Thursday, August 22, 2013

WTF?

This article makes me very happy that I've never joined the Goodreads community.  What is it with the internet that people can act like assholes and are never taken to task for their actions?

10 comments:

David Cranmer said...

That happens a lot, Sandra. I had a one star review directed against me because the reviewer didn't like the cover. Hadn't read the book.

G. B. Miller said...

Sadly, this goes on everywhere in the cyber world (main reason why I left the chat rooms and migrated to Facebook). I have a book on Goodreads (not uploaded by me), but after getting aggravated in trying to get a simple question answered, I basically wiped out all the info connected with the book.

sandra seamans said...

People are certainly strange, David. What does a cover have to do with the stories inside?

Sorry to hear that, GB. I left one Yahoo group I really liked because the moderator got very nasty (he called me a horse's ass) because I asked him a simple question.

Charles Gramlich said...

I actually have a hard time believing it. I've been on Goodreads quite a while and have found it a very nice place, preferable in many ways to facebook. I've seen no such bullying in my experience and no one with shelves like "This author should be sodomized." There may be such. I just haven't seen them. Of course there are assholes everywhere and I have seen folks being removed from groups because of that kind of thing, but it's been rare.

sandra seamans said...

Yes, but I wondered, Charles, because many of posts from the article on both Goodreads and the author's blog have been removed.

I can't imagine an author saying such things if they didn't happen but then many things that author's do these days surprise me. Of course, there's much that's put into private emails that we're not privy to. It's a bad situation for both sides.

Al Tucher said...

My books haven't attracted much attention of any kind at GR, but apparently there are worse things that could happen.

sandra seamans said...

Thank goodness for small favors, Al! I wondered if this all started just because the book was self-published. I don't know how particular they are over at Goodreads.

Fred Zackel said...

I joined goodreads ... and found somebody had dissed me THREE YEARS BEFORE AND DIRECTLY ABOVE THE NEWER REVIEWS. So ... "Why read the book?" When I asked what recourse I had with a bad review from THREE YEARS AGO AND DIRECTLY ABOVE THE NEWER REVIEWS, when I asked what the Goodreads people could do to help alleviate this, when I questioned whether I should stay, the Goodreads people said, well, maybe you should try selling cheaper copies and hope for better reviews. I quit them. I will take my lumps. As Thumper's Mother famously told her kid, Screw the trolls and ALL one-star reviews. For years I have lived in Obscurity, Ohio, and the water here tastes fine.

sandra seamans said...

Nice to know that it wasn't just a new writer having problems, Fred. Some groups like Goodreads and Dorothy L can make or break a book and they seem to take pride in doing the dirty when they can.

Dorothy L is another list I left because I couldn't stand all the bickering that went on.

It's sad that readers can't accept that there are some books they aren't going to like and others that they'll love, so punish a book because it's not to your taste or you don't like the cover?

G. B. Miller said...

This is directed towards Charles.

At the moment a bully group in Goodreads is planning to attack a well known writer Anne R. Allen by attempting to destroy her career by leaving one star reviews on Amazon.

They have brazenly told her publisher this.

Her crime? Pointing out the amount of obscenities and threats they have used in trying to destroy other authors.