{"id":138,"date":"2020-01-24T11:51:38","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T19:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stasosphere.com\/entrepreneur-being\/?p=138"},"modified":"2020-04-14T19:00:11","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T03:00:11","slug":"machine-learning-hallucinations-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stasosphere.com\/entrepreneur-being\/138-machine-learning-hallucinations-amazon\/","title":{"rendered":"Authors of Aging Tech Books on Amazon Will Have Their Ratings Dropped"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TL;DR<\/strong>: Amazon has implemented a new strategy of giving old reviews a significantly lower weight than the newer ones. And should anybody post a single bad review as of recent, which would be normal for outdated tech books, that review will pretty much define the quality of the book (== terrible).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gaming reviews has been a big issue for any marketplace, and in particular on Amazon. Amazon does a pretty so-so job at weeding out fake reviews out as it is gamed freely by some Chinese vendors in an inventive way that appears legit<\/a>. But it has recently deployed a new strategy of how it weighs each given review. Reviews with no ‘Verified Purchase’ tag get a lesser weight than those with the tag, and older reviews get progressively less weight in the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(note: I have no direct source to confirm that this is so, and I derived this by looking at multiple listing, asking for help<\/a> from others<\/a> and doing the math, which after several days of investigation lead to what appears to be a good understanding of what is probably going on. So please don’t take this as a definitive answer.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s Destroy my Book’s Reputation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My first book<\/a> was published in 2003. Now long forgotten by most, the Apache\/mod_perl technology became outdated around 2010, and moreover, this particular book was written about the first generation of this technology, and which got superseded by the second generation in 2004. As you can tell this book is not relevant for today’s tech world, unless you happen to maintain a 15-year old system that refuses to quit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until recently, that book had an almost excellent total 4.4 rating with 3 5-star reviews, and 4 4-star reviews. Which I think reflects well the reality. It’s an excellent work of 900 pages that took me 3.5 years of hard work to create. Once I finished the writing, I discovered that writing technology books is a foolishness, because they get outdated before they hit the presses. It’s better now, when books are digital, as compared to dead trees. But even with digital books, for an author to constantly update the book to match the ever-changing at a furious speed APIs and validating that the code still works is an insanely time-wasteful effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I know all those reviews on my book were honest and I have never solicited those. Only one of those reviews has a Verified Purchase tag, but many of my books were purchased at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention – I know that, because for 7 years I taught workshops at that conference and signed many of those books that were purchased there. Powell Books was usually the book vendor there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someone recently rated my book at 1-star (no review). I can’t imagine, who in their right mind would buy a 17-year old book on a long dead technology, and expect something good out of it? No wonder they must have been enraged when they started reading it and as a result left a I-hate-it 1-star rating. It could have been done out of pure malice too. Who knows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might say, what’s the big deal. Indeed, it shouldn’t be a big deal, since no single review should define a book’s quality – but, unfortunately, it is a big deal. Since after that rating was added, the total rating of the book went from 4.4 to 2.9. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, you might say, no way. But, unfortunately, numbers don’t lie:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So we have 7 positive and 1 negative ratings and you can see the system gave a whooping 48% weight to a single negative rating! Don’t you find it just odd?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the book has no chance to balance this machinated wrong-doing, because other than a straightforward manipulation of me asking someone to buy the book, rating it at 5-stars and refunding them the money, nobody in their sane mind is going to do it on their own will, because the book is 17 years old and is no longer relevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might say that, isn’t this a good thing that no longer relevant books get bad rating? It’s a difficult question. It depends on who is looking:<\/p>\n\n\n\n