Off-Topic: The Story Of An Internet Revolt

2013·3.1 MB·English

by  G. R. Reader

Copyright(cid:13)c G.R.Reader,2013
Forfurtherinformation,pleaseseep.xiii.
ISBN:978-1-304-57519-7
Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust
aresignsofhealth.
—Nietzsche
Toforbidusanythingistomakeushaveamindforit.
—Montaigne
I hope you’ll appreciate that if we just start deleting ratings
whenever we feel like it, that we’ve gone down a censorship
roadthatdoesn’ttakeustoagoodplace.
—OtisY.Chandler,GoodreadsCEO
iv
v
Contents
Howthisbookgotwritten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Forewordtothesecondedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
I Background 1
AReviewof“AShortHistoryofEverything” . . . . . . 4
IntheBeginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
AMessagefromGibson’sBookstore . . . . . . . . . . . 11
II Thedeletionsstart 13
AReviewof“F*ck!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
BytheNumbers: AnAnalysisoftheReviewsDeletedin
theGoodreadsPolicyChange . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
WhyGR’sNewReviewRulesAreCensorship . . . . . . 34
III Testingthelimits 37
AReviewof“MeinKampf” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
AReviewof“QuotationsfromChairmanMaoTsetung” 41
vi
AReviewof“TheDestructionofDresden” . . . . . . . 42
AReviewof“IfIDidIt” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
AReviewof“253” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
AReviewof“Logic: AnIntroduction” . . . . . . . . . . 49
AReviewof“Tampa” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
APhilosophicalDiscussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
AReviewof“Editorial”byitsauthor . . . . . . . . . . . 56
AReviewof“MartialLaw” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
AReviewof“TheMasterandMargarita” . . . . . . . . 60
AReviewof“Drive” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Personal, Political, Cultural: Parsing the Concept of Au-
thorBehaviorinGoodreadsPolicy . . . . . . . . . 71
IV Tryingtobereasonable 79
GoodreadsGetReal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
AReviewof“That’sNotWhatIMeant!” . . . . . . . . 84
V Revolt 87
AReviewof“CivilDisobedience” . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
TheHydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
AHysteriaofHydras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
AToU-CompliantHydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
AnExcitedYAHydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
AnElectronicQuotationalHydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
ADerrideanHydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
AnAngryHydra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
vii
G.R.McGoodreader: AnEyewitnessAccount . . . . . . 108
Wanted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
VI Theaftermath 113
AReviewof“Gazelle” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
AReviewof“MovingforDummies” . . . . . . . . . . . 118
TheArtofWar: CorporateTakeoverofUserRights . . . 119
VII Goodbyeletters 123
TheGoodreadsCensorshipRap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
My3100WordsontheEvilsOfCensorshipandtheWrong-
nessofBreakingTrust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
ConvergenceCulture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
ARetellingofGoldilocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
LibrarianonStrike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
AReviewof“Christy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
AReviewof“1001BooksYouMustReadBeforeYouDie”147
OneFootOutTheDoor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
VIII Butwhatiscensorship? 157
WhattheFoundingFathersMightHaveSaidtoEachOther
AboutCensorshiponGoodreads . . . . . . . . . . 160
AReviewof“FairPlayorFoul”byitsauthor . . . . . . 177
AReviewof“TheWonderfulO” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
viii
How this book got written
IbecameamemberoftheGoodreadsonlinereviewingsitein2008,
aboutayearafteritstarted,andhavesincethenspentagreatdealof
timehangingoutthere;moretime,possibly,thanwasgoodforme.
But it was so much fun. Here was a place where tens of thousands
of people, from all over the world, congregated because of their
commonloveofbooks. MostoftheonesIchattedwithwerewell-
read,articulate,opinionatedandwitty. Icouldpostareviewofany
book — any book whatsoever — and be sure that someone would
soon add a comment to it. That usually led to an interesting online
conversation, where other people would join in. Virtually the only
constraintonwhatyoucouldwritewasthatyouweren’tallowedto
post pornographic images. I wrote well over a thousand reviews,
ranginginlengthfromafewwordstomanypages.
In May 2013, Goodreads announced that they were being acquired
byAmazon. Thisnewswasnotwellreceived. Amongotherthings,
Goodreads had stated less than a year earlier that they had broken
offtheirrelationshipwithAmazon,asaresultofAmazon’smaking
unreasonable demands, with the consequence that Amazon was no
longer making their database available to Goodreads. This meant
thatmanyofthebookslistedonGoodreadsnowhadincompletein-
formation. Some of the people who worked as volunteer librarians
onGoodreadshadspentdozensorevenhundredsofhoursrestoring
themissingdata,believingthatthiswouldhelpGoodreadsstayau-
tonomous of Amazon. They were now furious over what they saw
asduplicityonthepartofGoodreadsmanagement.
I did not like the news about the Amazon acquisition either, and
guessed that there would soon be large changes; Amazon have al-
ways had a restrictive reviewing policy, which, at least as far as I
was concerned, made it uninteresting to post reviews on their site.
IhadalreadypublishedonecollectionofmyGoodreadsreviewsas
a book. I immediately put together a second collection and took
all the reviews in question offline. I wasn’t completely sure why I
ix
wasdoingthis,butitsomehowfeltimportanttoknowthatIhadfull
controlofmywriting.
On September 21, 2013, a rumor started to spread that Goodreads
management had deleted a number of reviews on the grounds that
theycontainedpersonalattacksontheauthorsofthebooks. Aclar-
ificationwassoonissuedbyGoodreadsCommunityManagerKara
Erickson. She said that a new policy had been put into place ban-
ning reviews which focused on “author behavior”. The policy was
sketchilyformulated,anditwasimmediatelyapparentthatitcould
not work. Many people began exposing its logical inconsistencies,
and the US media took an interest. A brief review of Mein Kampf,
negatively commenting on its author, was reprinted in the Wash-
ingtonPostacoupleofdayslater. Thereviewcollectedhundredsof
votes,andwasnotdeleted. Other,similarreviewswerealsoallowed
tostand.
Although only a few hundred reviews had been deleted, on a site
which claimed to have over 24 million reviews posted, there was
a general sense of outrage; this was, as much as anything, because
of the extreme lack of clarity of the new rules. Members became
increasingly creative in finding ways to test the limits. The most
popular reviews were soon various forms of protest review, which
in various guises questioned the good judgement of the Goodreads
management,insultedthem,andsuggestedmethodsforcircumvent-
ing the new rules. The site has always been dominated by fads.
Protestingagainsttherulesbecamethenewfad.
Goodreadsfadstendtobeshort-lived,andifmanagementhadsim-
ply ignored this one it might well have run its course and disap-
peared. Some of the creative insults, however, appeared to have
touched a raw nerve; management started deleting protest reviews,
claimingintheaccompanyingdeletionnoticesthatthereviewswere
“off-topic”. Thesitehasalwayscontainedahighproportionofoff-
topic reviews, which are often among the most amusing ones. It
was more than obvious that management was not cleaning up re-
viewsthatwereoff-topicperse;theywereusingthisasanexcuseto
x
removeprotestreviews. Therewassomethingsounutterablyridicu-
lous about the sight of a US company deleting posts accusing it of
censorshipthatmanyotherpeoplebegantoprotest. Itbecamecom-
mon for members’ avatars to feature a gag, most often a symbolic
rectangle photoshopped over the mouth. Others changed their user
namestoincludetextcriticalofGoodreads.
Inthemiddleofthisuproar,anAmericanauthorcalledArthurGra-
ham came up with a particularly clever idea: he created a fictitious
book called The Great Goodreads Censorship Debacle, written by
a fictitious author called G.R. McGoodreader. Graham’s idea was
a huge hit. Dozens of disaffected members posted reviews of the
book, many of them insulting in the extreme towards Goodreads
management. Thereviewstendedtocollectlargenumbersofvotes,
makingthemveryvisibleonthesite. Managementreactedtwodays
later by deleting the book, all the accompanying reviews and com-
ments,andMcGoodreader’sauthorpage.
A tradition had already sprung up of “Hydraing”: following the
GreeklegendoftheHydra, protesterstriedtomakesurethatevery
deleted review would be replaced by at least two copies. Arthur’s
bookwastheperfecttargetforthemostambitiousHydraoperation
yet. Since I had already published two collections of Goodreads
reviews, I was the obvious person to organize the work; I think
four different people independently made this suggestion to me. I
thought it was a wonderful idea, and asked for help. It turned out
that plenty of people wanted to help. By the next day, we had a
substantialgroupworkingontheproject.
And then a strange thing happened. We began to collect relevant
material,andthebookchangedbeforeoureyes. We(or,atleast,I)
had originally thought of it as no more than a complicated prank.
But as we read the many contributions that poured in, it became
clearthatthiswasfarmorethanaprank. PeoplelovedtheGoodreads
community. They cared about the friends they had made there and
thesenseofbeingpartofaworld-widefamilyofbooklovers. They
weredesolatedbythefeelingthattheyhadbeenliedtoandtreated