Disregard any Amazon Review with a "Top 10 Reviewer" Label on It

On something called Consumerist, an obviously intelligent fellow by the name Chris Walters writes in an article called The Fakery Behind Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers":

Amazon reviews, especially the effusive ones, have always been suspect—you never know when a five-star review came from an employee, publicist, or marketing type. Slate describes the dishonest world of Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers," where a small group of writers churn out purple-prosed blurbs and jacket-ready compliments at an astounding rate, sometimes for a fee. In turn, these reviewers are inundated with a sort of fame as well as free merchandise—mostly books in the past, but now electronics and other goods. Because good reviews sell more books, Amazon has no incentive to weed out the reviewers who have turned the system into a cottage industry. We suggest you disregard any review with a "Top 10 Reviewer" label on it. [Emphasis mine] [...]

My thoughts precisely — except I don't think "the group" is small, and I would extend the final suggestion to all reviewers with a "Top" denomination, be it "Top 10" or "Top 50" or even "Top 1000" (I just don't believe a normal independent bookreader (rather than a hired review-writer) will be willing to write a gigantic number of reviews that is necessary in order to break into the "Top" reviewer ranks).

Personally, I do read reviews when buying stuff there, but I start from going directly to one- and two-star reviews. If they make good sense, that's the end of this item — I don't even bother with positives, since I trust the authors/publishers to manufacture any number of gushingly extatic five-starrers for every piece of crap on earth. Otoh, if the negatives are not terribly convincing, I will peruse positive reviews too — but I always read them, analytically, not just let the bare fact that there are such reviews motivate me to reach for my wallet.

Iow, there are two approaches to dealing with Amazon reviews these days:

(1) If you're a moron, do NOT pay any attention to them (lest you get owned).

(2) If you do want to use them, don't be a moron — read them carefully; begin with the negatives. Never pay much attention to any particular review's starrage and especially "helpfulness" (voted, purportedly, by the public, but I bet, mostly by the shills, who vote "for" their and friends' reviews so as bump them up, and "against" the low-starrage-dealing enemies, so as to push them down, out of sight, off the first page; for more on that see our Publishing giant Elsevier in hot water over hiring shills, The Belkin Saga (hiring shills on Amazon), and Why John T. Reed does not sell his books on Amazon any more (a.k.a. Amazon “fixes” review problem)).

Why is Amazon Deleting Comments?

On March 8 Amazon poster Manny R. Brooklyn added a comment with a link to an article on this blog (right below: Klausner Protection Squad negs comments but doesn't vote for review itself). This comment was immediately deleted by Amazon (Manny got blown off the site too). Why? Needless to say, Amazon never offers an explanation. But based on past experience, it's never been a problem to add a link to a comment under a review: it's done a lot. So it's not that there's an Amazon guideline not to post links. Then, one must conclude, the reason for this Amazonian deletion had something to do with the article the link lead to. Is Amazon hiding something here? What and why?

Stats Update: In the last half a year Harriet Klausner reviewed

Thanks to an inquisitive poster we now have exact numbers for Harriet Klausner's contribution to Amazon reviews system during the last half a year.

[...]on Mar. 10, 2011 4:59 AM PST Guy the Gorilla says: [...] For those keeping track, here's a quick summary of her latest activity:

- 228 "reviews" in September 2010
- 296 "reviews" in October 2010
- 187 "reviews" in November 2010
- 192 "reviews" in December 2010
- 185 "reviews" in January 2011
- 229 "reviews" in February 2011

And so far in March, and it is only the 10th of the month, 90 "reviews," so the possibility of a banner, 300 "review" month remains a distinct possibility. [...]

Good! Now let's get some averages. We can easily see that Harriet has left her old ten-year average of just-about six (6) books a day behind (her fist reviews under the current account had been posted in late November 1999). Also, to refresh our memory: these daily averages are calculated from the number of reviews actually posted — remember how Harriet (reportedly) explained the all-positiveness of her reviews record? Here's how: she reviews only the books she liked; the ones she read but didn't like she does not review. So she reads even more books than she reviews. And so, here are her recent averages (only the good books):
- September 2010 daily average, books/day: 7.6
- October 2010 daily average, books/day: 9.55
- November 2010 daily average, books/day: 6.23
- December 2010 daily average, books/day: 6.2
- January 2011 daily average, books/day: 5.97
- February 2011 daily average, books/day: 8.18

- March 2011 (first 10-days) daily average, books/day: 10

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Note: Remember, in her profile, Our Lady of Faux Review says she was born with a gift of speed-reading, and that she reads two books a day. We don't have to believe this either, but even if we did, we can see that she actually reviews three to five times more books than she herself claims to read. The former number includes only the books she liked, the latter all books she tried to read, including the ones she didn't like and, consequently, didn't end up reviewing. Hmmm..... so she reads more books than she then reviews, yet she posts more reviews than the overall number of books she claims to be able to read! The Klausner Paradox.

Klausner Protection Squad negs comments but doesn't vote for review itself

Poster Guy the Gorilla raises an interesting issue:

Guy the Gorilla says:
It's either 22 mentally deranged people, or the same mentally deranged person circling back for the 22nd time.

I wonder if it may be Harriet herself, like I said earlier. If you'll notice, not one of these 22 "defenders" has thought to vote Harriet's original review itself as helpful. That is very odd. Makes me think it's her, and she can't bring herself to vote for her own review [...]

No, no, no. Come one, why would one suspect Harriet of such cowardice? The issue, I'm guessing, is far simpler. Let's go back some five-to-eight years.

Back then anyone could post reviews: you only needed to register with an email address and a password (the email address didn't need to be valid). So you could set up any number of accounts and start posting reviews (to your own books, for example, which is still done a lot — I'm gonna be posting an article about it soon). Then, in the mid-2000s some time Amazon started to require a purchase to be made from an account before it could be used to post reviews and comments. I'm not sure what this was supposed to ensure, since one could still set up any number of such accounts; the only difference was that it would cost you something because every time you'd need to buy something. But, since there's always been a lot of very cheap items there, this requirement would hardly deter an author/publisher flunkey intent on promoting own wares. Amazon could definitely see which such accounts belong to the same person (they shared credit-card personal info), but they have never done anything to prevent the operation (as far as I could see, at least). Anyway, now you need to buy something in order to start posting reviews and — and this answers your question, I believe — vote on reviews.

At the same time, and for the reasons I can't even begin to guess, voting on comments still does not require a purchase, so just like in the good old days of the Amazonian free-for-all, an easy-to-create no-purchase account is enough: when on the "create account" page, all you need is to type in something looking like an email address (blahblah@jibberjabber.net would do) and a password into the entry fields, et voila: you can vote on comments now. Why the difference? Hell knows. Since Amazon proved time and again that they're exceptionally friendly towards the shill — all their software glitches just happen to somehow enable reviewing shenangians and disable anyone trying to talk about it — maybe they wanted to leave one more non-obvious avenue for the shills to manipulate the site: we the veterans is one thing, but I'm sure that a casual visitor would be discouraged if his comment were hit by a large number of negs; this is entirely normal (shills used to do that with enemy reviews themselves: if you ever said something about their crap (in any context), next day you would find your own reviews massively negged).

So, getting back to your over-negged comments, it's quite likely that some member of the Klausner Protection Squad tasked with discouraging of the detractors set up a large number of no-purchase accounts that he then used to neg your and others' comments. The reason he doesn't vote for Harriet's reviews is that he can't: his no-purchase accounts do not allow him to vote on reviews — to overcome that he needs to buy something at least once from every account, and he's probably too cheap for that. Could it be Harriet herself? Why not? Of course it could.

Note: I haven't recently re-tried all these things I'm talking about above; so all this info is at least a year old. But it seems that things still work the way they did back then.

Five Stars! Roger von Oech reviews books by... Roger von Oech

Here's America's Creativity Guru Roger von Oech reviewing Expect the Unexpected (Or You Won't Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus by... Roger von Oech. Five stars, incidentally. A very good book, he really liked it:

Roger's new book is a fun read. [Notice that just like Colonel Gaddafi, Mr von Oech speaks of himself in the third person — this demonstrates the great humility of the two men.] It clearly shows his passion for the ideas of Heraclitus. I think he's done a great job of translating them into practical techniques on how to be more creative. The stories and tips are a delight. I was actually surprised to discover how well a thinker from 2,500 years ago speaks to the current issues. [...]

That's not all. Here Roger reviews X-Ball (Magnetic Design Set), by, um, you guessed it — Roger von Oech. Also five stars.

[...]This X-Ball is a whole lot of fun! I heartily recommend it. It'll put "white caps" on your "gray matter.

Clearly, this is another winner! Neither is this everything! Roger is really keen on letting the public know about real good stuff: here Mr von Oech reviews Innovative Whack Pack, an interesting product with mixed reviews, made by , er... well, no two ways about it — it's made by Roger von Oech! Mr von Oech happens to like it too:

[...]My favorite way of using the deck is to pick one card at random in the morning, and have it be one of my innovation thoughts of the day. If you enjoyed the Creative Whack Pack, I think you'll get a kick (and some ideas) from the Innovative Whack Pack.[...]

Can you get any tackier? The answer is yes, of course, this is not "rape-rape", and at least he posts under his own name, so it's more like silly than criminal. But even as is, it's pretty tacky. Amazon doesn't mind, naturally.

Lassen's reviews gone. RIP.

Check this out: Lassen's profile page with reviews now says "We're sorry, but this customer's list of reviews is currently not available. Please check back soon". Amazon probably got many complaints about his blatant plagiarism and the whole "Lassen Oeuvre" got removed.

I think it's a shame though: it'd be far more edifying if his good works remained, along with the detractors' funny commentary and his vulgar screeching in response.

The most amazing thing is that this semi-literate lowlife is a college professor. Yep, he's supposedly teaching writing (of all things: you should have seen some of his comments) in some provincial college. How did he manage to get the gig? Kids take out large loans to pay for tuition, and for their money they get exposed to this thieving vulgar scumbag's "instruction". Blows my mind.

PS. Of course you can still¹ read his reviews in the "sorted-by-comment" page (comments are unreachable even there though).

PPS. Did you notice that Amazon just bumped off two more whistle-blowing posters, "Jason Kirkfield" and "M"? All their posts that I've seen in the last couple of days have been "deleted by Amazon"... don't know if it's only their latest contribution that got eliminated or they suffered a total wipeout. I've been reading them for a couple of months at least and have never seen them post anything less than articulate, well-supported factually, and logical. But they speak about shills and frauds like Klausner and Lassen -- and that, as we know, isn't something up with which Amazon shall put for a long time. Can't touch this! Good bye friends, and join the club; you've earned your stripes.

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Note 1: Regrettably, this is no longer true: everything's gone now, every last vestige of Lassen reviews. What a shame, the stuff was priceless.

Harriet has a competitor? Amazon Top 50 reviewer Amos Lassen

Not that this represents any material threat to our dear Harriet, but the phenomenon is curious in its own right. Apparently plagiarism is rampant on the sacred pages of Amazon. Our correspondent alerts us about another Amazon top reviewer, someone named Amos Lassen. I haven't looked into it in much detail, but upon a cursory perusement it seems interesting. Here's Amos Lassen's reviews page with comments. Many familiar names amongst the critical commenters! Check it out. Oh yeah, there's more: our correspondent points to this Amazon discussion thread for more talk about reviews plagiarism in general and this reviewer in particular (I haven't checked it out, so see for yourselves).

Well, once more: no one beats Harriet at the sheer absurdity of her good works, but hey... there's enough room for everyone under this sun! Check it out and share your thoughts.

Our thanks to our correspondent for pointing us to this new (or not so new, actually -- but certainly new for us) event.

PS. Here's Lassen's Facebook page. Reportedly, it has some relevance to the proceedings as well, so here's the link for the fullness of information. Enjoy!