How not to respond to a bad review

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

It's unlikely she ever will be now.

can you say pseudonym?

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I said this on the other thread about this, but that sort of extreme reaction to criticism is something that depression survivors do. I don't know if she is a DS or not,

Even if she is - that's HER problem - not the readers who want to be entertained by books.

Offering books for sale isn't the same as giving them to your therapist.

So I don't feel bad for her - I second kennyc on that.

[wyndslash]

i love the love between human beings :|

that said, i always feel bad for the victims. in this case, i guess it's everyone involved.

[Worldwalker]

I had a whole long post written up, but really, Freeshadow said it all, and said it better.

wyndslash, there are plenty of victims. They're the people who were sworn at, not the person who did the swearing.

[Freeshadow]

Worldwalker I have to return the compliment now.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by wyndslash

@DMS: i actually feel bad for her now the more i think about it. i mean yeah, she shouldn't have responded that badly, but i think there's a limit to how much you can push a person. it goes from being defensive to just plain bullying.

Oh, just to be clear, my comments were most definitely not aimed at anyone here, and very much at those who have piled onto Amazon to leave awful reviews on her book listing, solely, in many cases I'm sure, on the basis of having read the blog discussion.

But can't blame her outburst on that, since she waded in on that blog thread before anyone said anything at all, apart from the original review. The "cyber bullying" on Amazon really only got going after she'd completely lost her rag, and told those commenting on the reviewer's blog to f*** off. Twice.

[januaryman]

I agree that her responses were bizarre and inappropriate.

I started enjoying the verbal abuse she was getting. But it was a hurricane. She had long stopped responding, but the thread was allowed to continue on for WAY too long.

I went to her blog - she is also an artist, not a bad artist at all - I rather liked some of her abstracts. Let's remember she is a real person, has feelings (albeit an admittedly thin skin and anger management issues) and is just grammatically challenged. Most pilers-on had similar inabilities to spell correctly or failed to parse their sentences. I agree with those posters who saw this as another instance of cyber-bullying.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

Oh, just to be clear, my comments were most definitely not aimed at anyone here, and very much at those who have piled onto Amazon to leave awful reviews on her book listing, solely, in many cases I'm sure, on the basis of having read the blog discussion.

I like to think those people at least read the sample first... I admit I was curious and read part of the sample, but it wasn't worth leaving a review since it was already at critical mass.

Originally Posted by januaryman

I started enjoying the verbal abuse she was getting. But it was a hurricane. She had long stopped responding, but the thread was allowed to continue on for WAY too long.

I went to her blog - she is also an artist, not a bad artist at all - I rather liked some of her abstracts. Let's remember she is a real person, has feelings (albeit an admittedly thin skin and anger management issues) and is just grammatically challenged.

Real person or not (hey, maybe she's not!), she really shouldn't have said what she said. You can't go off on a reviewer like that in a public forum. Ever. For any reason. A beat-down was appropriate, though it was certainly allowed to go on too long.

Originally Posted by januaryman

Most pilers-on had similar inabilities to spell correctly or failed to parse their sentences.

That just makes it even funnier

[Freeshadow]

A beat-down was appropriate, though it was certainly allowed to go on too long.

I think this'll be seconded by a majority here.

Now I'm only curious if this unwanted kind of fame will coin some term like "howett(ing) a reviewer"

[Worldwalker]

Bullying is taking someone's lunch money. Stopping them from playing on the monkey bars. Threatening to beat them up if they don't do what you tell them to. Saying things they don't want to hear, especially in response to them swearing at you, is not bullying. Is "bullying" (especially with the prefix "cyber-", which seems to make everything scarier) going to be the next word doomed to be expanded into vagueness and uselessness?

Any adult who can't handle people criticizing their writing ability has no business claiming to be a writer, and I think the jury is still out whether they should even claim to be an adult.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Any adult who can't handle people criticizing their writing ability has no business claiming to be a writer, and I think the jury is still out whether they should even claim to be an adult.

Agreed. It's pretty clear this woman has no business being a professional writer. But the piling on long after she'd left the conversation was a little excessive. So was the deluge of one-star Amazon reviews. I wouldn't call it bullying, given that she antagonized people (did you notice her first several posts spanned days? she kept coming back, trying to incite a reaction!), but the reaction was over-the-top.

[Worldwalker]

Remember, though, that the 307th poster wasn't looking at the previous 300 or so posts expressing the same opinion; they were looking at the first few (the author's and the reviewer's) and would have said the same thing if the other 300 hadn't been there at all; the odds are most of them never even read those intervening posts. They're not even paying attention to the fact that 300 other people already said the same thing they want to say. Like all the people posting updates that nobody cares about on Facebook, they're having a one-way conversation. The concept of "discussion" is really no part of this.

That's one of the problems with the Internet that is going to take a while to sort itself out socially. We have millions of people giving speeches with nobody listening. If you give a speech in an actual room to actual people, you can count empty chairs; if you post your profound thoughts on Facebook, you have no way to tell if anyone else cares. And, by and large, they don't; they're too busy posting their own even more profound (to them) thoughts.

A few weeks ago I was looking at a cage full of baby tortoises for sale. Most of them were trying to walk through one side of it. Were they thinking, deep down in their tiny tortoise minds, "he's walking north so I should walk north too?" Doubtful (for one thing, tortoises aren't that smart). Instead, whatever factors acted on one of them (light sources, the placement of the cage, whatever) acted on all of them in the same way. They all had the same reaction to their environment, which was, in their case, to walk north (or whatever way it was). People commenting on blogs, news stories, etc., are more complex than tortoise hatchlings, but their behavior follows the same patterns. The same things that affect the first poster and make him want to say his piece affect the 300th poster the same way -- and the previous 299 posts don't seem to factor into it at all. He wants to say something ... even, sadly, if nobody's listening.

That's one of the things I like about MobileRead: it's a place for discussion, where people actually read what someone else has said before they make their own proclamations. For all the places online there are to proclaim, there are remarkably few to discuss.

[Freeshadow]

well said - esp. the last sentence summing up the ah-so-shiny social networks at which there seems to be nothing social and communicative at all.
Just a bunch of centralised servers for 1liner slushpiles.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Bullying is taking someone's lunch money. Stopping them from playing on the monkey bars. Threatening to beat them up if they don't do what you tell them to. Saying things they don't want to hear, especially in response to them swearing at you, is not bullying. Is "bullying" (especially with the prefix "cyber-", which seems to make everything scarier) going to be the next word doomed to be expanded into vagueness and uselessness?

.

What would you call hundreds of people leaving you 1 star reviews without even reading your book? Since it is designed to put people off buying it, wouldn't that fall under taking someone's lunch money?

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Bullying is taking someone's lunch money. Stopping them from playing on the monkey bars. Threatening to beat them up if they don't do what you tell them to. Saying things they don't want to hear, especially in response to them swearing at you, is not bullying. Is "bullying" (especially with the prefix "cyber-", which seems to make everything scarier) going to be the next word doomed to be expanded into vagueness and uselessness?

Any adult who can't handle people criticizing their writing ability has no business claiming to be a writer, and I think the jury is still out whether they should even claim to be an adult.

The people who were responding directly to her in the blog discussion weren't bullying. The people who piled onto Amazon to leave vicious comments and 1 star reviews of her book purely in order to "punish" her for her outburst, were.

As for the "cyber" thing - I certainly don't use it to make it seem scarier. However I do classify it as something not quite the same as face to face bullying. It's a lot easier to bully someone anonymously and remotely than it is to do it face to face, and I suspect that many who indulge in that kind of Amazon 1-star blitz would never dream of standing in front of the same person and saying the same things (some of them quite personal and vicious) to her face. The end result can be the same, though - isolate them, intimidate them, beat them up emotionally and drive them out.

Those involved in the original blog discussion were the ones who were directly harangued and insulted by her, and they were able to respond directly to that, and tell her how they felt about it. Most of those who beat a path to Amazon weren't involved in that way, and were participating in the kind of "mob mentality" that rears its head sometimes. I'm sure they didn't think of what they were doing as "bullying" - probably thought of it as giving her her just deserts. But the cumulative impact of so many piling on like that and saying quite vicious things about not just the book but the author herself can be pretty devastating for the recipient, way beyond anything merited by her original outburst.