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Originally Posted by meeera
A particular set of authors has already doxxed at least one reviewer and published information on where she and her family hung out IRL and could be found.
That's the sort of behaviour some reviewers are sharing, in the hope that future potential readers might avoid interacting with or posting a negative review on books with authors who behave that way.
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That's an awful thing and I do hope that Goodread's new policy enforcement encompasses the harassment by authors of reviewers, especially if that behavior is as common as you say.
In the conventional publishing world (where the soon-to-be famous are often selected from MFA programs at prestigious universities before they've even written a novel), the machinery of fame is set up to be unforgiving and most new authors learn quickly enough not to reply to reviewers at all lest they find themselves shut out of publications and even offices that would have welcomed them before. Publishing responses in which one picks apart a bad newspaper review can be an easy way to find oneself locked out of that paper in the future and branded as difficult by anyone who's aware of that activity.
More established writers might decide to respond occasionally, but their careers are already in place and, most of the time, they know it's better to let posterity answer perishable reviews.
Unfortunately, that lesson of enforced self-restraint isn't taught immediately and emphatically in the world of internet self-publishing. Still, wise writers learn to understand it early on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
None of this is in any way comparable to a lynch mob. There's really no need to co-opt a violent racist past (or mostly-past) in order to talk about this sort of non-racist behaviour.
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The idea of a lynch mob has a
long history that includes but is in no way limited to acts of homicidal racism. It seems a tad literal to insist that a term which is often used metaphorically is always reducible to one sense of the literal meaning. It reminds me of this bit from Wodehouse:
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A: "Well, you know what they say: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."
B: "No, it isn't. It's usually the same color."
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Consider standard definitions of the term
lynch mob, which can encompass figurative and general use. The term has a long history of usage which doesn't equate "lynch-mob behavior" with racism at all, let alone putting anyone to death.
The Cambridge Dictionary:
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Lynch mob: a group of people who want to attack someone who they think has committed a serious crime.
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Here are a few examples of the term
lynch mob as used by journalists to describe something other than physical violence or murder by hanging -- but please don't think the political POV of any of these examples is pertinent to the discussion; I'm only using them as examples of common usage:
"Zimmerman coverage had lynch-mob feel"
"Journalism and the Lynch-Mob Mentality"
All of which means that (i) while your argument is well served when you differentiate between the behavior you feel is being targeted by Goodreads and that of a metaphorical lynch mob (as commonly referred to in journalism), (ii) your cause is not served by the suggestion that people who disagree with you are making specific comparisons between your internet behavior and the real-life crimes of homicidal racists.
Similarly, if I use the phrase "found guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt" to describe a jury's decision, it doesn't actually mean there were no shadows in the courtroom when the verdict was being read.
Someone else cited the image of a mob of villagers with torches (perhaps going after Dr. Frankenstein). That's precisely the metaphorical scenario which journalists most often intend to imply.
My point was this:
Personal grudges are no reason to threaten someone else's livelihood en masse through insulting threads, comments and reviews any more than it is right for an author to harass a reviewer by posting personal and private information about their lives.
Goodreads has every reason not to tolerate either kind of behavior. If an author can be shown by the evidence to have harassed someone in the manner you've suggested, then the author should be banned from the site and members should insist on this. But it should be clear at this point that Goodreads isn't the place to warn others about "authors behaving badly" even if it seemed to be such a place in the past. It's sounds as though the site is in the process of being the book review and reader's site it was intended to be originally and nothing more community-political than that.