Alfaniel's Original Blog Title

Little Known Facts about GoodReads Removals Debacle

People know some details about GoodReads removals, from the 6000+ posts on the announcement on That Friday to Ceridwen's compiled spreadsheets on the internet. But there are some lesser known details, which many debates are ignoring.

I won't comment on whether people should be forced to second guess GR's intent and the future of this site, instead of simply being honestly and fully informed what is going on.

GR/Amazon's official statements are not complete and/or correct. But at least, people should at least know all/more of the *facts* lost in the debates. Cold and dry.

I'll lay them down.

1. Before the Amazon takeover, it seems GoodReads was emailing members, when their reviews were objectionable, to edit them accordingly. Which people were usually doing, as it's not always easy to know where the line is. For example, the staff sometimes emailed members to tone down the amount of mature content in a review.

Not only the policy to *WHAT* is not accepted changed, but the *HOW* to act on it: direct removals.

2. The official notice states that reviews about author behavior will be removed from the site.

No. Reviews without "author behavior", but whose *comments* were about author behavior in their comments thread, were removed.

3. The official notices states that reviews about author behavior will be removed from the site.

No. Reviews with a completely different content than author, are being removed.

4. Following an account shows you the review updates from the respective member, in your home page.

The review updates from Manny's account are no longer displayed to his followers feeds. They still appear to friends, but not to followers.

5. Some people say that protests have been slightly slowing down lately.

Fact: over the past couple of weeks, many members involved in the protests could not log in for days. When they could, they could not post reviews, rate books, add a friend.

6. Reviews are usually removed when flagged, otherwise GR staff wouldn't know about them.

However, some reviews were removed within the hour of posting them, and linking to them in a status thread. So fast that it's not very likely that they've been (much) flagged.