I sense trouble

[farla]

I went to go look over my reviews, and noticed you can now report those as abuse.

...You can report abuse for other people's reviews, too. I just checked.

I mean, it does have the whole thing about "don't report just because they dislike it" and currently the categories are swearing/offensive phrases and spam, plus "other". But there's no way of knowing exactly what'll get hit and what won't.

Or, for that matter, how it'll be enforced period. I mean, they already can't keep track of people reporting stories for abuse, how's this going to work? (I'm not sure if they've just stopped taking stories down these days, or if it's still hit and miss, or what) More, what happens if they decide your review is abuse? Does it just get deleted, or...

And now that I think about it, I wonder if this is just a stealth attempt to remove inappropriate content. I mean, there was/is that swear filter, and now they're allowing anyone to report reviews for swearing... I'm not sure if I should tie this back to the NC-17 content/hiding R thing, since that's far older. But there's something that bothers me about the direction things seem to be taking.

(And does this have anything to do with the testing by people with beta reading experience? It doesn't seem like it should, unless the reviews are being judged on overall harshness. Which would mean that they'll be judged based on if those beta readers are of the sort that believe "constructive criticism" needs to be fawning to take the edge off or not, which strikes me as really, really worrying. I mean, the projects could be unrelated, but if not...

(And if that is it, things are really bad, because you can get in trouble even if the person you're reviewing okayed it, on behalf of one of their fans.)

Comments

[negrek.livejournal.com]

Maybe they just think people don't notice when their reports get ignored? So they think if they put little report buttons everywhere that send abuse tickets to the Internet equivalent of an incinerator, people will use them and be all, "Yay, I did something to improve the community!" and waltz off without checking to see if the problem is actually addressed?

[banzaisebastian.livejournal.com]

I really hope so, as I really don't want to know what will happen if the staff actually go through and "take care" of every abuse report they receive on comments. You know, like "omg theyre flaming me!!!!" every time someone submits concrit, which really goes back up to Act's initial comment.

I understand that FFNet's slogan is "Unleash your imagination," but it seems like they keep on adding things to the site that only exist to perpetuate an author's bad habits. I kinda want to go back to around 1999, when, sure, there were some really terrible fics, but we got the bare-bones of a fanfiction site, rather than something with bells, whistles, and the option to report every bad review you get.

But maybe I'm a purist.