[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

One reason I don't visit Mobile Read as often as in the past is because I weary of the preponderance of Booleans who view other members' posts as creative opportunities to Photoshop found language with a hyperbolic distortion filter.

Perhaps you should avoid MR is you are unable to tolerate people who have a different point of view from yours. Using insulting language like "rectal hook" and denigrating people's opinions you don't like as "ululations" (i.e., meaningless noises) is not the most productive way to engage in a conversation.

Anyone who isn't invested in being a rectal hook will understand when I say that might and some do not mean will and all. The point is not that opportunistic cliques of the mediocre and worse will fail to form.

While I understand what those words mean, I also understand that you are constructing a strawman argument.
Here is the specific comment I responded to:

The advantage of an author's review is not that they'll necessary like one's book but that they might have a better sense of what one is actually doing. Effectively Amazon is disallowing reviews by some of the very experts whom book review digests court.

It is not "hyperbolic distortion" to interpret that as meaning that you are suggesting that Amazon will lose authors, some (I never claimed "all") of whom are going to be better reviewers than non-authors. If this *isn't* what you meant, why did you describe authors as being "some of the very experts book review digests court?"

In fact, there is no distortion, much less hyperbolic distortion at all. I simply disagree with you. I do not believe, categorically, that Amazon will lose "expert" reviewers by barring authors from posting reviews. In my opinion, the reviews posted on Amazon by authors are generally *worse* than reviews posted by non-authors.

Sure, I've read some great book reviews by authors in, say, the NY Review of Books. Reviews that, I'm sure, took a month or more to write.

But you don't see these reviews on Amazon. What you see are a bunch of crappy reviews like the example I posted.

It's that, in eradicating all said cliques, you also erase the possibility of more informed reviews by professional writers who simply like to talk about what they read. The world is full of whipsmart writers who used to be mainstream and are now without work; who, lacking their old forum, are now drawn to Facebook and user reviews.

Maybe so. But instead of tendentiously throwing out near ad-homs, why not post an example of a great review on Amazon by an author? I posted an example of a bad one, and of course it's easy to find more where that came from.

Does this mean that all people who market themselves as writers are whipsmart? Obviously not. But it does suggest that to eliminate reviews by all writers is to wrongly assume they're all of equal merit.

I could easily do that with casual user reviews on Amazon, since the majority are teeth-grindingly stupid, but that would be a disservice to people who like to read, do not consider themselves critics and have written superb reviews.

If you're Virginia Woolf and don't want to publish a review under your own name because you have thoughts which you feel aren't worth subjecting to twenty drafts (her sweet spot, I've read), why wouldn't you post it on Amazon instead?

I can think of a lot of reasons why our theoretical Virginia Woolf wouldn't post a review on Amazon, mostly having to do with some variation of casting pearls before swine. But regardless of motive, it appears that the theoretical Virginia Woolfs have, in fact, not been posting on Amazon.

And if you're Amazon, why discriminate against all authors by assuming they all have an agenda?

I don't assume that they do or do not have an agenda. But I know that there is a conflict of interest.

By stopping Virginia Woolf from writing an Amazon review, you've deprived the people who read product pages, not delivered the world from a genetic predisposition to a conflict of interests.

What does "genetic predisposition" have to do with anything? And, again, I have not seen *anything* approaching V.Woolf-quality reviews on Amazon. Feel free to post counter-examples.

It's quite easy to cry inherent corruption when you don't belong to the group being targeted, innit?

Again, no one is crying "inherent corruption." The term, which has been used occasionally, is "conflict of interest." There is a difference.

The point is not that every published writer is inherently better at criticism than every reader. It's that many people who write professionally actually know things which are pertinent to the discussion of the value of books. You might as well tell Virgil Thompson he has no right to publish music criticism because he knows a few conductors a little too well.

No one is saying that authors can't publish reviews. No one is saying *anything close* to that. This is only about Amazon. Would the world of music criticism be poorer if Virgil Thompson were not allowed to publish reviews on Amazon? I don't think so.

The saner approach would be to discipline any reviewers who are shown to follow patterns of mutual praise or bear conspicuous grudges. Both groups -- reflexive praisers and bashers -- are rather large, and each contains a fair number of writers and non-writers. Ban the behavior, not the type of person or line of work.

That is almost impossible to police. That's the point of conflict of interest rules - they make it so you don't have to police.

Confusing a person's essence for their job is a bit like mistaking their skin color for their culture.

Um, no. Do you really not understand the concept of conflict of interest?

The mayor's brother-in-law is not allowed to bid on a public works project because he is the mayor's brother-in-law and that presents a conflict of interest: the mayor has an incentive to select not the best bid, but his brother-in-law's bid. In preventing this conflict of interest, no one is claiming that the mayor is corrupt, or that the brother-in-law is dishonest. The mere fact that the conflict exists is enough to bar the brother-in-law from bidding, because it is *important* that the bidding process be free of favoritism. Even at the cost of not considering what could be the lowest bid.

To return to the topic at hand - IMO, Amazon loses nothing by prohibiting authors from posting reviews, and gains something from doing so: more unbiased reviews, plus the removal of one incentive for producing biased reviews.

(And, yes, if we could prohibit relatives from contributing to Amazon's reviews, I would be in favor of that, too.)