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Comment by saul_goodman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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