Question about First Reviews in Zeitgeist

Perhaps this is just a matter of sampling bias but I've always had the impression the First Review/Hot Review section of Zeitgeist had some form of minimal real person involvement. Since the changes and modifications to the site I get the impression the first review/hot review section of Zeitgeist now is just some form of automated programming without any checking by a real person.

Today is a excellent example of why I'm asking - at the moment there are a lot of "First Reviews" that consist of the statements like "Case 2 Shelf 1", "Case 2 Shelf 2" etc. which, of course, are not reviews of any kind. Has something, in fact, changed or is the situation for first review/hot review in Zeitgeist the same as it has always been?

I think it's totally algorithmic. "First Reviews" are just reviews for works that haven't had reviews before. "Hot Reviews" combine some measure of recency with thumbs. I suspect it's always been that way. There's surely never been a crowdsourced moderation of these outside of the thumb and flag features, and I don't think staff have the extra attention to drink from the firehose of all reader reviews.

No, LibraryThing definitely does not have the staff to hand-curate reviews.

When you see a review like that anywhere on the site you can flag it with a blue flag ("this is not a review") and it will fall to the bottom of the list

OK, sampling bias it is. Thanks for replying.