|
I wrote reviews from years and years back. I did it because I loved books. I did it long before I published any of my own writing/books. I would have been gravely disappointed if Amazon "disallowed" it for some reason. Just a pride thing (and possibly thinking my opinion mattered much more than it did). These days, I expect such silliness out of corporations because they think they can figure out relationships/shills and whatnot by crawling along the web. I still maintain that it doesn't matter and won't help solve the problem. And I do agree there is a problem.
I am pretty sure that if I wanted to be a fake reviewer, I could put a little effort into creating a persona and do a bang-up job of reviewing whatever I wanted--and not tie it to myself. It's possible I could even charge for it. NUMEROUS times I have had reviewers who charge approach me in one way or another and never publicly. I've even had reviewers LEAVE a review and THEN ask to be paid along with an offer to do more reviews. These folks can work completely behind the scenes, target those of us who don't have a lot of reviews, and they can make their work look completely legit. If they stick to email and don't friend on FB or other social media, they probably do just fine. They get free books, make a little money, get ignored by a few writers who won't pay for reviews, and work or not work on reviews as they please.
Amazon won't find these folks. And the more they "target" certain types of activities, the more the reviewers will go underground. So the problem changes and actually makes fake reviews harder to spot.
Just because people don't protect their privacy doesn't make it a good idea for corporations to go crawling around being nosy. I'm sure they think being nosy is legal and fine and benefits them. I happen to think they are incorrect. They are wasting their time on something petty that doesn't even solve the problem. It changes our culture and not for the better.
|