For the previous week, I’ve been watching Goodreads drama occur in what appears like sluggish movement. Debut creator Cait Corrain admitted to fabricating at the very least six Goodreads consumer accounts, and leaving damaging evaluations (together with one-star rankings) of different debut authors’ books — a lot of whom had been authors of shade. On Monday, her writer dropped her guide Crown of Starlight, and Corrain posted a mea culpa on X (previously Twitter).
The coordinated efforts of followers and authors helped expose Corrain’s evaluate bombing. Final week, Iron Widow creator Xiran Jay Zhao tweeted a thread noting a sequence 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 lot of 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 accountability of sustaining the authenticity and integrity of rankings and defending our neighborhood of readers and authors very severely. Now we have clear evaluations and neighborhood tips, and we take away evaluations and/or accounts that violate these tips.” The corporate added, concerning Corrain’s one-star evaluations, “The evaluations in query have been eliminated.” Goodreads neighborhood tips state that members shouldn’t “misrepresent [their] id or create accounts to harass different members” and that “artificially inflating or deflating a guide’s rankings or fame violates our guidelines.” But it surely doesn’t clarify how these tips are enforced.
Goodreads additionally pointed Polygon to an Oct. 30 submit about “authenticity of rankings and evaluations,” which mentioned the corporate “strengthened account verification to dam potential spammers,” expanded its customer support crew, and added extra methods for members to report “problematic content material.” The corporate addressed evaluate bombing and “launched the power to quickly restrict submission of rankings and evaluations on a guide throughout instances of bizarre exercise that violate our tips.”
Ostensibly, these measures had been put in place after a number of particularly high-profile situations of evaluate bombing on the platform this yr. However these new instruments didn’t forestall Corrain from evaluate bombing authors in November and December. The rules, together with the October one, ask customers to “report” content material that “breaks our guidelines,” seemingly shifting accountability onto the consumer base. It’s previous time for Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, to think about implementing extra complete in-house moderation — or at the very 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 on this yr’s Studying Problem. The platform additionally has few obstacles towards these types of review-bombing campaigns, as any consumer in good standing can submit a evaluate to the platform, together with earlier than the guide has been revealed. Pre-publish evaluations are a part of the advertising and marketing cycle, and they’re expressly allowed on Goodreads. Publishers encourage authors to get evaluations on the Goodreads pages for his or her forthcoming books, together with in the course of the lead-up interval to launch. Readers can entry advance copies of books via official channels like NetGalley, or by receiving an advance reader copy from the writer, however there’s no technique to know whether or not a reviewer on Goodreads has really obtained an advance copy or not. (Although Goodreads evaluate tips require readers to reveal in the event that they obtained a free copy, not all customers observe these guidelines — principally, you possibly can submit your evaluate regardless.)
That is clearly not a difficulty that’s novel to Goodreads, however many different platforms require some type of verification earlier than reviewing. Etsy permits customers to evaluate a product after they buy it. Steam solely permits customers to put in writing evaluations of merchandise of their Steam library, and contains “hours performed” within the evaluate. The closest comparability to Goodreads I can consider is Yelp, which permits individuals to depart evaluations of eating places and different institutions, and which additionally has to deal with waves of damaging evaluations — typically involving complaints about issues which are fully 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 evaluate movies. But it surely doesn’t maintain a candle to the cultural chokehold of Rotten Tomatoes, a platform that aggregates evaluate scores from professionally revealed critics (whereas it additionally aggregates viewers scores, these are listed individually). Rotten Tomatoes has its personal points, however its system does imply evaluations don’t have a tendency to come back from individuals who haven’t even consumed the media in query.
As an informal peruser on Goodreads, searching for a guide to learn, how are you aware if a reviewer really learn the guide? I suppose the reply, at the very least proper now, is: You may’t. And as followers have change into extra refined and coordinated on the web, it’s change into even tougher to take the platform’s evaluations and rankings severely. In July, Eat, Pray, Love creator Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her forthcoming guide The Snow Forest — which was set in Russia — after some 500 customers, who had not learn the guide, left one-star evaluations. Gilbert is way more established and higher resourced than the debut authors Corrain focused. She nonetheless made the choice to tug her guide.
These debut authors didn’t have the identical energy or cachet, and it’s painful to think about how Corrain’s damaging evaluations might have impacted these authors’ guide gross sales — and subsequently their alternative to put in writing any extra books — had Corrain’s actions gone unnoticed. Publishing is stuffed with sufficient hurdles as it’s, particularly for authors of shade, with out this enormous one so near the end line.