19
I found a weird review for a book on the Kobo website and I'm baffled... Can anyone provide a theory?
(pawb.social)
I'm not quite sure where else to post this, but hopefully it'll encourage some fun conversation in any case!
So I saw Killers of the Flower Moon is on offer on Kobo. And just out of interest I scrolled down to the review section, to be met with some very confusing posts.
The Bloom review almost sounds like a response to something. It sounds like some kind of treasure hunt? What's going on with all that weird code?
The Sorry review has a similar feel to it, with the l33t speak stuff going on. I feel like I've wandered in to some kind of alternate reality game from the early 2000s. Or something from Hypnospace Outlaw.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what the hell is going on here?
It sounds to me like the first one is using the review site as some sort of “personal”.
I think you might be right. It looks like if you post a review on a Kobo device, you can use bold/italic or whatever and it displays correctly - but when that review then gets posted on the website, it's in plaintext and shows the HTML tags. That could explain some of the weird characters. And for whatever reason, a group of random people (probably kids?) are using Kobo reviews like social media, including cryptic hints as to where they're going to post next.
Why they'd post it to a book like this one though, I have no idea!
Maybe to do it without anyone seeing? Like are they hiding it from a spouse or a parent?