Interesting Links for 30-06-2025

[andrewducker]

1. The uncomfortable truth about Glastonbury

(tags:festival music business employment OhForFucksSake )

2. Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated

(tags:reviews OhForFucksSake books )

Comments

[simont]

#2: clearly the only defence is to have a secondary site that reviews reviewers. Any reviewer reviewing a book they can't possibly have seen yet gets a low review on the reviewer review site, and then review consumers who want to know whose reviews to trust can check the reviews of the reviewers on the reviewer review site, and not trust the reviews of reviewers with bad reviewer reviews.

I trust that's clear, Minister.

[movingfinger]

Goodreads is owned by Amazon.

[andrewducker]

Quid reviewers ips reviewers?

[andrewducker]

I do wish there were more independent sites.

[bens_dad]

Yes.
When I learnt that, I gave up thinking that Goodreads would be a useful resource
(maybe except when external parties point me at something in particular).

“Goodreads they wouldn’t interfere as they said the reviewer had a perfect right to predict if they’d enjoy it or not. I’m afraid at that point I washed my hands of them as a serious review site that should have some code of conduct."

Very much agreed.

[andrewducker]

Exactly, I'm not going to trust their ratings if they aren't going to curate them at all.

[fub]

I'm using The StoryGraph to keep track of my reading and to-read lists, and it works quite well for me. I've even won some giveaways there!

[foms]

1. That sounds like me talking about gate-show-type events, like Comic Cons and Creation Cons.

[jducoeur]

Sigh -- I really need to get writing. I have a series of articles that I started laying out months ago, puzzling at the bits and pieces we need in order to develop a really useful open reputation protocol. This notion that everybody has reputation -- including and perhaps especially other reviewers -- is pretty clearly central.

We've been collectively talking about this for 25 years, but it seems to be steam engine time: the rise of ubiquitous AI slop is making it just plain necessary in order to make any sense of the online ecosystem. And since the majors can't be trusted with it (their incentives are, to say the least, perverse), I think it's going to be up to the open source community to figure it out...