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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Man it's a shame that this system is having undesired consequences for the author, but the whole thread just reeks of pretentious entitlement.

Readers are giving feedback through an app that makes it easy for them to do so. Maybe the feedback is unhelpful, but I don't see anything here indicating that the readers are acting in bad faith.

These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read. From there it would be much easier to interpret this in a constructive way.

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I came away with the opposite interpretation. The author never blames the readers for doing this. The author even fully understands that the system is designed to help readers to be "helpful" in this regard, but the system is clearly misguided. And in this case it's not even a typo, the "bug submitter" has incorrectly identified a bug which has saddled the author with a potential loss in sales because of the "low quality" rating it can immediately imbue.

Here we have a system designed to facilitate near real-time feedback trying to push fixes upstream into a system built on hard-copy which is very non-trivial to merge patches into. Ultimately it punishes the author out-of-band of the publisher which is also broken. Sure, you can flail your finger at the stupid publishers for still printing in hard copy, but that doesn't solve the problem.

>The author never blames the readers for doing this.

the author seems to know they shouldn't be blaming the reader, but the whole tone of the twitter thread absolutely is blaming the reader. i don't know how you can read the linked thread and come away with an impression that the author isn't frustrated at the reader who reported the issues.

Things the author wrote:

"It’s not your fault, Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise that if you make too many notes, the system informs the author they’re pulling the book."

"Proofreaders are awesome! Amazon has just found a way to punish authors with them."

"That’s the problem! It weaponized people’s desire to help by having a computer go “oh, this must mean the book is Bad.” It’s not your fault!"

Now there are also tweets that are more on the "exasperated" side, but the author pretty clearly doesn't blame the users so much as the system itself.

I think blaming the reader is Ok, having easy access to the tools to do something doesn't automatically exclude you of all responsibility after using it, if that reader had asked a friend "Hey do you think this is a typo?" they would have been more likely to know it was not.

I once saw a one-star review on Udemy.

The reviewer's complaint: "Author has a non-English accent." I would understand if the author's speech was unintelligible but it wasn't.

> I would understand if the author's speech was unintelligible but it wasn't.

Don't assume that because you can understand it, everyone can. I can understand several accents that most people struggle with, and I struggle a lot with a few accents that are fairly common. It's to do with exposure more than anything IMO.

I'm not out there leaving one star reviews, but I will drop a course in a heartbeat if the instructor has an accent that's difficult for me. I'm there to learn and barriers to that outside of the actual learning process are not worth my time.

Tangentially, QQ lets you customize the font in which your messages are displayed to other people. Some people express their personality by choosing quirky or fun fonts.

That caused problems for me. I know how to read Chinese characters in more-or-less standard fonts. I wasn't really able to read the quirkier ones.

> Tangentially, QQ lets you customize the font

I always love it when I can change the font to suit my tastes.

> in which your messages are displayed to other people.

No.

Flagging something as "low quality" because of a few typos seems utterly absurd, even if the typos are real.

Allow me to introduce you to university textbooks.

Huge budgets. Insane costs to the user. “Low quality” would be the nicest thing said about them.

If I’m a paying user, how does this stuff make it through quality control? It’s because, there is no quality control.

> I will, sadly and angstfully, cop to typos. I make them. I’ve made peace. But now I’m supposed to fix failures of this person’s reading comprehension and understanding of vernacular

Sure it's not the best system, but the tone is condescending and unconstructive. I get that it's cool on Twitter to hyperbolize and vent, but in any other forum this would be cringe-worthy pretension.

Did you not read the part of the thread where authors are already reporting abuse of this system to harass them?

The problem is Amazon just lets anyone flag an eBook. It treats these random flaggings as signal to downgrade the book, directly costing the author sales.

The primary function of the system from Amazon’s POV is to keep costs down, meaning no customer service is required. Taken in that light it makes sense.

Flagging "moreso" as a typo is cringe-worthy pretension in the most literal sense - it is someone pretending to be a helpful editor and in the process causing the author to cringe as they are required to perform useless labor.

You dont get low quality flag for one typo. Author chose to only share "moreso" in a bid to garner sympathy. Others joining in complain about being forced, oh shock and horror, to fix ordinary typos (like missing letters) in their flawless creations.

It seems like you're the one with the entitlement mentality here. I fail to see why the author should feel good about someone who doesn't understand their work being able to cripple their sales, howbeit inadvertently.

> Maybe the feedback is unhelpful, but I don't see anything here indicating that the readers are acting in bad faith.

The author explicitly does not say this:

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1209544781468180480

> Again, my dear proofreader friends, please don’t blame yourselves. Amazon doesn’t exactly explain that your desire to be helpful is telling a computer that Book Is Bad, Pull Bad Book.

I think the author is very explicit that they aren't blaming users:

>It’s not your fault, Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise that if you make too many notes, the system informs the author they’re pulling the book.

And:

> That’s the problem! It weaponized people’s desire to help by having a computer go “oh, this must mean the book is Bad.” It’s not your fault!

The author blames Amazon:

> Sigh. I’m sure they thought they were helping, except all that really happens is that Amazon puts flags on the sales page to tell people it’s a terrible book and the author drowns in a morass of old files in a half dozen formats trying to fix things.

The author clearly blames Amazon multiple times for not making clear the connection between action (reader marks typos) and outcome (book gets "low quality" label and makes busywork for author).

As I reader I would not expect that to be the outcome and if I knew that's what would happen, I would just try to contact the author directly.

As I reader I expect the author got paid for what you have called busywork so I dont have to guess thru cat on the keyboard moments.

> These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.

Real hard to be grateful that your work is being published and read if people are clicking buttons that cause those works to get de-published and un-readable.

I think you are the one coming with pretencious entitletement, pretending you can give power to third party actors so unreliable as the average consumer and not expect to waste the time of thousands of authors; such power should be much more tightly controlled and Amazon knows that, maybe something like a dashboard where you can specify why the "typo" is there so next time someone reports it as such they can read why is it actually not a typo, and only _then_ can someone report it again and only _then_ get real consequences such as flags next to the book and other actions that economically damage the authors.

> These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.

This is a multi-award winning author with incredibly strong ties to sf fan, including fan writer, communities and a huge professional network. But sure, she should be grateful Amazon is giving her amateur editorial advice and (thanks to this system, basically negative) exposure.

They're not acting in bad faith (probably) but they shouldn't try to fix things that aren't broken or they aren't an expert in.

The "wisdom of the crowds" isn't. Your average commenter, even on HN makes a lot of basic English mistakes (I do my share too, but I try fixing when I have the chance).

These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.

Why? They did a pile of work and someone chose to purchase some of it. Are they somehow less deserving of respect than people in other lines of work?

Pointing flaws seen as disrespectful is a very SJW worldview.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not name-calling ones or shallow dismissals. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Kindly note that I am responding to the specific assertion I quoted, rather than complaining about anyone pointing out flaws. If you have some beef with an 'SJW worldview' that seems like your problem, rather than mine.

That's not how I was interpreting the tweets. The author is fine with the feedback on their writing; what they're not fine with is an automated system tagging their work as "low quality" if enough erroneous feedback (or subjective feedback that perhaps the author disagrees with) is submitted.

(See my other comment[1]; it sounded to me too that the feedback was on text intentionally spelled with non-standard spellings, but that's different from a "typo".)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876500

Yes and no. Even if they are acting with good intentions, it's still causing negative consequences for the author. I can understand it would be especially frustrating if the "correction" was incorrect.

I concur. The user provides feedback through the obvious interface they see, and the author blames the user. If it had started from a place of empathy, maybe it'd have the desired effect, but it doesn't for me. Maybe the author could have blamed the system, or raised the issue with Amazon, but starting off blaming the user sounds silly.

I'm not sure how the both of you can interpret the author's words the way you have.

> Hey, I don’t know if whoever flagged the typos in my ebook thought they were helping, but please don’t do that. That just means there’s a quality warning on Amazon’s sale’s page. It’s super not helpful, particularly when the issue is vernacular English.

> You have made my life way more difficult on Christmas Eve by setting this flag. I’m sure that wasn’t your intent, but...yeah, not great.

> Again, my dear proofreader friends, please don’t blame yourselves. Amazon doesn’t exactly explain that your desire to be helpful is telling a computer that Book Is Bad, Pull Bad Book.

those quotes you mention, while generally hinting towards Amazon's broken system, directly address the reporting individual -- unless i'm to believe that someone internal to Amazon reported it.

YOU made life difficult on Christmas Eve.

Don't blame YOURSELF

...wasn't YOUR intent.

So, unless I fall into the fantasy that the author is addressing an internal Amazon employee, it sounds as if those statements are being made towards the 'you' who reported the author.

It's all being snarky towards Amazon's broken system, no doubt, but the author doesn't seem to mind sharing the blame with the perpetrator of the report itself..

That's a shifted goalpost argument. GGP talks about "blame", you downgrade this to "addressing".

Certainly, the word "you" is used to address, but you would be mistaken in thinking that the word "you" alone implies blame. The rest of the quoted sentences clearly express the author deflecting the blame away from the person who made the reports on the book.

I understand different people have different perspectives but, to me, it still reads condescending towards the reader. As if the author were saying something along the lines of:

I know you're trying to help, but don't do that. You're not being helpful because you don't know well enough. You didn't know better but you've ruined Christmas for me. That said, it's not you, it's Amazon.

There are also these:

> THAT WASN'T EVEN A TYPO, PERSON, YOU GOT CONFUSED ABOUT THE SPEAKER

> I will, sadly and angstfully, cop to typos. I make them. I’ve made peace. But now I’m supposed to fix failures of this person’s reading comprehension and understanding of vernacular so that Amazon will take down the tag saying my book is low quality. During a sale.

> As if the author were saying something along the lines of: I know you're trying to help, but don't do that. You're not being helpful because you don't know well enough.

That isn’t what the author said, but that is an accurate assessment of the situation.

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