Amazon: working hard to make reviews less helpful

I'd already heard about Amazon deleting book reviews for no other reason than that they were written by authors - not the authors of the books under review, just authors in general. It's being done on the ground that they are potentially "people with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product". Clearly, this is an attempt to combat cases, recently highlighted, where authors have either puffed their own books or trashed those of rivals, under assumed names (and it is in the anonymity that the problem really lies: if Amazon insisted on people using only one posting account and that in their real name, it couldn't happen). But according to one of the comments under this article they are also going after reviews that have been published on reviewers' own blogs, on the basis of their exclusion of "reviews that [...] have been previously published elsewhere" (see their guidelines) Apart from being a heavy-handed response, this is a brilliant way to diminish the quality of Amazon reviewing at a stroke; some of their best reviewers are authors and literary bloggers, which is hardly surprising. If you're an author who does reviews on Amazon, don't link your review profile to your author profile in any way; this seems to trigger their response.