Thursday, June 10, 2010

Her fans trashed my Listmania lists on Amazon

I started pointing out that Ms. K writes synopses NOT reviews. Next thing I knew my 4 Listmania Lists went from 100% Helpful to 27% in under 30 days. I believe her fans are clearing behind this and it burns my shorts to have this happen to me (and probably many other people).
Does anyone know it there is anything I can do to restore my ratings short of just pulling the lists altogether. I hate that her fans are so vindictive and intolerant. They need to grow up and quit acting like spoiled brats. They are ruining Amazon. Since Amazon won't count my "Not Helpful on Ms. K's reviews anymore, I at least leave a comment.
If you want to see my lists look for "The Butler" (AKA Whimsical Cats) before I take them down to republish at a later date.

3 comments:

Malleus said...

Yeah, it's a neg campaign -- we've all had this in the past (first they attack your reviews, if you have any, but Amazon lately made this impossible, meaning if one and the same person keeps negging (or, "pozzing" for that matter) someone's reviews, then after a (rather small) number of "hits" his votes stop counting and the ones already cast are removed). That's reviews, but perhaps they do not watch other stuff, so I would start by emailing Amazon about this concerted attack on your profile and see what they will do (if anything). In general though, keep in mind: they're not on your side -- they like their shills. Quite honestly, I'm surprised they didn't blow you off the site yet (they've done it many times in the past). That's the cost of saying something there: the shills really "own" the site, if you start squawking, they will attack you in many ways: direct verbal bullying, massive negging, "report this" button, and what not. Amazon, clearly, is on their side, so be prepared. But they did in the past (if I remember it right) remove the campaign-negging votes, at least on some occasions.

The best way to approach this is simply not to worry about votes (who cares, really?) Alternatively, you may want to set up another posting account there (not a real-name one) and use it to post comments. Amazingly, one can have any number of such accounts on Amazon (why would that be, think of it. Kinda handy for the shills to set up a bunch of sock-puppet accounts and vote for themselves and post supportive and appreciative comments to their own reviews). It's a circus. I'm amazed not everyone is aware of that though -- it's done so brazenly, hard to overlook. And it's not just Harriet: I think most of their "top reviewers" are shills, except no one really post billions of reviews like Harriet (~six a day since 1999, it's a decade; near all five stars). And of course, it is rare that they are in addition so laughable too (errors, spelling, disjointedness, broken English, etc.) That's what makes Harriet unique, not dishonestly, they're all dishonest pigs there.

Stanley H Nemeth said...

Malleus:
You're on target as usual. The first thing people of good faith like the Butler should realize is that Amazon is hopelessly complicit in ongoing fraud. An outside agency (e.g. the FTC) might bring it into responsibility by pushing it up against a legal wall. For a long time ,and consistently, letters of outrage have been duly ignored by Besos and Company. So clearly they have a stake in maintaining the status quo of shills and crudely penalizing the whistle blowers by wipeouts. Short of FTC regulation, I think the only solution would be for good faith reviewers and commentators to inform Amazon en masse that they're refusing to help sales by leaving the site as commentators and purchasers until such time as Besos cleans up his act. A boycott in large numbers (with letters attesting to same)seems to me the next strategy. But how to organize it? Any ideas?

The Butler Did It said...

The latest from Amazon: "our technical support team has been alerted
to this issue twice, and they have not yet found any definitive
discrepancies in the voting"!

How is that possible? On June 13th alone I got 100 negs. I call that block voting -- or what they are calling "campaign voting"!