Sometimes review abuse is more subtle than the example in the article given.
I found a recently published technical book on Amazon, which had a couple dozen five star reviews. I read a few of them, and it seemed great. The author's biography said he worked at X, a very well-known software company. I bought a paperback copy, read it, and was disappointed. The book wasn't terrible, but it wasn't written very well, and did not contain the technical depth that it appeared it would on the reviews. The book turned out to be self-published, and the technical editor was the author's boss at X. The other editors were the author's family members.
I went back and looked at the reviews, and found that many of the five-star reviewers worked at X, or if I couldn't figure out their employer, they happened to be located in the same metro area as X's headquarters. One of the Amazon reviewers is even mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.
I think all the reviewers had good intentions to help their friend and colleague, but I think it's still misleading, as you cannot expect a someone to give an impartial public review on their colleague's work.
All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5 star book instead of 5/5.
This is curious, because my g/f (who read the book and liked it) posted a good review of a novel I wrote and her review was removed because Amazon figured out she knew me. I have no idea how they did this: we don't live together and I'm not sure I've ever bought her anything off Amazon, certainly not at her present address.
So I have the impression that Amazon is pretty good at weeding out good reviews from people you know, while still being complete rubbish at policing obvious spam reviews, and doing a terrible job of suppressing reviews from obvious trolls (my book has a two-star review from a guy who also gave "A Tale of Two Cities" a two star review, but you wouldn't know that unless you looked at their review history, and who can be bothered to do that?
As both an author and book-buyer, Amazon's review system is a complete loss. Every single book I look at has both good and bad reviews with almost no way to tell if they are based on standards at all relevant to my taste. Any review that doesn't say something along the lines of "My taste runs to X and this was a great example of X" or "My taste runs to Y and while this was kinda-Y-like it failed in these respects" may as well not exist.
I found a recently published technical book on Amazon, which had a couple dozen five star reviews. I read a few of them, and it seemed great. The author's biography said he worked at X, a very well-known software company. I bought a paperback copy, read it, and was disappointed. The book wasn't terrible, but it wasn't written very well, and did not contain the technical depth that it appeared it would on the reviews. The book turned out to be self-published, and the technical editor was the author's boss at X. The other editors were the author's family members.
I went back and looked at the reviews, and found that many of the five-star reviewers worked at X, or if I couldn't figure out their employer, they happened to be located in the same metro area as X's headquarters. One of the Amazon reviewers is even mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.
I think all the reviewers had good intentions to help their friend and colleague, but I think it's still misleading, as you cannot expect a someone to give an impartial public review on their colleague's work.
All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5 star book instead of 5/5.