GR Review Policy Updated

[Seeley]

Interesting update to Goodreads' review policy. Nothing really new except that they'll be deleting the nasty reviews and giving more attention to complaints about mean spirited reviews. No doubt this is in reaction to the recent Salon article (an article that was questionable to begin with).

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...


Peace, Seeley

[Jim]

Lots of people swearing they're going to quit GR over this 'censorship'. What a loaded word. They've always had this policy on reviews, the only change being deletion instead of them just not showing up in the community reviews.

Topics relating to the book & author are still going to be linked to their page & anyone can say pretty much anything in them. It's not as if they're deleting all the information from GR. If you want to know about the author, you just need to look in them or google them, as usual. Finding a book review that is primarily about the author isn't what I'm used to nor have I usually found them to be more than negative rants.

The site has grown tremendously in the past couple of years. As usual when you get a lot of people crowded together, rules get stricter. It's why I like living out in the country & moved 600 miles. Since everyone thinks they can spout any crap without consequences, some idiots have caused pain for the rest of us. Typical.

I don't know anything about the shelf thing, so have no opinion. One friend gave me an example that I didn't care for, but I haven't looked into it at all.

[Danielle The Book Huntress , Literary Adrenaline Junkie]

GRs messed up by deleting peoples' shelves without any prior notice. Their criteria for deleting shelves is highly suspicious. My question is how do they have time to monitor so many peoples' shelves when they can't even fix the bugs on the site.

I'm not a fan of rude, hateful reviews, but people do have the right to their opinions. I don't think it's fair to delete peoples' reviews just because authors complain about them.

[Seeley]

Lady Danielle aka The Book Huntress wrote: "GRs messed up by deleting peoples' shelves without any prior notice. Their criteria for deleting shelves is highly suspicious. My question is how do they have time to monitor so many peoples' shelv..."

Somewhere I heard GR has 30,000 reviews going up every day (never verified that on my own). If that's the case, the only way they can delete bad ones is by an algorithm. If they tell people in advance, then they'll give away the algorithm and people will dodge around it.

When I first joined GR, I signed up for every group. I found some of them were trashing authors for ridiculous reasons. So I left those groups, unfriended those people, etc.

Life is too short to hang with haters.

Peace, Seeley

[Danielle The Book Huntress , Literary Adrenaline Junkie]

I am very much against trashing authors, so don't get me wrong. However, there are authors who do behave horribly, and stalk reviewers when they give them unfavorable ratings. I think it's ridiculous that an author can't take a bad review. I can respect if other readers don't want to be bothered reading their books. It's a punitive act unfairly executed by Goodreads to delete shelves because of their titles. I think their time is better spent doing other things than trolling members' shelf titles.

[Travis]

I have some creative and at least one shelf that drops the F bomb but I always figured my bookshelves are mine. Reviews on the other hand I can understand needing a bit more discretion.

[Seeley]

Lady Danielle aka The Book Huntress wrote: "I am very much against trashing authors, so don't get me wrong. However, there are authors who do behave horribly, and stalk reviewers when they give them unfavorable ratings. I think it's ridicul..."

If you've not seen the Salon article, some of the claimed shelves were pretty far out there, recommending rape and encouraging suicide. I've never seen anything like that, so I'm not sure how widespread the problem is. But, there is a fine line between standards of civility and censorship.

Peace, Seeley

[Travis]

Ah now that you've mentioned it I haven't read the salon article but I have seen some shelves that I felt were wrong and I am quite open minded so if those are the types of things they are cracking down on they are probably justified to a certain extent as long as it doesn't get pushed to a real extreme. PG 13 is what I would consider an appropriate rating for good read members to keep in mind. PG 13 really gets away with quite a bit at least in the movies.

[The Pirate Ghost, Long John Silvers Wanna-be]

My take on things

[new_user]

Salon article doesn't really matter because Seeley pointed out the only salient points. The author was complaining that she was getting death threats when in reality the shelves were users describing themselves dying, the book was so bad in their opinions. Hyperbole, profanity, but definitely not bullying and authors crying bullying every time they get bad reviews or negative responses when they argue with the bad reviews really just detracts from the issue of real bullying. It gets ridiculous after the umpteenth time too.

Let's face it, the issue for most of these 21 and 22 year olds uploading "New Adult books" to Amazon and creating Goodreads accounts is that they barely know codes of behavior, much less the code of an artist/writer. You don't argue with reviewers. You understand that your work will have to stand up to rigorous critique, unless it isn't noticed at all. You have to have a thick skin, as most vets will say. If anyone's interested to see what this author from the Salon article said to provoke the so-called "bullies":

http://darkwriter67.wordpress.com/201...

It's just entitlement. Do I think some reviews get mean? Sure. It's the net, and these aren't pros. There's no way to judge them either. What kind of metric would we use that wasn't subjective? GR has set no such standards anyway.

[Danielle The Book Huntress , Literary Adrenaline Junkie]

I have to say this much, civility is an internal code. You can only preach or force people into adhering to a code of civilized behavior only to a certain extent. I am honestly amazed at how rude people are online. Does it mean I like it, no? My worst pet peeve is rudeness, but that's my value. Not everyone has the same values.

While we're at it, I don't like cursing or foul language, so I don't use it very much. Others may feel differently. If I have a rule that says people can't curse, than I can expect people who really want to stay around try to adhere to it, but I am going to have a certain amount of people who will leave just because they want to feel free to curse.

If Goodreads is an environment that fosters creativity, you can't put restrictions on people to an extreme degree. Some people express themselves by saying stuff like 'kill me now'. Or 'bend over, here it comes.' To my grandmother, that would be very rude. To some members on the site it is rude, but that's how other people express themselves.

I realize authors are here to promote themselves to some degree, but they need to realize that others are not here just to be a potential consumer to them. They are here to hang out and express themselves as freely as they are able. I think that as long as they abide by reasonable terms of service, no problem. If you delete shelves and give people no notice, that's not reasonable.

From what I have heard that article in Salon is very suspect.

[Danielle The Book Huntress , Literary Adrenaline Junkie]

Travis of NNY wrote: "Ah now that you've mentioned it I haven't read the salon article but I have seen some shelves that I felt were wrong and I am quite open minded so if those are the types of things they are cracking..."

I don't know if I agree that peoples' shelves need to be PG-13. Why, because there are X rated groups on GRs. People can make their profiles private and warn younger members not to read their reviews, and they can friend only people over 18. Why do they need to edit their shelves if they can pretty much talk like they want in other parts of Goodreads? You can't even look at a person's shelves if their profile is private. You only know what their shelf is if you look a book they added to the shelf. I think that people need to make an effort to overlook something they don't like in a public online site to some degree as well.

I don't have any anti-author shelves, but I do have shelves that tell how I felt about a book and its content. Should a shelf be deleted because I put it on a 'not for danielle' shelf and the author gets angry because I shelved it there? Maybe I put it there because I don't like reading anal sex and menage or bdsm? It has nothing to do with whether I hate the author of a book sucks or not.

[Danielle The Book Huntress , Literary Adrenaline Junkie]

I wanted to add this: I am not a published author. I don't make money on writing books. So I admit some ignorance on how it feels for published authors. But this I know. Being able to write and have others read your work is a privilege. I think that being a published author is a privilege. With it comes responsibilities and some risk assumption that not everyone is going to like your book, or even you based on your book. Some readers are immature. Their reviews reflect that. As an author, you have to accept that fact that reviewers will write reviews based on their feelings and take it with a grain of salt. I think there are some authors who are unable to do this and they make everyone pay for it, especially conscientious authors like yourself, Seeley. I think that being an author requires professionalism and saying that you won't win over every reviewer and when you just didn't write the best book, and learning from that instead of throwing a tantrum over bad reviews and complaining to the powers that be about it.

[Travis]

Any opinions I may have are basically mute points anyway. None of these changes being made apply to me as far as I can tell. I not one to flag something someone has posted and if I were an author, which I'm not, and were to read negative reviews about myself hard as it may be to take it I'm not the type of person who would comment to the reviewer since it is their own opinion. I know I have posted on facebook at times things which people have found offensive and attacked me and I just let it go rather than turn it into a big ordeal.

[Seeley]

new_user wrote: "Salon article doesn't really matter because Seeley pointed out the only salient points. The author was complaining that she was getting death threats when in reality the shelves were users describi..."

Excellent post, New_User. You have a well researched piece there. My experience was a little different. I'd been alerted to Lauren's review problems a few days prior to the Salon article and checked it out. There was one 1-star review at the top which made obvious the book had not been read and went on to recommend the young woman should kill herself. I was shocked and sent a link to a friend who, 2 hours later, said the link was "not found".

A lot of Lauren's problems were self-inflicted or over-dramatized but not imaginary.

Peace, Seeley

[The Pirate Ghost, Long John Silvers Wanna-be]

Seeley wrote: "A lot of Lauren's problems were self-inflicted or over-dramatized but not imaginary. "

Now that's a thought...put that with Judy Collins and we got us a Big Bang Theory going!

Or maybe a Simple Delusotory Phlippic and the cure for that is a Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine

All hail the wisdom of the Brothers Funkel, Simon and Gar!

[new_user]

Seeley wrote: "Excellent post, New_User. You have a well researched piece there. My experience was a little different. I'd been..."

Well, I can see why GR mandated that reviews must relate to a book (although that review isn't what Howard or Salon's reporter were referencing; she misunderstood a shelf name and admitted that later). Particularly since book pages are GR's public face. It concerned me, however, that they deleted personal shelves and without warning. It's a little invasive. My first thought was, "Are they going to curtail any discussions about authors? Find comments missing in updates, groups?" I don't think they will, but it shook my trust a bit.

I hope that's an end to it. I've heard GR's beefed their Author Guidelines. I don't know what they looked like before, but those guidelines are the limit to what GR can do for authors, realistically. They've advised authors to report suspect reviews and not to engage with negative reviews. There's nothing else that GR can do for authors ignoring that good advice.

ETA: I forgot that shelves are visible on the public book pages. But this probably isn't the only instance of undesirable shelf names (according to GR) making it to the book pages. So I wonder if eventually they'll eliminate them from the pages or control them somehow? Slippery slope.