I just assume all reviews are lying unless I know the reviewer or have validated their past reviews. I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance. This certainly doesn't mean you have to HIDE the public reviews by unknown people.... just give an incentive to give input at what sort of reviews you want.

> I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance.

Goodreads does that though. Reviews from friends and people you follow are shown first

Ah, interesting, apologies for the accidental goodreads slander. I moved on to storygraph a while ago and haven't looked back.

Doesn't that require the user to curate a friends list of people with comparable tastes? I've never met someone who has my exact (eclectic and multilingual) taste in books.

Besides, I wouldn't even know who to 'friend' or 'follow' on a site like this. What's the point? Chances are I'd just end up in some bubble, which defeats the whole point of reading.

Presumably you'd agree with a review and then follow someone.

I can't say I've ever thought of reading as a way to fight against a "bubble", nor am I sure that being in a "bubble" is inherently a bad thing. I don't think my life is any worse for identifying that I'm not into fantasy smut or steven pinker or self-help neuroticism and in fact my life is better without these authors in it.

Yeah, reviews are inherently social. I’m waiting for someone to build a review platform on top of ATProto (bluesky).

We'll definitely implement automatic review bombing protection. I'm thinking something like Steam does.