Friday, March 31, 2006

Fairness of amazon.com reviews of McCutcheon: The Final Theory restored

Update: One day after this article was written, the one-star reviews were erased once again.

Brian Powell has just informed me that the critical reviews of the book

are no longer deleted from the amazon.com website. When we first informed about the strange filtering procedures, the book had 33 reviews with the average rating of 5 stars. Now it has 63 reviews with the average rating of 3.5 stars - a consequence of roughly 15 one-star reviews that quite suddenly appeared on the amazon website. ;-)

Recall that Anthony Kirmis was the winner of our $13.08 grand prize for the first 1-star review that survives for one week. His review had been erased two days after he received the money. But apparently something has changed about the algorithms how the reviews of this particular crackpot book are filtered. Brian Powell and I thank everyone who was pushing for more balance.