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In case anyone missed it - GR Review Policy Changes
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Been following it all weekend...want to simultaneously stomp around in a rage while sobbing pitifully. It's a upsetting to say the least. :(
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Did I understand the Goodreads post correctly or am I missing something?
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People were really, incredibly, worried about the same changes when they were applied to the text of the reviews last year - and it only affected a minuscule fraction of reviewers. Now it's just extending the rules that apply to the text of the reviews to the shelf names as well.
I assume that GR is trying to get a cease fire between the badly behaving authors and the badly behaving author haters... Which is all well and good. And, truthfully, it's been needed for a long time. BUT they just really do NOT have the staff to respond to complaints in an appropriate time frame. I flagged some suspicious sock-puppet-ish behavior over a week ago and I haven't heard back, nor have the suspicious listopia votes and reviews been removed.
It's also the fact that the new rules are so incredibly unclear. You could have written a perfectly respectful and thoughftul review, but say the comment section gets rowdy? The rules do not state wether or not just the comment are deleted ( which in of itself bothers me on principle) or if the entire review has to go.It isn't just the "bad" apples loosing reviews - a five star Harry Potter review had been deleted also.
I'm also on twitter, and I have to say I was really incredibly annoyed, upset and surprised at the passive aggressive Quote of the Day posts from Goodreads, in light of their announcement in Friday.
Sept 20th, "Love can make even nice people do awful things"
Sept 21st, "Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead."
Sept 23rd, (Monday when they finally sorta answered the outcries)
"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
The biggest problem for me, is that Goodreads has drawn a line in the sand and they are unfortunately not on the same side as their users. And I'm not even a user who's likely to be directly affected by the policy change, but Goodreads has taking their second big step on a slippery slope. Right now the problem is we have no idea what the rules a saying and either does Goodreads. They've made the policy so vague that everyone has to watch what they say. That doesn't sound like any kind of book environment or community to me.
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I believe there's no place else to go. I want a social networking group about reading. GR still has tons of resources and groups that are important to me. There's no equivalent elsewhere. I've discussed this with friends who are considering leaving, but to go where? What could replace GR? Librarything if cataloging were my main interest, but it isn't. I'm on GR for the social networking.
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Basically, a really quick summary of this whole debacle for anyone who hasn't been following it --
There's a group of people who got tired of authors spamming forums, posting fake reviews, using sock puppet accounts to talk about their books on the forums, voting on listopia, etc. And they especially get mad at authors who insult, argue with, or try to 'correct' negative reviewers.
So, this group of people band together to call out these "badly behaving authors" for all their misdeeds. And, there is a core group that's decently organized, so when one of them finds out about something like this, they tend to share that info, so then it's not just that one person who reacts to the misdeeds, it's multiple people.
The problems, IMO, started on Amazon a few years back. The Amazon forums were a pretty lawless, unregulated place at the time. Amazon reacted by making it much easier to get rid of forum posts and reviews (often, negative reviews, by all accounts) then by making the forums very hard to find unless you know where to look, and then the problems migrated over to Goodreads.
Here on Goodreads, the group used to punish the behavior by giving books low ratings and including a text review explaining what they thought the author had done. So, if multiple people did such a thing, it would really drag down a book's rating, especially on self-published books which generally don't have as many ratings/reviews to begin with.
So, early last year, there was a giant hoopla about it, and some authors who had pissed off the whole group of activists and had been bombarded with negative reviews started up a website called "Stop the Goodreads Bullies" and started publishing all the info they could find out about the reviewers - real names, addresses, phone numbers, where they liked to hang out, etc. They took that page down pretty quickly, though they still posted lots of things these "bullies" did (bad reviews, etc) and took a lot of things out of context but the whole thing got some rather one-sided press attention where the press talked only about the "bullying" aspect of it all, without referencing the other side of the argument (what the authors had done to get their attention in the first place).
After all the negative press, last summer Goodreads changed their policy - saying the text of the reviews had to be about the book, and they did some other restrictions (I don't remember what, exactly) that meant it was a bad idea to rate a book low due to author behavior. But shelves were still fair game. So people started protesting author behavior by putting their books on shelves instead. Some shelves people used are pretty neutral like "due to author" and "do not buy" -- but others got pretty creative with their shelf names and not in a good way.
A couple of weeks ago (or was it a month?) this mess hit the press again because an author claimed a reviewer had used the shelves to threaten physical violence. Turns out the reviewer had actually said that he'd rather be physically assaulted than read this particular author's books - but the author had interpreted the shelf name wrong, and thought the reviewer wanted to assault HER -- and that's the version of events that got publicized. She later retracted that claim and blamed the whole thing on PMS. Of course, the retraction and PMS claim never got publicity, but the so-called threats did!
So, yeah, I was kind of expecting something like this after this last debacle. But even though I understand why... that doesn't mean I like these changes! I really do want to know if an author does this sort of behavior. There's so many indie authors out there that if I want to try one, I'd rather give my money to one who doesn't rig their ratings or argue with reviewers.
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When Amazon bought Goodreads, Librarything did a 1 year free trial, and I grabbed the chance - and uploaded a bunch of my books, just to try it out.
I'm not a fan... Everything is so fiddly over there! Whereas here, you can enter an ISBN and get some "default" info, over there it seems like you have to enter everything yourself, for every book. Yuck. I just want a "more or less accurate" list. I really don't care if every little detail about my books is correct!
I like some of their features - tagging, for instance, and being able to search for multiple tags - but I'm spoiled by Goodreads.
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I'm not leaving either, it took me years to find book groups that I liked on any website. however I will not provide free content for Goodreads when they obviously don't respect it.I've been working on a personal book blog (veeeeery slowly, since I don't really know what the hell I'm doing) since the Amazon announcement, and haven't posted a review on Goodreads since. I when I'm all ready to go (sometime this weekend, hopefully) I will post all my reviews on the blog first then just rate and provide a link on Goodreads. I will also no longer make any data edits on Goodreads (I prefer LibraryThing for cataloging anyway).
I'll own my content, have a backup and control over it. But I do love my groups which are honestly the only thing keeping me here.
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There's been at least one case where someone edited all their existing reviews to "Removed due to Amazon buyout - see my blog for my review" with a link included -- and those were deleted for promoting an external website.
Though they were a popular reviewer back when they posted real reviews and the links were quite prominent and obvious, so they would have been very likely to get flagged.
Hmmm, thanks for letting me know. But I do see many reviews that provide a short paragraph then a link. Maybe it was the anti- Amazon message that was the problem?
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Basi..."
Thanks for the clarification Melanti. I am glad all if you will stay around for the book discussions. That is what I come here for, discovering books and talking about them.
Melanti wrote: "Shomeret wrote: "What could replace GR? Librarything if cataloging were my main interest, but it isn't. I'm on GR for the social networking. ..."When Amazon bought Goodreads, Librarything did a 1..."
I catalog on Librarything for a small specialized library. If a book isn't on the Librarything database and has never been entered by any Librarything member before, you can obtain a record from the Library of Congress or any other library that has the book on its database. That's a clear advantage that Librarything has over Goodreads. If no one has ever entered the book here on Goodreads, you need to enter it manually. But Goodreads has the advantage over any other book site when it comes to social networking.
It's the principle of it - but, as usual with the powers-that-be of Goodreads, it's about the way things were done. There are, I read somewhere in that ginormous thread, about 20 million members on Goodreads. There are about 13,100 members of the Goodreads Feedback group. Yet - as usual - when Goodreads decided to make a significant decision, they did not send out a sitewide email, nor put up a banner notification, not make any other attempt at letting the other 19.98 million people in on the news. The other main Issues are that the deletions a) were made without prior notification, and b) follow no discernible pattern, whatever their one poor mostly-absentee representative tries to say. One poster said she was notified that they had deleted 90 reviews. I checked; she has something like 350 now, which means they deleted a wee bit less than a quarter of her reviews. Without telling her beforehand. They have also - though the GR rep denies it - deleted 3, 4, and 5-star reviews. They have also deleted such shelves as something like "may read later" and "favorite authors" - though again Kara (the face of GR in the thread) denies it.
My gut is that if they had emailed everyone and said "Hey, on October 1 we're changing things, we will delete any shelves like this (give examples) and any reviews like this (give examples), fix 'em or lose 'em" - and then emailed people with specifics (*this* and *this* are in violation of our new TOS and will be deleted 24 hours from now if they are not edited to comply) - I think in that case there wouldn't be a thread with 3,467 posts on it, and counting.
Or maybe there would.
Good grief, I'm starting to talk myself into leaving.
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I think it was a combo of all of the above. No paragraph, anti-amazon, and very prominent location.
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Tracey wrote: "It's the principle of it - but, as usual with the powers-that-be of Goodreads, it's about the way things were done. There are, I read somewhere in that ginormous thread, about 20 million members on..."
Goodreads is remarkably bad at customer service... Changes made without warning on a Friday afternoon then running and hiding for a long weekend is pretty par for the course around here. Most of their major changes are made without warning and without having people in the forums interacting with us users to do damage control.
In one of the updates halfway through the thread (and appended to the initial post), Kara (the GR rep) says they only deleted shelves/reviews from 21 accounts to begin with, admits they made a mistake by not giving warning first and anyone with shelves/reviews flagged for deletion from here on out will be notified first. That doesn't make what's already happened much better, but hopefully (crossing fingers) they've learned that they're morons?
By the way... Here's a screen cap of some of the offending shelf names. This is a screen cap from the most recent news story I mentioned. And, yes, from what I can tell, these were two of the members who had reviews deleted. And a third that I recall being involved in the debacle is also missing books/shelves.
(Not saying Goodreads was right to do what they did -- Just trying to provide some context as to why they felt it necessary.)
Tracey wrote: "It's the principle of it - but, as usual with the powers-that-be of Goodreads, it's about the way things were done. There are, I read somewhere in that ginormous thread, about 20 million members on Goodreads. There are about 13,100 members of the Goodreads Feedback group. Yet - as usual - when Goodreads decided to make a significant decision, they did not send out a sitewide email, nor put up a banner notification, not make any other attempt at letting the other 19.98 million people in on the news. "Exactly. I was so pleased to see that somewhere in that endless thread someone had quoted the exact quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that I thought of when I initially read the announcement.
It was on display at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, "Beware of The Leopard".
It's small things like that that remind me to stick around. =]
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The Goodreads people are probably saying something like "Apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all."
They seem to have learned all the wrong things from Hitchikers =/Their apology should have read more along the lines of, "Don't Panic." And instead all we got was Vogon poetry.
They could have at least warned everyone to have their towels handy.
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When Amazon bought Goodreads, Libr..."
What exactly is cataloging? Also I have seen on people's profiles "goodreads librarian" but did not know what it meant.
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Jalilah wrote: "What exactly is cataloging? Also I have seen on people's profiles "goodreads librarian" but did not know what it meant..."
Cataloging to refers to keeping a record of someone's books. Some people just care about the titles/authors, others care about covers too, and others want all the particulars to match - isbns, pages, paperback/hardback, publisher, date published, etc.
Goodreads Librarians are people authorized to make changes to the Goodreads books database. So if I see there's a book that has incomplete data, or that the site is missing the Kindle edition for instance (happens all the time) I can go in and add it myself.
I did miss this. Thank you for posting, Chris.
Melanti, thank you for that in-depth explanation of the whole saga. By the way, in LibraryThing, you don't have to enter info for every book manually. (I added you to my interesting libraries a few months back by the way; flying-monkeys is me). The site's UI takes a little getting used to but it's powerful once you get the hang of it.If you go to the Add Books tab you enter the ISBN then select which source you want to search for that ISBN. Choices will pop up on the right and you pick the one you want to add to Your Library. Of the 2,000+ books I imported there were about 100 or so I had to add manually. And to add a book manually the only info you *have* to enter is the title and an ISBN. It'll pull the details from Amazon first or Library of Congress if it's not in Amazon. I prefer to use any source *but* Amazon. Updating covers to member sources or my own will be an ongoing work in progress. It's fun, though. Especially with the older editions without covers.
The best aspect of LibraryThing is you can catalog however you want. You can go super deep - detailing every book down to its size - or you can keep it super simple. I'm developing a system for cataloging all my anthologies in such a way that I can quickly pinpoint which stories by which authors I already own. This will help me when I'm mulling over a purchase and wonder how many of the stories I already have at home.
I migrated to LibraryThing back when Amazon bought out Goodreads. Now I only shelve to-read, read, currently-reading and my group-specific challenge shelves here on GR. I post all my reviews to LT first then copy them over to GR.
And the only reason I'm still on Goodreads is the groups/friends/family. LibraryThing does have groups, which I recently started joining (If anyone's interested, there's a really interesting group for Weird Tales called The Weird Tradition) but I'm still loyal to the few I'm in over here because, well, probably because I've been here longer and the groups I'm in have a laid back, welcoming attitude. I can't stand to join a group only to discover it's filled with people who prefer to attack other people rather than discuss books; or, the members are just plain condescending about anything they don't deem worthy of their standards.
So Jalilah, I don't plan on going anywhere unless "the man" starts messing with our groups. :D
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You're welcome! I was a bit frustrated by the fact the official thread only had one side of the story... I hate that sort of thing.
Maybe I should go back and check LibraryThing again. The day I switched over was the day they started offering the year's free trial (a day or two after the Amazon buyout). The site was lagging cause of the traffic, and maybe my import wasn't completely finished? I know that not a single one of my books had covers, and I didn't want to have to go in and assign hundreds of covers manually!
I suppose I should go check it out again while I still have some of that free trial left.
And I agree on wanting laid-back groups... I have several I might stick my nose into every now and again because they occasionally have an interesting thread or two, but I hang out in the laid back ones.
Chris - what's Booklikes like? Is it just a blogging site focusing on books? I went there and I couldn't figure out how to see any reviews without creating an account.
Jane wrote: "Now why would potential members want to pick the $1 option if their books are in jeopardy of facing eviction? And why would LibraryThing offer a $1 yearly subscription if they want more money for their membership fee?..."
It's one of those where the people who do decide to pay foot the bill for all of the free-loaders. I think it's meant to be an honor system of "pay what you can afford" and as long as they have enough money to keep the site up and running, they're happy.
And I think having any sort of fee at all is meant to keep trolls and pre-teens off the site. Cause if you're willing to pay, even if just $1, you tend to attract a more mature crowd, those who are for the most part old enough to have a credit card and are not afraid to have their real name out there. That's the theory at least. Haven't hung out there long enough to know if that's how it works in reality.
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I'm not really effected by the changes. It just seems stupid. I have to wonder if the reason why it was so on the down low is so they can say they did something and here's the outraged proof, without doing anything.
Melanti wrote: "I don't think anyone's going to call the site admins hoopy froods anytime soon!Tracey wrote: "They could have at least warned everyone to have their towels handy."
you guys totally made my day. =]
@Chris, I believe that it was all a knee jerk reaction to bad publicity - somehow they honestly thought they could get over heavy ground. The "we can afford to bleed" mentality. And maybe they can, since the River has them now.
@Leah I've been a member of LibraryThing longer than Goodreads, but I never delved into all its features, just stuck with the cataloguing, mostly. Is there a way to search for other members?
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Hm... I really like seeing all my friends' reviews of a single book on one page, so I'm not sure that would work for how I like to browse books. As much as I like you guys, I like the books more!
And I think it was on the down low was because they figured they were only going to apply it to 0.01% to 0.1% of the user base so they didn't think it was a big deal, and they're baffled as to why the other 99.9% of us are objecting. It just turns out that several of the 0.001% they've already dealt with are extremely active and vocal members of the Feedback forums.
Sophie wrote: " And maybe they can, since the River has them now."
Possibly. The newest Paperwhite is going to have some Goodreads integration built into the storefront. (and hopefully into the splash screen at the end of the book. That's probably going to attract quite a few new users.
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From Carol:
Thought you might be interested in participating or spreading the word.
Maybe Goodreads won't change a thing. But we can make it clear that Goodreads' new bookshelf name and review-author-behavior policy is not a popular one.
I've been talking with a few people and have heard a variety of thoughtful idea. Part of the problem in organizing is coordinating so many people, and everyone having varying levels of comfort or goals for the site use.
My proposal is to make next week--Sept. 29 to October 5 protest week. Protest as often as you can, in the way that you feel comfortable.
Suggestions:
1. Write a review that should be flagged because it discusses author behavior and not the book.
2. Flag others' reviews that are meant to be flagged.
(see above)
3. Create shelving that should be removed according to the policy.
4. Post daily updates referencing the issue or referring people to the thread
5. Keep the Goodreads Feeback Announcement thread alive with objections about the silencing: 6. Post a
6. protest profile picture/ like a protest picture
7. Tweet/blog/Tumblr and everything else, and link back to the threads, post on status updates--
this is a nice compilation of various blogs, posts and reviews: http://hiddenreviews.tumblr.com/
8. Voluntary blackouts--such as not using GR for book-related purposes or not posting reviews
9. Flag, flag, flag
10. Boycotting librarian work, with a message/post/status/link that you are boycotting and why.
11. Boycotting giveaways, with a message/post/status/link that you are boycotting and why.
12. Let everyone know if you are considering moving and why:
13. Pick a book about censorship or about banned books and write a review about Goodreads' new policy.
I thought Unlearning Liberty appropriate: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
The classic: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
@Jane, Hmm, I'm not sure where you're getting all those dollar amounts. All I've seen is:- free (catalog up to 200 books)
- $10 per year (catalog as many books as you want)
- $25 lifetime (one-time donation for the life of your membership for as many books as you want) You can see at http://www.librarything.com/more/store
I went for the $25 lifetime membership.
Care to read Tim's and other LT-er's thoughts on GR's review policy changes? http://www.librarything.com/topic/159...
Like Melanti wrote above, the idea behind the membership fee is mainly to keep out trolls and those under 13 years old. And from what I've seen on the site the last four-ish months, it works. I haven't been spammed by authors (which LT takes very seriously!) and members have all been helpful and polite when I asked questions.
The social aspect of LT is secondary to the books, though. Most people expect to see you post in groups and/or add their library to your Interesting Libraries list *before* you send a Friendvite. In other words, get to know you first. I'm sure there are exceptions, just like over here, but it's something to know ahead of time.
@Melanti Yes during the time period there was so many people importing that they actually had to re-do their system in order to accommodate everyone. I ended up waiting and the import system was much better, not perfect!, but better. I found if I tweaked my import file before upload it went more smoothly (less manual input). Biggest help was if I used the 10-digit ISBN instead of 13. But if you don't mind having Amazon as your primary source your import should go much faster and more complete now that the GR exodus has subsided.
@Sopie Starting at the Home tab, look directly below it, you should see Profile, click on it. Then click Edit Profile over on the right. In the left you'll see Friend Finder. Right now I think there's only Facebook and Twitter. Again, the social aspect is something that most LT members want secondary to the books, so the developers haven't placed those elements as high priority. But they are aware of people wanting easier ways to find other members. So basically you have to meet people through Groups or know someone's user name in order to add them. http://www.librarything.com/wiki/inde...
Hope that helps! And feel free to message me on GR or LT if you have questions. I'm flying_monkeys on both.
P.S. I also joined BookLikes back in April. http://leah.booklikes.com/ It has an attractive interface but it mostly focuses on giving readers their own book blog. Since I already have my own site I decided to abandon my BookLikes account, for now. They have added lots of new features over the past months, though, so they're highly responsive to members' feedback and feature requests.Basically, with online book / reader sites, it comes down to what you want out of the account:
- catalog
- spam-free social interaction
- book groups and discussions
- your own book blog
- review integrity and freedom
- or an even mixture of all
I've liked bits of each - Goodreads, LibraryThing, BookLikes, libib - but none are *exactly* what I want. C'est la vie!
@Jane, yes, cataloging one's entire library is definitely time intensive. It took me nearly five months to import, edit, and tag mine. And that doesn't include the time I'm still spending on inventory and then eventually on covers. Currently, for about two months now, I have a printout of my library on LT and have been going through each room marking off what's already in LT and adding what I had missed (back when I was on GR). But it's already stopped me from purchasing the same book whilst shopping at local bookstores and thrift stores.Happy I could help make the decision process a little easier. I know with so many choices out there - and the time commitment involved in joining a site - it can be difficult to know which one will be what you're looking for. I hope GR will be that for you!
P.S. Amazon does *not* co-own LibraryThing. Tim Spalding has had to address this bit of misinformation several times. You can read his response at http://www.librarything.com/topic/152...
Leah wrote: "P.S. Amazon does *not* co-own LibraryThing...."That is good news indeed. I've seen that all over the place - now I know to direct people to Time Spalding's response - thanks.
I joined LT before I did GR (lifetime memberships were $20 then, I think), and only came to spend more time here because the communities there don't seem too active. Now the communities are the only reason I'm staying here - but sadly, because a lot of friends have fled GR. Mostly for Booklikes.com, at the moment.
She posted on the Ginormous Thread, too - about as briefly as possible. I could almost feel sorry for Kara. Almost.
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Well, an apology is always nice... providing lost data, even if they're not allowing it back on the site is even better.
I'm glad some of the more neutral shelves are explicitly allowed again (like "due to author" or "will never read this author").
Still not the site-wide announcement most everyone wanted though.
(warning, thread is long. But read the first post at least).