[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Seraphine

I fully support the changes that GoodReads is going to be making to their site. I'm a lover of YA, and this particular genre sees a lot of unnecessary drama due to GoodReads not stepping in and calling a spade a spade; authors are not their works. If you don't like an author, that doesn't mean that a review of one of their books in which you simply trash the author is a worthwhile review. If we try to draw lines in the sand so that "this amount of author trashing is okay, but this amount isn't", we'll end up with something ridiculously staggered.

But they were doing something about this:

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.

What changed now was that they expanded their focus, and while they said that they remove shelves focused o author behavior it seems like they are not removing all shelves focused on author behavior:

Oh wow. So you deleted my "due to author" shelf (WHICH WAS FOR ME, BTW), but kept my "cool author" shelf. Double standard much?

^comment on the news from the link in the OP

Originally Posted by Seraphine

It's all or nothing. I support this choice; if you obey GoodReads' site terms (which you agreed to obey when you registered, whether or not you read them - ignorance is no excuse), you won't have reviews or shelves removed. If you want to trash Sammy McStrudle for the content of his being rather than the content of his novel, you do so on your own personal website - you don't go to GoodReads and write an absurd review. In the same vein, if I want to swear bloody murder, I do it in my own house, not my grandmother's.

But according to the rules in place when people registered, the reviews and shelves wouldn't have been lost.

Originally Posted by Crusader

This is apparently a message authors now get when commenting on reviews of their own books, so it seems changes go both ways. Not sure authors are getting preferential treatment.

This seems to me like Goodreads is saying: you were behaving like children, so now you will be treated like children. But their parenting tactic is not a good one because they have different rules so to each side it will seem like the other side got the better end of the stick.

The authors are treated better than readers because they only may go under review for outside-of-guidelines behavior while readers get the immediate deletion of their reviews and shelves.

Readers are treated better than authors because they get to socialize more authors are discouraged from interaction, so readers get to vent and authors don't.

Interestingly, the other day I noticed groups around authors' behavior. Such as "Bad behavior authors" or something I don't remember.
Granted, groups don't appear on the book page. But comments do.

Groups = good, shelves = bad?

Reviews = bad, comments = ?

^comment on the news from the link in the OP

At the end you there are going to be to many frustrated people and all for a problem with a very small percentage of reviews:

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.)