SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

I’m referring to this list here:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
Reading through this list it became clear to me that something strange is going on.
Misba, an author who I had never heard of before managed to get 3 books (books 1, 2 and 3) of a trilogy she has written in the top 100 of the greatest works of Science Fiction.
She is currently occupying positions #80, #84 and #86.
An accomplishment equal to the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin. Certainly better than Frank Herbert or George Orwell who could only get a paltry 1 and 2 of their books in the top 100 respectively. Misba must surely be one of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time right?
How does one get in the top 100? It’s based on the Book Score. “The books score is based on multiple factors, including the number of people who have voted for it and how highly those voters ranked the book.”
So if a book can get enough fake votes and reviews then it can get onto this list, which I’m sure is exactly what’s happened here.

Every other book rated above Misba’s have at least 25000 ratings. In fact, all but 2 have over 50000. Misba’s books have 13570, 16548 and 4085 ratings.
Her books also have an unusually high percentage of 5 star reviews – 78%, 75% and 75% for all 3 books. For other books, it’s very rare to even get over 60%. For example, even Dune, the highest rated science fiction book of all time only has 52% 5 star reviews. In fact none of the top 10 have a rating higher than 57%.
Many of the reviews follow a similar pattern – It begins with a text excerpt, apparently taken from the book, followed by praise of the book. The text excerpts are mostly esoteric and obscure, not making much sense. The actual reviews themselves are equally baffling. My guess would be that these are mostly AI generated, using bot accounts.
If one looks at the 1 and 2 star reviews, in many cases it is the exact same review by the same account saying the same thing with different star ratings.

Then I started going down the rabbit hole of looking at these fake bot accounts. In some cases it looks like a lot of effort has gone into making them look like genuine accounts. They have other books that they have read, other books they have given equally weird and meaningless reviews to. In many cases they “like” comments from other accounts that have reviewed Misbas books.
Conclusion – there is undoubtedly manipulation happening here using the GoodReads rating system to artificially inflate the popularity of these books and get them onto the Best SciFi list. In my opinion this goes against the spirit of the GoodReads rating and review system. It’s not only Misba’s books – there are clearly others. This was simply the most egregious example I noticed. Is there anything we can do about this?

That's a good question! Can something like this be reported to Goodreads? It's really underhanded. Hopefully someone with knowledge on the subject can help.

I never heard of the author before you mentioned the name.

You can report accounts you think are spammers. But at the end of the day, this site is at the mercy of the Amazon algorithm, so there will be people who will game for that.

I'm not comfortable saying more than that. This author is South Asian, and it's entirely possible she has a large readership outside of Western audiences. To think SF has to be dominated by white Western writers and that anything else is suspect is not something I wish to be part of.

CJ wrote: "I'm not comfortable saying more than that. This author is South Asian, and it's entirely possible she has a large readership outside of Western audiences. To think SF has to be dominated by white Western writers and that anything else is suspect is not something I wish to be part of."

This is a completely irrelevant point you are making here, addresses nothing in my origina post and is making insinuations that were entirely absent from my post. This is about manipulation of the GoodReads review and rating system.

CJ wrote: "...To think SF has to be dominated by white Western writers and that anything else is suspect is not something I wish to be part of..."

I didn't see anything in his post that could be construed as prejudice towards Asians. You might want to reread the original post.

Stewart, you could contact Amazon since they own GR. I had called them about a book that was "written" by AI, but was marketed under a fictitious author's name. Perhaps they could look into it.

Michelle wrote: "Stewart, you could contact Amazon since they own GR. I had called them about a book that was "written" by AI, but was marketed under a fictitious author's name. Perhaps they could look into it."

Thanks Michelle, I'll see what I can do :)

and yeah this has nothing to do with Asians. I guess instead of mentioning Frank Herbert I could have pointed out that the great Cixin Liu (who is Chinese) has only managed to get 1 book of his celebrated Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy into the top 100, and the point would be the same. Also, I've done some further digging (in the form of doing web searches on Asian search engines) and it appears Misba is just as obscure in Asia as she is in the rest of the world, so that point is also moot.

Goodreads is basically a marketing tool. I've seen a number of videos on YouTube, as well as posts across social media, about creating a bestseller on Amazon within just a few days—even if the book is badly written or entirely generated by AI. Many of these books have actually turned out to be successful.

A few years ago, before AI became what it is today, a prankster on YouTube demonstrated how easy it is to create an instant hit and get your book featured on Amazon’s recommendation lists. And since Goodreads is Amazon... well, there’s your answer.

I don't trust anything on here anymore. Way too often, I've bought a horrible book that had thousands of five-star reviews. Nothing is real—not even the books—especially now that one company announced its goal to flood the market with 85,000 AI-generated titles this year!

It's a user-created Listopia list. It's not unreasonable to think that 112 people voted for Misba's top book. The fact that the threshold is so low just means that participation is low. The usefulness of Listopia lists in general is limited.

The problem with fake reviews is real. I don't know where to report that, but you'd be right to make noise about it.