Wednesday, March 11, 2015


The Amazon axe falls on the famous.... oh the irony!

Following on from the previous post, one thing that I didn't mention was that the world famous (and successful) author, Anne Rice, took her ramblings to the Amazon forums to actually promote the STGRB website. This is the website that seemingly uses 'bully' tactics to teach other supposed 'bully's' a lesson - The term 'bully' is, in my opinion, being thrown around like confetti at a wedding, much to the detriment of those individuals that are actually being bullied on the internet. STGRB have their own definition which, if you are to believe the masses on the forums, can be translated as 'those we don't like for whatever reason', and personally I see a lot of truth in this.

Onwards: So, Anne Rice (the perpetrator of the campaign against Kayleigh Herbertson for converting an old copy of an aged book into an art project - details in the previous post) decides to start her own thread on the Amazon forums to promote the antics of the STGRB site. 

Question: Is anyone else spotting a degree of hypocrisy in this?

Amazon threads are open to anyone to comment on. There are historical alliances and grudges, in fact there is some open warfare to be witnessed; but they are not generally moderated by Amazon, their preference is to sit back and wait for someone to tell them that something is wrong. There are hundreds of these threads so it is a difficult task for them.

Back to the story: Anne opens a thread directing people to the STGRB website, warning all authors to stay off the Amazon threads, staking her name and reputation behind the principles and activities of the STGRB entity. And then she systematically spams all of the other threads with her words of wisdom about the thread and continuously promoting the STGRB.

There is a lot of heated discussion, a lot of evidence posted to, at the very least, give a sane person reason to reconsider such overt promotion, all of which apparently fell on deaf ears - Oh woe, this was never going to end well.

I have witnessed Amazon remove specific posts of individuals because unfortunately there are some unpleasant people that trawl the internet, hide behind a keyboard and have nothing better to do than abuse the perceived weaker people, but they are few and far between (thankfully). This morning I wake up and find that Amazon have removed her entire thread! Somewhere in the region of 6,000 posts - gone.



For an internationally renowned author this, in my opinion, is what we would call 'being owned' by big A. I would imagine that AR is feeling quite wronged by this unusual turn of events, after all she is a world wide famous author of Vampirey things, and I am sure that this is far from over, (if her previous behaviour is to be used as a yardstick), but it is kinda reassuring to know that no-one is bigger than big A, regardless of their own opinions of themselves.

It is so coincidental that all this is going on just as my posts were focusing on the perils of the Amazon fora, and for that I thank AR. But it's not personal, I have no malice towards her at all, I don't presume to know her well enough to have an opinion, but thank you!

4 comments:

  1. Who is this wise man?

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  2. A minion who thinks for himself?

    Is that even possible? ;)

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    Replies
    1. Rare apparently, but definitely possible Anna :-)

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