Amazon has a concept of Influencer Reviewers, but they should almost immediately recognize this as bs. I've never met anyone who actually cares about a general product critic. Amazon isn't niche, so even if there is, say, some guy who reviews protein powders on Amazon, and you're really into protein powders... The odds of you finding this person are low, and since Amazon isn't designed in anyway for you to interact with this person, and find more content about protein powders, nutrition, fitness, etc -- it makes no sense for you to follow this person on Amazon.

Certainly, there are some influencer reviewers with genuine followers. But this should be an exception to the rule.

GoodReads on the other hand is a place that lends itself to an influencer. So it's much more difficult to tell who's posting real reviews and who's posting bullshit that's being liked by bots and then added to the first review most people see, and then just getting liked a lot because it's first -- not because it's any good.

Further, GoodReads is actually like the 8th biggest social network in the world and one of the most heavily trafficked websites online. These influencers can actually get a lot of eyeballs, but GoodReads provides almost no way for influencers to make money -- like YouTube, Pinterest, or even Instagram do (most Instagram influencers post ads almost exclusively now).

So GoodReads influencers have to get more creative and extortive to make any money.

Further, this problem is compounded because people don't finish books they don't like. Everyone watches plenty of TV and movies they don't like throughout the year, so they rate these on IMDB or wherever. They like reviews that are bad. This happens much less frequently on GoodReads. If you're an influencer, you learn very quickly that any negative review is unlikely to make the front page. And if you're trying to grow your following, that's all you really care about. So you need to post a ton of 5 star reviews. Well, books take a long time to read. I highly doubt these influencers have time to rate and write a review and make a video about their review for a novel every or two or three a day. Yet, they do. So the majority of these have to be fake just based on obvious time constraints.

Amazon used to have more social features a decade ago: you could follow reviewers and talk with them, and there were message boards for the book-, music- or film-lover community as a whole. However, that functionality was gradually hidden on the site or outright removed. Apparently Amazon felt supporting it was too expensive and it didn’t appreciably increase sales, and for books it was made redundant after Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads.