[informationally]

Reviews are meaningless, they have been for a long time now. The right way to do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality.

One of my reviews was removed once because it mentioned the author lacked expertise in the domain he was commenting on. It was about AI and the author was a historian. I recommended people skip the chapters about AI but apparently that was too critical.

[wdr1]

> Reviews are meaningless, they have been for a long time now.

That doesn't make this okay.

[spiderice]

> do reviews is off site because that is the only way to guarantee impartiality.

Yelp begs to differ

[informationally]

Yelp is a social network that also happens to have business reviews. So I don't mean a social network, I mean a site specifically focused on reviewing books and other consumer products. I don't mean some rando opening an app and writing their opinion about the food they just ate.

[GauntletWizard]

Yelp is a company with a reputation for offering advertising services for reputation management. There's an inherent paradox in offering reviews: true anonymity can be review bombed. Moderated anonymity has to be paid for - and the companies being reviewed are willing to pay more.

I don't know if Yelp is honest in their reviews. I can't tell for certain. But they do have reputation management services for sale, and so you have to question who is the consumer, and who the product.

[robbedpeter]

Yelp is shady af.

[Spivak]

I mean some random going to a website and writing their opinion on the book they read is a review site. You're basically just describing Goodreads.

If you mean professional critics then sure, but they have their own problems and are also divorced from reality but for different reasons than "randos."

[JohnFen]

If the off-site review is on a product review blog or website, then I don't think it's likely to be any better than the ones on Amazon.