinion/customer review forum in recent years. I don't know if you've seen the links to the articles on the subject that Tony Trendl has been posting in the FB Amazon Reviewers' group lately; the two most illustrative on the subject are these, published by Forbes and the New York Times very recently:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharma...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/bus... ,

There is also a Cornell research paper, published last year:

http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11... .

Amazon's response to the problem just seems to be to encourage negativity, and discourage friendship and loyalty all across the board ... regardless whether true or fake/bought. In other words, instead of doing what Google and TripAdvisor did, namely, to really invest in an algorithm that would eventually allow them to weed out fake positive reviews and fake loyalty, they just chose the seemingly easier route of throwing out the baby with the bath water!

Fake reviews and sock puppetry have begun to rear their ugly heads on GR as well; it will be interesting to see what steps this site will take to protect its community. I can't imagine they'll go the Amazon route, however. Trust and loyalty are too much at the core of GR's reason for existence ... at least if you go by Otis Chandler's statement that it builds not so much on reviews per se but on people's trust in their friends' reviews and opinions.

(I did a quick Google search -- didn't find the article/interview I was thinking of when I posted message no. 5 above, but he's said similar things elsewhere as well, including this year:
http://www.sfgate.com/business/onther...
http://publishingperspectives.com/201...
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/pr... )

Still, the developments on Amazon ARE a major disappointment -- AND a case study in how not to go about it, at least not if you truly value the community you've built ...