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Re:Sock Puppets. Online Reviews: Completely Worthless or Onl... by greenyoda on Saturday September 08, 2012 @03:54PM (#4493810)
If a review is littered with phrases such as "modern masterpiece", "will touch your soul" or "a magnificent book", I'm not likely to take it seriously. I pay attention to reviews in which the reviewer can (a) convince me that they've actually read the book and (b) show me that their criteria for a good book have something in common with mine.
Re:Sock Puppets. Online Reviews: Completely Worthless or Onl... by hga on Saturday September 08, 2012 @08:33PM (#4494527)
Exactly; maybe it's just because of age, but by the time on-line reviews became important my BS filters were well developed. Its not very difficult to detect the chaff, and it doesn't take too many heuristics---I like "specificity" a lot---to recognize the honest ones. Then doing your step b is easy.