The travails of a guy trying to post a negative review to Amazon.com

Amazon will accept other 1-star reviews, just not his. This is a very frustrating tale, and it shows just how amazingly, totally, completely two-faced Amazon can be if it (apparently) thinks a review might damage a book’s sales. It’s a study in giving someone the brush-off while still ‘officially’ holding out hope.

For maximum effect, read the linked pages in order.

Upon reading that website, I went :eek: :smack: :rolleyes: :eek: :smack: :eek: :smack: :frowning: :mad: :rolleyes:

This supports my belief that stupidity should HURT.

I agree. Hopefully, as word of this spreads Amazon will have to address the issue.

Chill out. Amazon reviews are absolutely worthless – no one really pays any attention.

I was listening to NPR the other night and may not have caught the whole conversation, but they were saying that when you search for the term “abortion” on Amazon, the site used to ask in essence, “Do you mean adoption?” People complained about that and Amazon claimed that because the words were so close in spelling that they thought it would be helpful. But of course, when you would search for “adoption” it did NOT ask “Do you mean abortion?” I believe they said it was changed now. I haven’t checked for myself. I don’t think I will use Amazon as much in the future though.

Well I tried it out and I got abortion-related titles plus this:

“abortion”(Related Searches: if these walls could talk, pro-choice, pro-life)

Seems pretty balanced to me. The review issue is awful, though.

This is almost certainly a result of the automated mechanism Amazon uses. Do a google search for “jew” and you get “Jew Watch.” This is a result of the algorithms that google uses to determine what a search is actually trying to find. Amazon’s search has similar algorithms that somehow determined that “abortion” was a misspelling. I HIGHLY doubt that there was any political motivation.

Hmmm.

I actually went to that book at amazon, and there is currently one not-at-all-relevant-to-the-book 1-star review:

There are 5 2-star reviews.

Dunno about the guy in the OP’s link.

Just went and looked and found about 7 1-star reviews, including 2 that are titled “non-science” and appear to be copied from the OP’s link. One has a comment about Amazon’s habit of removing bad reviews.

GT

I just logged onto Amazon … the review section has REALLY been revamped. Now it’s like every item has a mini-message board.

Same thing happened with Star Jones’s book, IIRC. The day it came out, and everyone read it, the negative reviews were just piling up and up…until they suddenly disappeared.

Hmmmm…

:dubious:

HERE’S a one star rated book.

Can’t see any problems…

Days ago, I submitted a one star review of a book.

See the result.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471234885/qid=1143813085/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-9607823-9818313?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

And here is another.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785819924/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/104-9607823-9818313?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

Anybody else have a problem with people that review items they haven’t read/watched/listened to? (Yes, I’m sure in this case he did extraneous research on to the author’s website, but still, read it then tear it apart).

Huh. I logged onto Amazon and I can find the reviews again. Weird.

I was thinking the same thing. I’d be more inclined to feel sorry for this guy if he had actually read the damn book.

Sorry, but reading chapter one does not count as having read the book.

I wonder if fans (possibly the Author) were reporting his reviews as bad reviews since the reviewer clearly says he hadn’t read the whole book.

There does seem to be a plethora of new 1 star reviews. If that is dopers, please stop it (at least right now) as it looks very suspicious to anyone who looks at the reviews from Amazon if there is a compaint.

Aren’t they equivalent to the reports of fishing results published by the guy who rents the boats?

Like this one? :stuck_out_tongue: