My reviews are "useful" - what fresh hell?
Over the last week or so, I have been getting e-mails from Amazon telling me that "a customer just told us your review was helpful to them while shopping on Amazon" (I just got two more today). Presumably this is connected with the little voting buttons "Was this review helpful to you? Yes No" which take the place on Amazon of "Like" buttons elsewhere-certainly every review for which I've gotten one of these e-mails had reaped at least one "X of Y people found the following review helpful" note. But I've gotten dozens of those helpful ratings over the last year and only just now started getting these e-mails, so is this just a newly implemented way for Amazon to reach out and poke me at unawares, or what?
None of these have been especially glowing reviews on my part, FWIW. The interesting thing about today's pair was that they were about two books on the same topic, and the timestamps were only four minutes apart: apparently someone was looking for books on the Goths, read and rated my review of Burns and jumped right away to Heather and rated that review too. But they did not rate my review of Wolfram: why not? Did they buy Heather and search no further? Who knows? And will Amazon give me a way to turn these off, once the novelty fades?
None of these have been especially glowing reviews on my part, FWIW. The interesting thing about today's pair was that they were about two books on the same topic, and the timestamps were only four minutes apart: apparently someone was looking for books on the Goths, read and rated my review of Burns and jumped right away to Heather and rated that review too. But they did not rate my review of Wolfram: why not? Did they buy Heather and search no further? Who knows? And will Amazon give me a way to turn these off, once the novelty fades?