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01-29-2013, 11:09 AM | #76 |
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I've never written a review on Amazon - legitimate or otherwise .
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01-30-2013, 12:10 PM | #77 | ||
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A little context, if't please.
I said this: Quote:
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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. 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. 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? And if you're Amazon, why discriminate against all authors by assuming they all have an agenda? 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. It's quite easy to cry inherent corruption when you don't belong to the group being targeted, innit? 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. 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. Confusing a person's essence for their job is a bit like mistaking their skin color for their culture. Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 01-30-2013 at 02:57 PM. |
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01-30-2013, 12:32 PM | #78 |
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01-30-2013, 12:57 PM | #79 | |
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(Edit: Just to clarify, I hope it's clear I'm kidding about calling moderators hypocrites -- especially those who, when not donating their free time to resolving everyone else's issues, post occasionally on the boards they happen to moderate.) Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 01-30-2013 at 02:41 PM. |
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01-30-2013, 06:42 PM | #80 |
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01-30-2013, 06:50 PM | #81 |
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I think they should let the friends and family thing go, as long as it's not like 10+ reviews from people who have never reviewed a book before. a handful to help the book get its footing I think is ok.
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01-30-2013, 06:57 PM | #82 |
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^ The thing is that they are no indication about the quality of the book: of course friends and family will praise you and give you 5 stars, which makes those reviews completely useless in my eyes.
As a potential customer, I'd rather know how readers feel about the book, than how loved the author is by his friends and family. |
01-30-2013, 07:40 PM | #83 | |||||||||||
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Here is the specific comment I responded to: Quote:
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. Quote:
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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.) |
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02-11-2013, 12:54 PM | #84 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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My apologies for the tardiness of my response. In a world in which books and stories have yet to be written and edited, I haven't felt terribly enthusiastic about the tedium of replying. The rather testy fisking in the last response to me suggests the next might be no more friendly or perceptive, hence the fruitlessness of this exercise.
Clearly, Andrew's last fisk makes a series of assertions about a post that hasn't been understood and a playful tone that hasn't been heard. Quote:
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The term "rectal hook" was never applied to Andrew. It was applied to the imaginary respondent who continues to make the case that "might and some do not mean will and all." If Andrew considers himself to be that imaginary respondent, to whom reasoned argument means nothing, then it is he and not I who chooses to place the hook in that delicate position. Let the record show, Your Honors, that my learnéd colleague's pejorative interpretation of ululation is one that no one else on this thread inferred and which I myself did not intend. Frequently, I refer to my own comments and those of my friends as ululations because the comparison is meant to be humorous and not — again — mean-spirited. Quote:
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One more thing, Your Highnesses: In all of his responses to me and others on this thread, Andrew has relied rather heavily on charging us with using rhetorical fallacies — specifically, that of the straw man argument. As we shall see, it seems fairly clear that Andrew is using the term so broadly as to suggest he might need to review its usage. Quote:
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While I realize that "you've misinterpreted me" lacks the sound of punitive authority which straw man seems to hold for Andrew, accusing someone else of misinterpretation is more accurate in most cases (such as this one). Andrew might also wish to consider that misinterpret is less didactic. Quote:
Yet I've consistently spoken of only some reviewers. I've even gone so far as to suggest the hypothetical example of Virginia Woolf writing an Amazon review, which winnows the idea of some down to few. My argument is not one which places all or many or some writers on pedestals. It acknowledges that, by banning all authors' reviews, Amazon bars the possibility of preventing readers from benefiting from Virginia Woolf's review. Exceptional reviews by anyone — authors or otherwise — are still worth fighting for. Note Andrew's use of quotes around the word expert, which could be construed to mean that no such expert authors exist. Andrew could say he was simply quoting my use of the word expert, but he is also in his own words making a statement about what he does not believe "categorically." In the hypothetical realm, why would anyone assert that no expert reviewers actually exist? Quote:
Despite these statistical vacillations, I maintain that exceptions are still worth fighting for, whether their numbers are best expressed by "some," "a few" or even very few. Quote:
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It does seem that Andrew's responding to an argument I didn't make by suggesting our theoretical Woolf wouldn't want to "cast pearls before swine" (and thank you, A.H., for that open-minded characterization of Amazon's customers) — as if I'd made the argument that our disenfranchised theoretical Woolf had better places to publish — but again, I don't think that necessitates anyone's wagging their finger and chanting, "straw man, straw man!" That would be netiquette's equivalent of complaining about his punctuation. Quote:
Besides which, the sort of conflict of interest Andrew's talking about is deeply embedded in the publishing and academic industries — it simply occurs at a higher level. That level of conflict is far more difficult to ignore than Amazon's because the rewards are significant, real and pervasive rather than largely theoretical. I don't know anyone who buys self-published ebooks based on badly written raves from author-reviewers on Amazon, and few self-published authors who make any money, but I do know academics and editors who literally publish, promote and assign one another's papers, essays and books. No one seems to call that nepotism or a conflict of interests (though I do), and while the alternative might seem more ethical, the end result would be to take away yet another advantage of being a lowly academic in a corporate post-academic world, penalize teachers yet again, and allot more power to corporate interests that have far greater conflicts of interest (see (early) Reagan's and Goldwater's former education rep., who used to warn that free access to higher education was in danger of creating "an educated proletariat"). Quote:
For the love of Oscar Levant, it was a joke, Andrew! If your last few posts are any indication, you might want to readjust your frivolity filter! Quote:
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There is not any ad hominem whatsoever in my calling Andrew's idea unreliable because it eradicates the possibility of excellence in an attempt to prevent a conflict of interests — an attempt which I consider ineffective as well. To respond ad hominem would suggest I attacked the man as opposed to the argument, and the irony is that the very first lines of Andrew's response to my last post are closer to the definition of ad hominem insofar as they accuse me of posting for reasons I haven't expressed involving motives I don't possess: Quote:
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Perhaps someday, an Amazon reviewer's name will no longer be anonymous after a fixed number of years following said reviewer's death. If that ever happens, I think we'll be amazed at the number of famous Amazon reviewers -- especially the occasional and not the prolific. It seems (anecdotally, at least) more difficult for writers to be recognized and supported than once they were. High-profile writers might be relatively unaffected, but the ones who have published steadily until recently are often in a different situation. Writers who have hated the idea of blogs for all this time, dismissing public journals as self-indulgent or giving too much away that isn't in the books, are now writing them out of desperation. And that is only counting writers who are published and known already. What exactly would a Virginia Woolf growing up in our multimedia-driven briefly attentive culture feel compelled to do? I don't think it's far-fetched to posit her writing a dozen Amazon reviews as she pursues other modes and methods of publishing. I can also see her taking down and wishing to reuse the reviews at a later time if publishing her reviews elsewhere became viable. It's a mistake to see even famous writers as the completed and elevated literary edifices they became postmortem when they were often not seen that way in their own time. No accident that Leonard and Virginia Woolf happened to run their own press. That good writers who are ignored will sometimes write reviews for Amazon seems evident to me, not only in the ways in which writers are now rejected by publishers, but because the ones who have been published in the past — even for decades — seem unable to find a publisher now. Quote:
Mobile Read has a handle on this. They don't prevent authors from reviewing other writers' books, they simply prevent them from promoting their own books dishonestly. And if a pattern of animosity and defamation exists (which is far more harmful than mindlessly effusive reviews), they track that pattern and act where necessary. Quote:
The original comment: Quote:
We live in a time in which attention is at least as important to people as financial gain, and that is often true on Amazon when it comes to self-publishing. It is also true on MR and many other internet forums, where people love to insult virtually anything which seems held in high regard. No one would ever suggest that such comments be banned, but they still exhibit a conflict of interest involving the desire for attention as opposed to mere financial gain. Just because conflict of interest cases tend to focus on the financial and professional implications does not mean that other examples of corrupting secondary influences fail to fall under the same definition. Secondary influence is the primary issue in general with Amazon reviews, one which is unanswerable in terms of blanket automated enforcement. The only way to control it fairly is to track individual user trends and to take user reports and complaints seriously, as MR does here. The issue is with Amazon's systematic and historic avoidance of certain kinds of customer/user interaction. Everyone knows that they've only made direct customer service possible because they were notorious once upon a time for hiding their phone number and contact info — for years, you couldn't find their phone number on site. This is simply another way for Amazon to automate interaction and impose a boolean rule instead of having to hire enough people to monitor human behavior in a human way. Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 02-22-2013 at 01:01 PM. |
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02-14-2013, 03:50 AM | #85 |
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Having read this hilarious post in which you obviously revel in the “tedium of replying”, I am now one hour closer to my death...
But that was part of your joke, wasn’t it, Mr Prestident? |
02-14-2013, 09:12 AM | #86 |
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[QUOTE=Prestidigitweeze;2419999]My apologies QUOTE]
OFF TOPIC sorry please is just a little cameo Dear Prestidigitweeze, In Italy I was considered kinda intellectual, but I struggle to find in English some good book, like a novel that uses refined expressions. I mean everybody speaks English, so I find everywhere really simple expressions to manifest feelings. Could you recommend me an extensive bibliography where I could draw fully from cherished expressions that embellish that miracle called language? When I translate litteraly my thougts from italian to English the fake purists( shallow english managers) that I know here say that I am too much latin, could you consider the possibility to push further my knowledge of the English language. So far outside some Stephen Fry book and maybe Joyce , I never found something that fullfil this need to taste the language as I was used with some italian writers, please advice me and sorry for my English mistakes |
02-14-2013, 09:15 AM | #87 |
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I'd suggest reading Dickens. One of the greatest of English authors, in terms of his use of the language, to my mind.
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02-14-2013, 09:30 AM | #88 | |
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I strongly assume (and hope for it) that this question will generate an even longer response from our esteemed colleague than his last one. |
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02-22-2013, 01:11 PM | #89 |
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Trocchietto:
Sorry yet again -- may my fecundities of propitiation immerse you in an ecstasy of secondhand shame -- but cringing at conflict had caused me to skirt this dangling kilt of contention until Pynch requested that I return its tug. Suffice to bray I'll make more recommendations than you can stake a shiksa at once I speak to you via PM about your virile interests. Thintherely, Prethti ("Ego ergo aegis," intoned the pseudo-classicist's crossfade.) Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 02-22-2013 at 01:21 PM. |
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