Tuesday News: Reddit’s dilemma, Adobe Digital Edition 4, Baptist responds to The Economist, and authors buying reviews
Publishing NewsADE / authors / Book Reviews / epub / fiverr / Free Speech / History / Race / reddit / slavery14 Comments
Reddit at a crossroads: The inevitable clash between free speech and a desire for funding – An interesting piece on the current dilemma facing Reddit, a comment deeply committed to free speech, but commercially dependent on venture capital funding, which can be notoriously demanding in its conditions for continued support.
It is pretty much impossible to be a free speech absolutist without having to defend the right to publicize some really skeevy stuff. And for absolutist First Amendment attorneys and scholars, the principle might be enough. But for the corporate entity Reddit (which is largely owned by Conde Nast’s parent company), the “ideal” of unfettered free speech is unlikely to remain uncompromised – for good and bad.
The challenge for Reddit now is: How does it retain its commitment to such free-speech principles while it is trying to raise money from a group of what could be nervous or conservative venture funds? Twitter has also wrestled with its early commitment to being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” and its desire to grow and generate revenue for its public shareholders has led to a form of quasi-censorship in which certain tweets and accounts are banned or hidden from users at the request of governments. But Twitter’s challenges are like a day at the beach compared with Reddit’s.
Remaining committed to free speech is hard enough when the speech you are trying to protect is violent or homophobic or repulsive in a number of other ways, but it becomes exponentially more difficult when you have investors with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line breathing down your neck. Will Reddit start to water down its commitment, in the hope that it can bridge those two divides without losing its soul? Or will it be forced to mimic Facebook, which routinely removes photos of women breast-feeding and never says why? –Gigaom
Adobe Releases Digital Editions 4.0 Featuring inComplete Support for Epub3 – Oh, look, Adobe Digital Editions 4.0 is here. And — surprise!! — it lacks some vital support functions (and this doesn’t include all of the Windows issues):
For example, Adobe DE 4.0 does not support embedded audio or video, and it is also lacking support for basics like right to left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) . The search function is incomplete, and the app is also lacking advanced rendering features (such as knockout, overprint, and non-separable blend modes). And last but not least, mouse wheel scrolling is officially not supported for Epub3 ebooks. –The Digital Reader
The Economist’s review of my book reveals how white people still refuse to believe black people about being black – Most of you have probably seen The Economists jaw dropping review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, which they removed but have kept is on a ‘special page,’ without the brilliant comment stream taking the publication and the review to task for its ridiculous yet horrifying take on Baptist’s work. In The Guardian, Baptist writes about the larger problem of relegating the testimony of black people to a less authoritative position relative to the testimony of white people. Definitely worth reading.
But the Economist didn’t apologize for dismissing what slaves said about slavery. That kind of arrogance remains part of a wider, more subtle pattern in how black testimony often gets treated – sometimes unknowingly – as less reliable than white. The Economist reviewer was saying that the key sources of my book, African Americans – black people – cannot be believed.
As the historian Jelani Cobb pointed out to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Friday night, the reviewer’s ideas about slavery’s history are not actually as uncommon as many of us would like to believe. He’s right: All across the American south, you can go to historic plantation sites still pushing the idea that slaves who had a “good” master were happy, and “faithful.” –The Guardian
When arrogance, hypocrisy, and deceit all come together in one place – Author Linda Hilton compiles and exhaustive portfolio of evidence regarding authors allegedly purchasing reviews on fiverr, especially in the wake of her findings that neither Goodreads nor Amazon has penalized authors for purchasing reviews (although those allegedly providing reviews have had their accounts deleted). Are readers still using Goodreads after everything the site has done?
To date — it’s currently Sunday, 7 September 2014 — no Goodreads author has lost her or his account due to buying of fiverr reviews. Even though Patrick, Director of Author Marketing (or whatever his official title is) hinted that authors could be deleted if they were buying fiverr reviews, not one has been so terminated.
. . .
Frustration with Goodreads’ lack of action on this issue prompted me to announce publicly that I would no longer spend my limited free time doing their job for them. I would not track down the information, collect the screen shots, do the leg work to clean up their site of fraudulent — and illegal — “ads” masquerading as customer reviews. I didn’t say I’d stop doing it; I just wasn’t going to give the information to Goodreads any more. I was, shall we say, moving house. –Linda Hilton
I still use Goodreads Robin. It’s my book catalogue and there’s nowhere else I can go. I have over 4000 books listed. The idea of doing all that again is… NOPE.
But I don’t participate in most of the social aspects of the site and so manage to avoid the kerfuffles. These days I rarely post entire reviews on GR – just the first couple paragraphs and a link, or, just a link if the review is here or at AudioGals. I only post the full review if it’s very short (which, as we all know is a very rare thing).
Also, I barely read YA so I manage to avoid a lot of the BBAs and I’m careful about which indie authors I read too.
The reddit situation is confusing.
On the one hand, they banned the subreddits hosting stolen pics of celebrities ( after several days, when they could have done that immediately).
On the other hand, other subreddits dedicated to candid pictures of women taken in the street or cafés/sex with animals and other illegal and/or morally disgusting situations are allowed to live on and perpetuate their vile comments.
So if you’re not Jennifer Lawrence and some creep took a picture of your thong while you were bending over to tie your shoelaces, good luck trying to stop people from masturbating on your body all over the internet.
I’m not even talking about vengeful exes posting nude pics/videos of their girlfriends, because they “deserved it”.
They’re obviously only moderating because they HAVE to, not because they want to.
Thank you for the Baptist link. I get the international version of the Economist and the review was in the book section, even though I downloaded my copy a few days after it came out (so they had plenty of time to fix it). The full review was just jaw-dropping.
They actually said “Slaves were valuable property …Slave owners surely had a vested interest in keeping their “hands” ever fitter,” without ever considering the fact that slaves (aside from the pretty women) were valuable for their labor and getting labor out of someone who gets nothing for it is not easy.
I thought the questioning of slave reports was acceptable, since I figured slaves had an incentive to make slavery sound as awful as possible to end it. Even with the ideal master, who wants to be owned body and soul?
I still use Goodreads, but mainly because it has some features I like that LibraryThing doesn’t have. (Or it does, but in a less confident format.)
I never really got into the social aspects of it and while I still occasionally post reviews there, they’re copied pasted from other places I post reviews to as well. Mostly I just rate books as I finish them. (And curse the continued lack of half stars.)
I’m really starting to enjoy Leafmarks. They have 1/2 stars AND less drama. The social aspects are still growing (and the database as well). It’s not as robust as GR but…GR has been in existence for over 5 years and Leafmarks is new.
@SAO:
“I thought the questioning of slave reports was acceptable, since I figured slaves had an incentive to make slavery sound as awful as possible to end it. Even with the ideal master, who wants to be owned body and soul?”
What, pray tell, is an “ideal master?” Even many who thought they were being benevolent as slave owners still used brainwashing to tell blacks that they were inferior. And many used religion as an excuse to own another human being. But that’s the point. Slaves weren’t thought of as humans, but chattel.
I don’t question many of the accounts, because the fear of retribution and violence during that time period were so very great. Published accounts show some slaves were so entrenched in the system (generations of their family under one slave owner) that they identified with their “Master” by saying “What we gonna do Master?” for each little thing. And slaves snitched on others who sought to escape, thinking they were doing something good for their “Master”. Not to mention how many women and children were used as sexually. With the amount of photos available that show the results a whipping can leave on one’s back, the incentive was there without needing to embellish.
If we can admit its still wrong today with modern slavery, why would yesterday be any different?
I’m going to recommend this blog for anyone interested in photos and articles regarding slavery:
http://usslave.blogspot.com/2012/02/slave-whipping-as-business.html
http://usslave.blogspot.com/2011/09/slave-tortures-mask-scolds-bridle-or.html
Not surprising. Historical romances set in or involving the South are full of enslaved or formerly enslaved people who are perfectly happy to work for the hero/heroine, whose family was always *so good* to them.
And fuck Reddit. I hope that shithole shrivels up and dies. They take all the fun out of browsing Imgur.
@Ridley: Yes, the historical romance set in the southern US during slavery without the history. Because, God forbid, should reality intrude. It’s too jarring and the reader ONLY wants the love story. There are a few authors I’ve come across lately who write those kinds of romances placed in turbulent times with interracial characters. And the conflict is minimal, if present at al!! I cringe because people still get sex ed from romances and are probably gleaning history from them too. UGH! Nowhere in this effed world has an interracial couple, especially the duo of Caucasian and non-Caucasian, ever lived without comment or conflict. To scrub it down for entertainment value is HISTORICAL FANTASY at best.
@wikkidsexycool: thanks for the links
@Kaetrin: I’m still a heavy user of Goodreads and don’t see myself abandoning it anytime soon. For me the social networking aspect is actually the main attraction. I have a lot of problems with it (I agree with Lostshadows – it’s far past time GR added half star rating capabilities) but, for now, the benefits outweigh any negativity.
Since I, too, have to be coaxed and cajoled into picking up YA I manage to avoid some drama. However this type of conduct by authors churns my stomach. Reading is a highly personal experience and this type of manipulation is intolerable. I like to post at least a paragraph of my thoughts about each book I read because I like to be part of the discussion and contribute to the content I rely upon. But I admit when I read an indie book or something by a lesser known author with few reviews I hesitate in writing one myself because I know it’s more likely to receive personal attention from the writer.
Some users do very well at monitoring abusive behavior by authors and other users – which is great – but it shouldn’t be solely their job. I’m all for a zero tolerance policy and banning users permanently. I only see this type of scenario growing worse if GR and Amazon don’t take action to police abusive behavior and establish policies to deter it.
Not gonna lie. I ignored SAO’s comment because I couldn’t come up with words to explain how I felt.
But after reading ONE of wikkidsexycool’s links I was so sickened I had to take a break. :-(
There is no “good slavery” once we leave fiction.
@Wikkid
I meant whatever an ideal master might be, a theoretical construct for the purpose of argument. Obviously, I didn’t explain myself well. At the time, many people who were strongly against slavery still felt that blacks were inferior to whites, including, many say, Lincoln. So, many whites might believe that under ideal conditions (whatever they might be) a black slave would be content to have food, shelter, and a master who would take care of him, even if they would not believe the same of a white man. Given that The Economist in the 21st century seems to think slavery wasn’t so bad, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that whites of the 1700 and 1800s thought so.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot in ‘Silencing the Past, Power and the Production of History’, says that the view of black inferiority was “based not so much on empirical evidence as on an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants.”
However, the brutality of slavery was clearly not acceptable. Whites didn’t have to believe that blacks were much better than animals to know that you shouldn’t treat animals or people that way, making brutality a winning argument.
I did not mean to suggest that I doubt the brutality of slavery; I don’t. There is overwhelming evidence (plus the logical question of how to get labor from people who have zero incentive to work). But The Economist stated that the author “cites the testimony of a few slaves to support his view (about) these rises in (cotton production) productivity, ” which I took to mean that the book quoted too few sources, and perhaps biased sources, to support his economic argument about productivity growth from 1800 to 1850, which might have been a valid criticism. After all, between the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and the ending of imports of slaves in 1807, the rise in productivity might have been due to treating the slaves better. This this argument implies that in the before period, the slaves were malnourished and deconditioned, so better only means treated in a somewhat less appalling manner.
So, to sum up, the argument that I thought The Economist was making was about support for a particular thesis, not about whether or not slavery was brutal or a GWTW fantasy. However, I haven’t read the book, so I can only speculate about the validity of The Economist’s criticism.
When I was an undergraduate, my immigration history professor talked about how slaves were more likely than free people who had paid for their journey to make it to the US by ship. Her point was not that slaves were taken better care of, but rather that we should consider the level of inhumanity of a system that was so ruthlessly focused on the economic value of slaves that those human beings were forcibly taken from their homes, relocated against their will, and provided just enough concern so that they would be “worth” the investment of their owners because they remained alive to face unremitting imprisonment and debasement. When you think about it from that perspective, the view presented is more hideous, not less.
Historians like Edward Baptist understand this, while the reviewers of The Economist responsible for that ridiculous travesty of criticism clearly do not.