[faithbw]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

The problem is that people on the internet often reward one another for thinking alike. This can create the illusion that any sort of consensus is right.

Most of us understand that a physical lynch mob is a bad thing. What some of us do not understand is that banding together to hound a person we dislike until they become unemployed or unhinged is merely another kind of lynch mob.

I'm always amazed at the people who rejoice on Yelp whenever a small business owner whose attitude they dislike goes under. If you don't care for a waiter or restaurant manager, then why not go elsewhere? Why try to destroy the livelihood of everyone involved with that restaurant because one of its employees annoyed you once? The punishment is absurdly disproportionate to the crime.

It's the same with authors, isn't it? If they don't connect with you, why not find different authors and let that person who annoyed you connect with someone else? Why keep a public list of of the ones you hate, hoping to build a consensus? A well-written review which reads the work closely and finds it wanting is condemnation enough.

Of course, I can understand how anyone would be upset losing shelves they'd spent seven years building. The total erasure of anything seems sad. If only sites had the time to keep copies the work they deleted massively.

ITA with your entire post.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Keeping lists of books/authors you want to avoid reading seems silly enough to me. Keeping lists of books/authors you'd encourage others to avoid seems downright presumptuous.

Again, ITA.

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.

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.

If an author is behaving badly, then I think a person has a right to say so on her own personal blog. However, I don't think it has a place on GR. Also, from what I've seen on GR, harassment and bad behavior occurs among both readers and authors and honestly more so among readers.