Goodreads reviewers and STGRB. When will it end?

I just read through all the recent articles relating to the Goodreads drama and the Stop the Goodreads Bullies wesbite, The Huffington Post one and the responses to it from Andrew Losowsky, Foz Meadows, I'd already read the Stacia Kane one for she is the Queen of Awesome, the Smart Bitches one, and the one by John Scalzi, which was just pure class. (I may have spat tea at my PC when he suggested they "may just be twelve."

What I gathered from reading through all of those articles is that in the two weeks (ish) since this website began, it's been slowly unravelling from this supposed caped crusader mission by a "victim" of bullying, rallying the troops and shining a light on this heinous underground movement of evil reviewers with the power to dictate what thousands of free-thinking individuals do and say on Goodreads (ahem), to people outside of the brouhaha discussing the increasing levels of crazy on display by a clearly vengeful person (or two).

Hopefully that means if this momentum carries on, it should be over soon. I.e. GoDaddy will get a clue and take the website down.

This righteous crusade started with the website falsely trying to associate itself with the Big Guns. It had anti-bullying banners plastered all over it and tried to set itself up as a protector of indie authors and authors who've been "victims." Enter stage left REAL anti-bullying associations who took one look at the website and insisted their banners be removed immediately. What does that tell you? More and more people are publicly disassociating themselves from it. This "group of readers and writers" is slowly starting to look more and more like 2, maybe 3 people all talking to themselves via sock-puppet, Peter Pan-themed, accounts at their own pity party for the mentally unstable. They must be editing out every single comment by anyone who disagrees with them because I don't believe for a second none of you/us have tried to comment there to tell them how disgracefully they are behaving. Just look at all the comments under the HP article where it's not been doctored.

And even though the HP site is refusing to take down the original blog post, even they are basically saying they've now realised after unanimous angry responses (which is probably not what STGRB had in mind when they "proudly announced" it) that they might have made a boo boo and will "fix it" by letting the other (sane) side speak. Hm. Not perfect but not in support either.

With reference to the use of "snark" in reviews and the possibility of changing policies with regards to it on Goodreads as Foz Meadows suggested, I don't see how you could possibly seek to attain that without impinging on freedom of speech. And why the heck should it be changed? Not everyone writes reviews the same way, there's a wonderful diversity on Goodreads. I personally don't get too snarky or use swear words over much but it doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading one or two that do. It shows passion, I think, when you wanted a book to be good and it fails epically. Because we love books and reading THAT much. These kind of Rotten Tomatoes reviews are to be expected in a public forum discussing creative, subjective work. It's been happening with movies for years. Just look at the Razzie awards and such.

I keep looking at the STGRB site and each day the level of desperation on display seems to increase. I go there, I see the words on the screen, but all I hear is the squelching of sour grapes....

The opinions stated in this post are that of

and are unbiased and freely given.