For the previous week, I’ve been watching Goodreads drama occur in what seems like sluggish movement. Debut writer Cait Corrain admitted to fabricating at the least six Goodreads person accounts, and leaving unfavorable evaluations (together with one-star rankings) of different debut authors’ books — lots of whom have been authors of colour. On Monday, her publisher dropped her book Crown of Starlight, and Corrain posted a mea culpa on X (formerly Twitter).
The coordinated efforts of followers and authors helped expose Corrain’s overview bombing. Final week, Iron Widow writer Xiran Jay Zhao tweeted a thread noting a collection of one-star evaluations on debut science fiction and fantasy authors’ Goodreads accounts, with out naming any names. In addition they shared a 31-page doc of unknown origin (which Polygon reviewed) that contained screenshots of accounts that added Crown of Starlight to quite a few most-anticipated lists, and left one-star evaluations on forthcoming books by Kamilah Cole, Frances White, Bethany Baptiste, Molly X. Chang, R.M. Virtues, Okay.M. Enright, and others.
This as soon as once more brings Goodreads’ moderation points to the fore. When reached for remark, a Goodreads spokesperson despatched Polygon an announcement: “Goodreads takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously. We have clear reviews and community guidelines, and we remove reviews and/or accounts that violate these guidelines.” The corporate added, relating to Corrain’s one-star evaluations, “The reviews in question have been removed.” Goodreads community guidelines state that members mustn’t “misrepresent [their] identity or create accounts to harass other members” and that “artificially inflating or deflating a book’s ratings or reputation violates our rules.” Nevertheless it doesn’t clarify how these pointers are enforced.
Goodreads additionally pointed Polygon to an Oct. 30 post about “authenticity of ratings and reviews,” which stated the corporate “strengthened account verification to block potential spammers,” expanded its customer support group, and added extra methods for members to report “problematic content.” The corporate addressed overview bombing and “launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines.”
Ostensibly, these measures have been put in place after several especially high-profile instances of review bombing on the platform this yr. However these new instruments didn’t forestall Corrain from overview bombing authors in November and December. The rules, together with the October one, ask customers to “report” content material that “breaks our rules,” seemingly shifting duty onto the person base. It’s previous time for Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, to contemplate implementing extra complete in-house moderation — or at the least extra refined inner instruments — if not for the sake of its customers, then for the sake of authors who’re on the mercy of the platform.
Goodreads is extraordinarily influential. There are over 150 million members on the platform, 7 million of whom participated in this year’s Reading Challenge. The platform additionally has few limitations in opposition to these types of review-bombing campaigns, as any person in good standing can put up a overview to the platform, together with earlier than the e book has been printed. Pre-publish evaluations are a part of the advertising and marketing cycle, and they’re expressly allowed on Goodreads. Publishers encourage authors to get reviews on the Goodreads pages for their forthcoming books, together with in the course of the lead-up interval to launch. Readers can entry advance copies of books by official channels like NetGalley, or by receiving an advance reader copy from the writer, however there’s no method to know whether or not a reviewer on Goodreads has really obtained an advance copy or not. (Although Goodreads overview pointers require readers to disclose in the event that they acquired a free copy, not all customers comply with these guidelines — mainly, you’ll be able to put up your overview regardless.)
That is clearly not a problem that’s novel to Goodreads, however many different platforms require some type of verification earlier than reviewing. Etsy permits customers to overview a product after they buy it. Steam solely allows users to write reviews of products in their Steam library, and consists of “hours played” within the overview. The closest comparability to Goodreads I can consider is Yelp, which permits folks to go away evaluations of eating places and different institutions, and which additionally has to deal with waves of negative reviews — typically involving complaints about issues which might be totally out of that enterprise’s management. So far as fan-review platforms for leisure go, there’s Letterboxd, a platform the place customers can monitor and overview movies. Nevertheless it doesn’t maintain a candle to the cultural chokehold of Rotten Tomatoes, a platform that aggregates overview scores from professionally printed critics (whereas it additionally aggregates viewers scores, these are listed individually). Rotten Tomatoes has its own issues, however its system does imply evaluations don’t have a tendency to come from individuals who haven’t even consumed the media in query.
As an informal peruser on Goodreads, wanting for a e book to learn, how have you learnt if a reviewer really learn the e book? I assume the reply, at the least proper now, is: You possibly can’t. And as followers have change into extra refined and coordinated on the web, it’s change into even more durable to take the platform’s evaluations and rankings severely. In July, Eat, Pray, Love writer Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her forthcoming book The Snow Forest — which was set in Russia — after some 500 customers, who had not learn the e book, left one-star evaluations. Gilbert is much extra established and higher resourced than the debut authors Corrain focused. She nonetheless made the choice to pull her e book.
These debut authors didn’t have the identical power or cachet, and it’s painful to think about how Corrain’s unfavorable evaluations might have impacted these authors’ e book gross sales — and subsequently their alternative to write any extra books — had Corrain’s actions gone unnoticed. Publishing is filled with sufficient hurdles as it’s, especially for authors of color, with out this big one so shut to the end line.
