Are Crowdsourced Reviews Fair or Useful?

Randall Sullivan
(photo: oprah.com)

An article in today's online edition of The New York Times discusses the influence of crowdsourced reviews on a book's commercial fate. The piece uses Randall Sullivan's Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson as its case study. Apparently, Mr. Sullivan's work offended some of the late Gloved One's fans. They retaliated by submitting highly negative, one-star reviews in amazon.com's information about the book. Essentially, the bad reviews killed the book's sales prospects.

For some time, the tech crowd and its more cynical fellow travelers have promoted the notion that crowdsourced reviews are reliable, truthful measures of a product's quality. This allegedly democratic notion gained great prominence in the world of restaurant reviews. Two Yale-trained lawyers, Tim and Nina Zagat, turned their crowdsourced data into a personal bonanza. Google purchased the Zagat information empire and now sends Zagat's "cast of thousands" reviews into the world. Few consumers question the quality of the reviews, their perspective, or their veracity.

Amazon's book reviews are a more primitive version, if such a thing is possible, of the Zagat formula. However, the dark side of crowdsourcing has emerged during the cause celebre of Sullivan's title. Instead of enlightened mass opinion, the reviews allegedly reflect an organized hatchet job against the book. An author can now claim his or her work has been ruined through the manipulation of a system.

Of course, Sullivan did not squeal when things were going well, such as when an excerpt from the Michael Jackson work appeared in Vanity Fair. He also did not complain about Amazon's marketplace clout and how stifling its role is in publishing. Sullivan did not question the notion of crowdsourcing as a legitimate method of appraising the value of a book. It only mattered when the book's buzz did not go according to what appeared to be a carefully crafted plan.

Today, few raise any concern about Amazon's nearly religious belief in the validity of algorithmically based appraisals of quality, or evoke any useful skepticism about accepting crowdsourced "wisdom." Those notions should be explored and skeptically considered. A new headline for the Times article would add some punch (no Sulzberger pun intended). The story could be entitled Untouchable: The Strange Life of Crowdsourced Reviews and the Tragic Death of Controversial Books. Sounds like a five-star idea to me.