Goodreads’ ‘unfair’ rating problem

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at schwab.com slash Washington Wise. That's schwab.com slash Washington Wise. Odoo, providing tools for businesses across industries into one fully integrated platform. Whatever your business needs, Odoo is committed to providing it. Learn more at od00.com.

0:47Imagine you're an author. You've spent years laboring over your latest story idea, fine-tuning your characters and the plot. You're excited to put your work in front of the public, hoping that your carefully ordered words will resonate with readers.

1:06But before your book is even out, it's given a low rating on the influential book review website Goodreads. Why would someone leave a bad rating for a book they've not even read yet? And I know they haven't read the book because the book has not been published yet. It's not out there. It's not available to be read. So where do these reviews come from? And why are they persisting on the platform? Does Goodreads have a fake review problem? So when I saw it, when I saw that they had reviewed all nine of my books, I thought, oh gosh, this feels like someone with a personal vendetta. And that just feels like a very strange thing to me.

1:42Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Jonathan Griffin with BBC Trending. We do in-depth reporting on the world of social media. Today, we're looking at the influential book review site Goodreads and how ratings, called unfair by authors, can mislead potential readers. Goodreads launched in 2007, and despite being bought by Amazon in 2013, much of it has remained unchanged as a user experience since. For many, the slightly clunky interface doesn't get in the way of their enjoyment. In fact, the website hosts an estimated 150 million accounts, according to Penguin Random House.

2:24Signing up for Goodreads is an easy process. Logging in can be done with an Amazon account, and very few details are required, all of which makes tracking legitimate reviews and ratings more challenging, according to Craig Silverman, co-founder of Indicator, a newsletter and website investigating digital deception. A site like Goodreads, where it's not necessarily requiring people to verify their ID or things like that is, you know, it's really about trying to get as many people to be as active as possible. And they're not super concerned about making sure that everybody is, you know, using their exact name.

3:00Over the last few months, BBC Trending has become aware of several types of untrustworthy reviews and ratings on Goodreads. Pre-publication ratings, which appear before a book is published, are permitted on the site and are supposed to be based on advanced copies. But we've learned of the system being abused and books being rated before those copies are out. We've also seen so-called pre-read reviews, where users review a book which has been published while openly declaring they haven't read it. This is accompanied by a star rating, which then gets factored into an overall average reader rating, making it confusing for would-be readers of the title.

3:39And there have even been suggestions that bots could be reviewing thousands of books at once. But why does this matter? Well, active communities of Goodreads enthusiasts cluster on Reddit. Here they share their experiences of the website and some acknowledge that ratings can play an important role in helping them decide whether to read a book or not. Here's one user's comment. We all say ratings and reviews are just a guide, but I've noticed how strongly they affect my choices, sometimes without me even realising. If a book's rating is below 4 on Goodreads, I almost automatically hesitate. It could be 3.9, which really isn't bad, but that subconscious bias kicks in.

4:26Maybe this isn't worth my time. Even more interesting is how reading the first few reviews shapes perception. So it's pretty clear low ratings can drive a wedge between readers and books that could work for them. Those inside the publishing industry also talk of book deals, publicity drives and career trajectories resting on decent star ratings. So obviously it does come into some publishers thinking about whether they will acquire another book or continue with an author. That's Eloise Wood, Deputy News Editor at Industry Publication, The Bookseller. These things, they affect authors' careers potentially.

5:08and it feels very important, particularly with the publishing industry, to protect it and nurture it. There's a gap of time between when a book deal is announced and when the finished work reaches the public. This is when the author writes, rewrites and has their work sub-edited. It's also when major websites like Goodreads and their owner Amazon start to list details of the book publicly on their pages. Usually, there isn't a great deal to say. After all, no-one has even had the chance to read the book. But a shell of a page goes online anyway, containing bits of information that have been made available publicly, like the name of the author and the name of the book.

5:58In the picturesque English southern coastal town of Brighton, I meet crime writer and former BBC journalist Joe Furness at a local independent bookshop. Hey, how are you doing? Thank you very much for making the time to speak to me. That's all right, thanks for coming all this way. You came down from London, I see. She tells me that one day, in the limbo period before advanced copies of her latest book, Guilt Trip, came out, she went on to Goodreads and started to look at the shell page for the novel. I went on to the page because I was uploading actually the cover. Strangely enough, as part of this automatic process, the cover doesn't actually load up.

6:34So as soon as I get the cover, I sort of just popped on to put it up there. And I noticed that it had one two-star review or two-star rating. Jo says she thought the rating had come from a bot, so she added a comment. This book is not yet available for review. Before long, she received a rap over the knuckles from Goodreads itself. Oh, you've bought the actual email itself? Yeah, I bought the email from Goodreads with me so that I can quote it. So it says, a comment you posted was brought to our attention. We ask that authors refrain from confronting users who give their books a low rating. And this email told me that my comment had been taken down.

7:17So that sort of piqued my interest because suddenly I thought, well, hang on, this isn't a bot. There's obviously a real person behind this because they've complained about my comments. So I clicked and I could see then that they had in fact one starred or two starred all of my books. every one of my nine listings. And these nine listings include some foreign editions. So again, I'm confident that they haven't read this book because Guilt Trip is not available yet. Jo says that she had no idea who might have a vendetta against her and her books. So she looked at the account responsible for the postings.

7:53What details could she unearth about the poster who went under the username Benji? They didn't have any followers. They weren't following anyone. they appeared to have been set up just to one-star all of my listings. I asked Jo how this made her feel. Yeah, so it's not just an irritation, it's not just a nuisance, it has a much deeper resonance and it's to do with allowing people, all people, I'm talking about authors and real readers, genuine readers, to feel that they can go out into these spaces and express their opinions and talk about what's important to them. At this point, Jo says that she reported the incident to Goodreads via a form on their website, citing community rules that forbid the use of the platform to harass others.

8:38And I got an email back from Goodreads sort of acknowledging the report, but nothing then happened. Nothing happened for weeks and weeks. Jo is well plugged into the wider writing community, both in real life and in author-only Facebook groups. It was in one of these groups that she says that she noticed other writers also complaining about being targeted on Goodreads with unfair ratings. So I wrote a short article about it, which was published in the bookseller magazine, which is sort of the industry magazine for publishing. In my case, this review was taken down, but only when the bookseller magazine contacted Goodreads, and then suddenly all those reviews of those ratings have disappeared.

9:21Jo's article struck a nerve with fellow authors, says Eloise Wood, deputy news editor at The Bookseller. I think Jo Furness' piece felt almost like a kind of call to arms of just saying this problem is really affecting people still and something needs to happen. And, yeah, lots of authors then got in touch saying, yes, sharing their experience, which was very similar. But it was quite a mix of authors and, you know, it was romance, it was crime, and that it was more general thriller, and one or two more literary novels, actually. The bookseller have now written several articles about Goodreads reviews, including recently a story in which authors of queer fiction said that their work was receiving low ratings before the advanced copies were released because of the subject matter.

10:12Typically, pre-publication reviews are supposed to be based on advanced copies, But it's alleged that they weren't in these cases and they weren't in Joe's. Goodreads say, We have been in contact with the author in question, and the relevant reviews are no longer visible on Goodreads. If you like a good mystery, you'll be wondering who was behind the account, going by the username Benji, that gave low ratings to all nine of Joe Furness's book listings. Well, not much information was available about the account, and searching for that username within Goodreads proved futile. A number of other accounts use the same name, many with incredibly low numbers of followers.

10:55So in order to get to the bottom of whether the account was owned by a real person or a bot, I asked Craig Silverman for his thoughts. There's nothing here that would aid us in determining whether the Benji account is being operated by a human or a bot. And most of the time, you wouldn't need a bot to leave a bunch of one-star reviews. So doing this manually is really easy. And this is one of the things about the platform design that's important to note about Goodreads, which is that you don't have to leave a text review. You don't have to verify you bought the book or read the book. You could literally go in and in the span of a few minutes, if you wanted to go on a one-star spree, you as a human could do this and one-star tons of books very easily.

11:41So it is a very low friction way to be able to give a negative signal in a very small amount of time. Jo's story of being targeted by negative reviews on Goodreads doesn't end with the removal of the Benji account's ratings, though. Her article in the bookseller prompted further backlash, this time from another account. Initially, I had great response from lots of people. And then I noticed on Goodreads that I had one new one star review that had popped up on my book from someone who took issue with the fact that I had written the article. I'll admit this is a response to the author invading reviewer spaces, said the commenter on their one star review.

12:25They claimed that Joe had misused the term abuse to include authors receiving negative reviews. Adding it was, it's not something to run to admins about. It literally doesn't matter how someone uses Goodreads. There was no indication they had read Jo's work. I contacted the account behind that one star review, asking them if they would be willing to have a chat with me about Goodreads and the rating system. They declined to comment. That review and rating are no longer available on Goodreads. Jo is keen to stress, though, that for her, the story of Benji and that subsequent commenter are less about those individuals concerned and more about the platform itself.

13:03My issue really isn't so much with that person doing that for their own strange reasons. My issue is more to do with the fact that there's this huge, very powerful review site and they give you no power whatsoever as an author to have any sort of right of reply to these kinds of posts, to these kinds of ratings or reviews. There is essentially no way to challenge them. And when something is that obviously malicious, I don't understand why we as authors cannot have some kind of right of appeal. Craig Silverman says the challenge of preventing abuse of the pre-publication review system is not impossible to overcome.

13:45Goodreads, if they wanted to go a step further, they might actually require people who want to leave a pre-publication review to provide proof that they actually have a digital or physical copy of the book. and supply a photo of them holding it. I suspect that's probably a few steps too far of what they'll be willing to do. Coming up, low ratings target an author in Pakistan and a mystery Goodreads account which has dished out over 34 ,000 book ratings. I'm Jonathan Griffin, and you're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. Self-directed investing. Trading. Full-service wealth management.

14:24Automated investing. financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning. Phew. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more. I'm Jonathan Griffin and this is the documentary with BBC Trending. We've heard about the concerns authors have about pre-publication reviews. But what if your book is already out there and reviewers start dishing out ratings while openly admitting they've never read it?

15:08So I took a look and what I came across was something called pre-read reviews. Now, pre-read review is something that you have already made your judgment that you will not like this book, even though you haven't read a single page of it. And that's what I encountered, and that's what felt a bit strange to me and a bit odd. This is Awais Khan, an author from Lahore, Pakistan, who writes fiction books with social issues at their heart. His work is typically well-received by the public, with his novels getting ratings between four and five stars on Amazon. The results are similar on Goodreads. But not everyone is a fan of his work.

15:47In May of this year, one reviewer left a one-star rating and a long scathing review on Khan's highest public-rated book, Someone Like Her. This is probably the worst book I've ever read, they said, before detailing a number of gripes with plot points and characters. So far, so good. A weiss, and this is something Joe told me too, accepts that you can't always please your audience. and criticism from people who've read his work is something authors learn how to deal with. But then the commenter went on to his other titles, leaving what they called pre-read reviews and one-star ratings. Probably going to hate read this book so I can rant about it to a friend, yay.

16:29Said one. I'm literally going to hate read this book so I can torture myself more. They wrote on another. Although these comments are unlikely to mislead anyone into thinking that they'd read the books, the one-star ratings do influence the overall book scores, and Goodreads users may reasonably assume ratings are an indication of the views of people who've read the books. Aweiss was keen to highlight to me how receiving negative reviews like this could, in his words, devastate a debut author. I asked him how it made him feel as an experienced writer. It's years going to writing a book because it's not the actual act of writing it.

17:07There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes where a lot of your thought process has been going on for months and then you start writing the book or start planning the book. So yeah, it is a very, it's a huge labor of love. It takes a lot of time and effort, blood, sweat and tears because we all know that there's not enough money in publishing. But so yeah, I feel that this is like doubly hard to deal with. So please do try and read them before you make up your mind that they're horrible. On Reddit threads, there is feverish speculation about whether some of the most prolific Goodreads accounts are automated bots producing low ratings.

17:49One of these threads really caught my eye. It relates to an account with no profile picture called Pug Ugly. If the statistics are to be believed, Pug Ugly is, according to Goodreads, the second biggest reader of all time in the United States. I asked Craig Silverman, co-founder of Indicator, for his thoughts about the account. One of the things that stands out to me right away about this account is you look, they've got over 34 ,000 ratings, which is just adding the star. And it's a 1.09 average. So tons and tons of ratings, overwhelmingly negative. But under that, it says 44 reviews. And to me, there's an interesting kind of spread there between insane high-level activity of leaving mostly one and maybe two star ratings, which is like the easiest thing to do, least amount of effort.

18:42But then 44 reviews where they've actually written something. In contrast to those 44 written reviews, Craig calls 34 ,000 ratings low friction activity, something easy for a user to do very quickly. You know, I might want to do a bit of math of like, okay, so 13 years, 34 ,000 plus ratings. How many ratings is that per year? How many ratings is that per day? And just sort of see, like, does that track with someone being able to, you know, have some human activity? While it doesn't seem likely that anyone could have read that number of books, about seven per day, I wanted to speak to Pug Ugly.

19:21So I sent them an email inviting them for a chat about the website that they've poured so much time into. They didn't get back to me. But it is possible to run some tests on their email address and see where else it's in operation. The email has been used on sites like Pinterest, Spotify, Google, Etsy and Disney to name a few. All of which creates the impression that this isn't a burner email set up purely for Goodreads. Maybe Goodreads need to put in a speed bump and say, hey, you've rated 50 books in the span of 10 minutes. You know, we're not going to allow you to rate any more books for the next X number of days or X number of hours.

19:58or we're going to put your account through a certain kind of review because we think there may be suspicious activity. We approached Goodreads for comment. They told us, When a concern is raised about content or behavior, we investigate against our reviews or community guidelines and take appropriate action. Craig Silverman says it's not just authors who need Goodreads to succeed in tackling unfair reviews. It's the website itself. If people on Goodreads or people considering using Goodreads to find books suddenly lack confidence that actually the things getting good reviews or bad reviews are really the result of genuine activity, well, then the whole point of using Goodreads starts to come into question.

20:41And so for me, it fundamentally is a threat to the integrity and usefulness of their platform. And I hope that this and other scrutiny might cause them to sort of look at this and say, let's take action. that's it this week for this episode of the documentary i'm jonathan griffin from bbc trending this episode was mixed by hal haynes our editor was flora carmichael if you want to message trending with your thoughts on this or any of our other programs then you can email me it's jonathan.griffin at bbc.co.uk thank you for listening