On Goodreads

I usually refrain from posting other-than-book discussions, or personal pieces on here. This is primarily a review/book haul blog, but today, something is different.

Goodreads is different. My internet home for more than three years has taken an about face in how they will moderate reviews and shelves. According to the new TOS:

 1. Reviews should be about the book. If you think a book is a masterpiece, tell people why. If you hated the book, say so. If it had potential but fell short, share your perspective.

2. Members are not permitted to harass or threaten other people. We have always dealt with this promptly when it has been brought to our attention.

We have done our best to uphold these tenets, and they aren’t changing. But we recently recognized that we can do a better job enforcing them, particularly in the small number of situations where tensions start to run high. We took a long, hard look at our guidelines and how we moderate Goodreads and identified some areas where we can be clearer and where we can improve. I wanted to share with you some of the changes we are now making:

**Make it easier for anyone who feels concerned about content on Goodreads to get help from Goodreads staff. We have now improved the visibility of our flag button, and have added the ability to flag inappropriate friend requests. Of course, people can also reach us through support@goodreads.com. If you see any inappropriate content or behavior on Goodreads, please use these options. We’re here to deal with this so that individual members don’t have to.

**Better education for authors about Goodreads and our review guidelines. It’s clear that some problems have come up because some authors who are new to Goodreads don’t know what’s appropriate on Goodreads and/or take matters into their own hands rather than flagging content that they feel is inappropriate. We’ve therefore revised our author guidelines to make them clearer. We’re also working on improving how we introduce new authors to Goodreads.

**Delete content focused on author behavior. We have had a policy of removing reviews that were created primarily to talk about author behavior from the community book page. Once removed, these reviews would remain on the member’s profile. Starting today, we will now delete these entirely from the site. We will also delete shelves and lists of books on Goodreads that are focused on author behavior. If you have questions about why a review was removed, send an email to support@goodreads.com. (And to answer the obvious question: of course, it’s appropriate to talk about an author within the context of a review as it relates to the book. If it’s an autobiography, then clearly you might end up talking about their lives. And often it’s relevant to understand an author’s background and how it influenced the story or the setting.)

We recognize that not everyone is going to agree with our approach. People have different - and often quite strongly held - viewpoints about what should and should not be allowed in a review. We’ve had suggestions that no GIFs should be allowed, reviews should be limited to 300 words only, reviews should only be allowed if you have read the book to the very last page, etc.

What we try to do is provide room for our members’ own personal approach within our overall principles rather than set rigid guidelines. We’ve found it has worked well for the community overall so far and is something that readers value.

By the way, to put things in context, every day we have more than 30,000 reviews written on Goodreads and, on average, only a handful are flagged as inappropriate. That means 99.99% of new reviews are happily within our guidelines. (Funnily enough, we get way more flags from people asking us to add a spoiler alert to a review than any other type of flagged review.)

We think we have something special here with the Goodreads community and we want to support and protect that. Thank you for being part of this. As always, we welcome your feedback on these changes and on how to make Goodreads a better place for readers and authors.

They claim this is not censorship. They are wrong.

I'm far from the first person to voice their opinion on the new direction Goodreads has taken since "becoming part of the Amazon family" earlier this year, but I won't be the last. This new policy - this arbitrary and hypocritical deletion of users personal shelves - is a bad move. It's pandering to a bunch of whiny authors, it's a blatant step to becoming more like Amazon review forums, and it's clearly a modification designed against supporting readers' personal content and opinions. 

Deleting content users have worked hard for, and have done so for FREE, for their own benefit and for the site, is wrong. Especially without any warning or any chances for those users to save their own work.

I don't usually talk about author behavior in my reviews. I do shelve books as "will not read" for those that attack reviewers, publish and profit off of fanfiction, etc. But, while I don't say much, I do think how an author acts and what they support SHOULD have an impact on whether someone will read them. 

For instance, in my review for "Orson Scott Card's"  (in quotes because it was ghostwitten for him) Earth Unaware, I say this:

Written as a prequel to the well-loved Ender's Game, Johnston's Earth Unaware tries to fill in some of the holes and unexplored history of the "Enderverse" and the first Formic War that led to Battle School, and Ender's adventures in vanquishing the "hormigas"/Formics. When this book works the most, it succeeds predominately on misplaced nostalgia for the earlier-published-but-later-in-the-chronology novels like Ender's Game, Xenophobe, Children of the Mind, etc. I found Earth Unaware to be a weak, ghost-written book that lacks the easy charisma, dynamic characters, and unique storyline that the other books possessed in abundance and which made them so memorable.

There are obviously some good, interesting ideas at play here (the asteroid mining and the cultures that sprout up around them [free miners versus corporations, etc.]) but Aaron Johnston is primarily a graphic novelist, and it shows quite obviously here. Nothing about the novel is realized to its full potential -- from characters to plot to even the action, almost all about Earth Unaware felt contrived, weak, and overdone all at the same time. This is a superficial and shallow adaptation of Ender and the world's backstory, obviously written primarily to lure in fans of Ender's Game and its subsequent sequels. The plot is minimal, the characters are in dire need of more/or a rounded personality (or in Wit's case, a connection to the actual story. His Earth-bound plot will surely coincide with the events of the sequels, but for Earth Unaware, they are more filler than anything else, Mazer Rackham cameo or not.)

Wonky pacing, uneven and unconnected storylines, cliched or predictable characters, and more made this a miss for me. The few things I found interesting were often and quickly glossed over to focus on the less developed ideas and characters. There are people who will absolutely love this and gush over the finally explained and explored first contact with the Formics, but Earth Unaware is nowhere near the league of Ender's Game in any area. This review is much shorter than most, but my disappointment with this and OSC's raging homophobia make it almost impossible for an impartial thought.

And other thoughts:

When I first read Ender's Game, I was 10. It was my first scifi novel and Ender was a protagonist seemingly created just for me to love. I still love it to this day, but more for nostalgia and my first sense of how powerful children could be than for anything else. It was revelatory: kids can be heroes and save the world too! Now that I'm older, wiser, and more exposed to the kind of hate that OSC regularly spews towards homosexuals, I find myself less and less inclined to pick up anything he's written (or was written for him.) I debated whether or not to even review this (though it's far from a glowing review) because I don't want to promote OSC in any way, shape or form, negatively or not. In this recent climate, among all these debates about author behavior and how it affects readers, I find it hard to justify my read of this/these books. Sure, OSC has never attacked a negative review or reviewer (to my knowledge, but I certainly try to ignore anything that comes out of his mouth at this point), but how authors behave does impact their work and those who read it.

As I was reading Speechless by Hannah Harrington right after this novel, it made me think about silent compliance, ignoring the bad stuff, and just doing what everyone else does for the sake of not making waves. I'm done, I'm gonna make my own wave about this; I just can't support an author who thinks it's right to discriminate against and dehumanize other people. I was granted an ARC of this, but you can bet this author will never see another penny of my cash. I won't be finishing the First Formic War series, and though I thank TOR for the generosity of reading the ARC, even an ARC of the sequel won't tempt me. Goodbye, OSC. I will still reread Ender, but I won't recommend it anyone anymore.

So long, Enderverse, and thanks for all the fish. 

To me, that entire review is valid. To the Goodreads staff? I am in violation of their "let's protect the poor authors from readers examining their behavior." But they are WRONG. How OSC acts, and who he supports, and who he dehumanizes is important. I don't watch Roman Polanski's movies. I don't buy Michael Jackson's music. There are times when the actions/views of the creator need to be known, so an informed audience can decide whether or not to give these people money. Authors are no different. They are public figures. How they conduct themselves will and SHOULD have an effect on their products and if they sell.

This has been a long weekend. Goodreads has alienated many of their "1% users" - aka the people who flock to the site day after day. They have divided bloggers into groups - those who are leaving (for BookLikes, or Riffle, or Reading Room), those who are staying, and those whose will continue to use the site as a reference but no longer post full content. It's frustrating, it's sad, and it's disheartening to see my friends splinter, to see their work casually deleted with no regard.

Goodreads has given me a lot over the years. I refuse to let it take away the fun I get from blogging and talking about books with the awesome people I have met through the site. I refuse to let it dictate to me what I can say in my reviews. What they have done here is WRONG. If the awful people behind STGRB are on your side, that should tell you a lot.

I'm angry. I'm disappointed. But I won't stop DNR'ing BBAs. I have already set up a BookLikes account (actually started in April, but ignored til this), but I haven't left Goodreads entirely. I will wait, watch, and see how this all plays out.

To my friends stil at GR: I love you, and we will still talk.
To my friends on BL: we can figure out this site together. Give it patience and time.
I don't, and won't, judge anyone for their personal choices -- I just hope that everyone keeps an open mind. 

There is a lot of work involved for those who leave, and it is daunting. There is a lot of pressure on those who have stayed, and that's depressing. So, everyone, please, be respectful of one another.

We will see how Goodreads handles the fallout from this latest modification, but the complete lack of communication does not bode well.