Action Heroine Fans discussion

On Sept. 20, Goodreads initiated a controversial change of policy on what kinds of reviews and shelf names are considered acceptable to post. Because it was announced only on a thread in the Goodreads Feedback group, most members have not yet heard about it, so some Goodreaders have asked group moderators to post a mention of it in their groups. Here's the link to that thread: www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1499741-... . The announcement is the first post; those following it provide additional understanding of the controversy, but it's a very long thread to read in its entirety (well over 5,000 comments the last time I checked).

Thanks for posting about this Werner. I was very dismayed at Goodreads for the manner in which they executed this policy, along with the unclear/arbitrary use of force instituted. I feel that their motives weren't pure, and they were initiated by a group of people who had a very specific list of targets in mind. However, GRs didn't consider that many people would be impacted both directly or indirectly and would have such a negative reaction to what they did.

I've been trying to strive for a sense of normalcy on this site, but it's not the same. I hope that GRs administration will realize what they are doing is wrong, even if they feel that the spirit was right.

Thanks Werner. I"ve seen some of the insulting stuff from both reviewer and writers get posted around the blogosphere and I'm glad Goodreads has taken steps to make improvements. I've backed away from this site to keep away from some of the mud slinging, and now that behavior has been taken to other sites. I say good for you, Werner, and good for Goodreads.

I'm undecided on this issue. I can see good reason for dealing with slanderous reviews, but to remove books without warning was unfair. I've also heard of some people having whole shelves removed without warning or apparently any good reason. So for now I'm being wary and watchful. I've made copies of all my reviews and I'll wait and see how matters develop.

When I posted the notice above, I took pains to make it neutral and informational; I figured we could share our opinions about it in the following discussion if we wanted to, which is what we're doing now.

I've been a Goodreads member since Feb. 2008, mainly as an avid reader who loves to talk about books, and secondarily as an author who's glad to mention my own work where it's appropriate, but who's not on here solely or mainly for self-promotion. (Most Goodreads authors, I think, have the same attitude that I do.) My experience has been good; I've never had an unfair or abusive review of my work, I've never had any unpleasant altercations with other authors over my reviews, and I've only rarely been targeted for vicious comments by other Goodreaders. (I've run across, and reported, two or three sock puppets.) That said, I know that some Goodreaders haven't been so lucky. There's something about the anonymity and physical separation from the people you're talking to/about on the Internet that, for some, brings out an ugly streak expressing itself in verbal abuse, threats, name-calling, hate speech, false accusations, etc.; and that for some authors/publishers seems to offer all sorts of possibilities for dishonest, deceptive marketing. None of this contributes to intelligent, enjoyable discussion about books or ideas, and none of it should be tolerated in a civilized community. One of the functions of site managers and moderators is to eliminate that kind of thing, and it is not "censorship" in any negative sense to do so. Frankly, I've felt for a long time that the Goodreads management is remiss in bending over backwards to tolerate a lot of bullying, abusive behavior on this site that shouldn't be tolerated, and that it blemishes our sense of community to do so.

All of that said, the existing rules already covered all of that kind of thing before the new policy existed. They should have been, and should be, better enforced; but we didn't need the new policy to do it. All that the new policy does is forbid reviewers to make mention in reviews (and this is now being extended to shelf names, and comments on reviews!) of actual cases of bad (and in some cases illegal and dangerous) author behavior, which would legitimately make a difference in people's decisions about whether to buy or read the author's book(s). It seems to me that suppressing information about bad behavior is to indirectly condone it. And the implementation of the policy, IMO, has been ham-handed and incompetent from the beginning, starting with the failure to announce it site-wide, and continuing through the original deletions without notice, and the apparently capricious and selective "enforcement."

C.C., I'm really sorry to hear that the mudslinging on Goodreads has made you back away! You're a respected and valued member of this group, and I promise that your moderators won't tolerate any of that kind of verbal abuse here.

Werner wrote: "...I've felt for a long time that the Goodreads management is remiss in bending over backwards to tolerate a lot of bullying, abusive behavior on this site that shouldn't be tolerated...

... And the implementation of the policy, IMO, has been ham-handed and incompetent from the beginning, starting with the failure to announce it site-wide, and continuing through the original deletions without notice, and the apparently capricious and selective "enforcement."..."

I agree completely with the first two points. It has been very poorly announced. GR has never been good at that & gotten worse. Reading the Feedback group is like a poor soap opera - too many of the same players whining on the same theme. Finding useful information in there is impossible, especially given the horrible 'search discussion posts' feature.

I wrote 1 review that was just about the author - a misbehaving one that he flagged & GR told me would be removed from the community reviews. With the new guidelines, they told me I had 2 days to fix it or they would delete it. I removed the content & posted it as one of my stories & put links into both. GR then told me it was fine & left the blank review, complete with comments in place. This sort of defeats the purpose, IMO.

(Note: When the author saw this, he complained to me, so I removed the links & edited out the names turning this into a more generalized story on why authors shouldn't comment on reviews. That was several days later, after GR had reviewed my changes.)

Anyway, I'm not sure about the deletions without notice nor capricious selections. I have tried to get better data on that, but it wasn't in my case, although I did split hairs. I don't have any experience or data with the shelf names.

So, it's not the end of the line for me with GR, although I'm not happy with them. I moderate several groups & decided I wasn't going to bring this up in any of them. I feel it's GR's responsibility to communicate with their customers & I haven't received a notice from them asking me to spread the word. Until they do & give me a good reason for doing so, I won't.

Jim, like you, I'm not going to leave Goodreads over this, though I'm saddened to hear that a number of people have. It's still a wonderful site for book discussion, and I've formed some treasured friendships here (including my friendship with you!). I'm not about to let bad behavior from others (whether they be authors, reviewers, or site managers) run me off from a network that's come to mean as much to me as this one does; and I think it's better for those of us who care about those kinds of things to stay and help set a better tone for the site, rather than abandoning it to be destroyed by trolls.

On the deletions without notice, Goodreads admits to doing this in the cases of the first 21 reviewers who had content deleted. In fairness to Goodreads, though, they have since admitted the failure to give notice to have been "a mistake" and apologized, and they are trying to recover the lost data and send it to the people who wrote it, so they can have it for their own records. (That only applies to content created before the policy change, though; they still claim the right to delete anything created after that without notice.)

There are both pros and cons to the idea of group moderators posting a mention of the policy change, IMO, and your point about this kind of communication being the responsibility of the Goodreads' management is perfectly valid. In each case where I've posted about it as a moderator in a group, I've done so only after discussion and consensus between the co-moderators (except in the one group where I don't have a co-mod), because I think that kind of shared leadership is one benefit of having more than one moderator in the first place. For my part, the factor that tips the balance in favor of responding to the plea of other Goodreaders to post is the fact that the Goodreads management is patently shirking its responsibility, and my feeling that, in principle, people should know what the rules are before they put time and effort into creating content that might be deleted. And I think it's to the advantage of the Goodreads community to have wide discussion of the policy and its background, in a moderated forum that encourages rationality and civility (in contrast to the Goodreads Feedback group thread, which right now doesn't appear to be moderated by anybody --but sorely needs to be :-( ). But I totally respect your decision not to post about it in groups that you help to moderate!

Personally, I don't blame Goodreads for this problem, no more than I do for Amazon having created an Authors Ghetto-forum to avoid all the problems they had with authors spamming the discussion forums on their site.

In fact, I've noticed, to my surprise, that sites like Goodreads and Amazon have bent over backwards to allow users/members to regulate their own behavior. Problem is, just like with the freedoms that people have offline, they abuse their freedom and ruin it for the law/rule abiding folk.

Goodreads did the right thing by stopping the abuse of some members by attacking authors. On the other hand, I expect that this was a pre-emptive strike to quell some of the disgruntled members that have been smearing the reputation of the site. I honestly believe that the next big rule change will be to drop the hammer on authors who have been abusing the members of this site as well. There's a certain even handedness that I've noticed in the way Goodreads operates. I just wish authors on this site would stop acting like clowns, and respect that this is a site first and foremost for readers. Having that attitude would go along ways to prevent Goodreads from having to institute rules that curtails some of our freedoms and hurt the community.

Werner, you make a good point for announcing it & considering the discussion in this group, it seems like it's working out fine. My original decision was based on all the madness surrounding it when it first came out. Several groups I belonged to had people going off the rails & abandoning the site wholesale, very similar to what happened when Amazon bought it out. I've lost GR friends to both & seen a lot of fine discussions get lost in the free-for-all.

I mostly don't want to see the argument stir up hard feelings in areas that should be discussing books, though. I'm not exactly a stickler for staying on topic, as you know, but this was my line in the sand at the time. Now you're making me re-think it somewhat.

Thanks, Jim! Yes, I definitely don't want to encourage anyone to go off the rails or leave Goodreads in response to this, nor would I want the discussion to elbow out the conversations about books which are why we're all here in the first place, or to create hard feelings in the group. (After all, however we feel about the new policy, we all want the same thing: a Goodreads community where everybody acts like civilized adults and treats each other the way we'd want to be treated ourselves.)

I'm generally for as much freedom of self expression as possible. It's too bad there are some people who are little more than children who can't be trusted to behave in civil ways. They are everywhere on the net, though, certainly not just on Goodreads. So far I've had only wonderful interactions with Goodreadians.

So just to be clear: The issue with shelf-titles is something like "Bob Smith is an A**hole"?

Not "Books that I hate" or "Books that suck"?

Yes, Derrick, shelf names like the first one you mentioned would be the kind that are banned by the new policy. (It would also ban designations that don't mention an individual author, like "Authors [of the books on the shelf] Are Pedophiles," etc.) Your other two examples would still be okay.

Werner wrote: "Yes, Derrick, shelf names like the first one you mentioned would be the kind that are banned by the new policy. (It would also ban designations that don't mention an individual author, like "Autho..."

If that's the case, then I don't think I have a lot of complaint about it. There're too many ways to express displeasure with a book without having to go there.

My 'Do-Not-Read' shelf
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
hasn't been touched, which makes me happy. I only have a few books on it, none are rated since I haven't read them & don't plan on it. All have valid reasons for avoiding them, too.

I'm wondering if I should or can properly change them to 1 star reviews, though. Does anyone know if no-star reviews show up in the community reviews? I know my friends have seen these since several have commented & even liked them. You can't filter for a no star review & I don't think I've ever seen one.

Jim, I don't know if Goodreads shows no-star reviews in the community reviews or not. (I saw the link to some of your no-star reviews in comments you posted, so that's how I was able to "like" them.) You might want to ask about that in the Goodreads Feedback group.

No, I'm not wading through Feedback. That place is a nightmare. I don't think they do show.

The things that never occur to me. It would never occur to me to have a shelf labeled something like "asshole writers" or "attention whores." My shelves are labeled things like "westerns," "Non-fiction Sports," "Poetry," etc. I guess I'm not very imaginative. My interest here is in books and that's certainly where my focus will lie.

Jim wrote: "No, I'm not wading through Feedback. That place is a nightmare."

I know exactly what you mean (I'm a Feedback group member, but it's one of only two groups where I've adjusted the settings so that I do NOT get daily updates of all the posts!). The trick in using that group is to ask a specific question (I usually start a new thread for it), and then watch for the response in your updates of individual posts on threads you've commented on. I'll post the question for you (if I can't find an answer with the "search discussions" function) and get back to you on that.

Thanks, Werner.

Everyone does their shelves differently, Charles. People have complained that the field is too short. I don't know how long it is, but I've never run into the limit & doubt I ever will. I'm like you & tend for short, generic names.

Jim, the answer to your question is yes, they DO show as community reviews. A good example is the first community review of The Sentimentalists, which has no star rating.

Thanks, Werner.

My longest shelf title is one I started last year, so this year's is: "2014-tree-book-purchased-or-gift" (GR added the hyphens where I had spaces, of course).

That's a pretty long title.

No problem, Jim; glad I could help! (I was curious myself. :-) )

Some of the deleted shelf names weren't abusive at all. I don't like the idea of Goodreads mucking about with my shelves. People put a lot of time and energy into cataloging their books, and their arbitrary way of doing what they did was very unprofessional.

Danielle, I agree with you, on principle. Of course, if someone created a shelf titled "Authors Who Are Pedophiles" (or "Wife Beaters," or "Convicted Felons," or whatever), and then proceeded to add books by authors who aren't guilty of those things, that would be unethical, not to mention legally-actionable libel, and Goodreads would be justified in deleting it. But I think that such cases are practically non-existent, and that Goodreads has thrown the baby out with the bath water in the way they've gone about this. :-( (Like Charles and Jim, my own shelf titles are almost all based on book content, and none describe the authors, so I haven't run into any problems myself.)

It gets my back up at times. I'm tempted to create a shelf called "Books-that-promote-incest" & put some of Heinlein's later books there. No one who read them would argue the point, but I'll bet GR wouldn't like the shelf name.

Hmmm... They goofed up the message sorting several days ago & haven't replied to my support message about it. Maybe I'll create such a shelf & let them know about it to get their attention.
;-)

I definitely think there should be some shelf titles that are completely unallowable, but how many are really like that? Most just irritated immature authors and they complained.