Taking the Good out of Goodreads

             So last year, I think it was last year? Maybe it was two years ago? I am not entirely sure on the exact amount of time, I joined Goodreads. I loved this website, it was there for me to be able to read books and express how I felt about them and talk to others about these books that I had fallen for, or not so much, or whatever the case maybe. Even better, if helped me find all these amazing books! I never really had problem with it really, and I had meet some really amazing people - one of which who I e-mail "pen-pal" with.
             So color me suspicious when I started talking to my now very close, very good friend who I will not named told me she rarely used Goodreads. And I was shocked because she is an author - indie - after all I would think she would be stalking the place like no one else's business. So when we started talking about her lack of using Goodreads I asked why? And she simply told me: Bullying.

             To say I was shocked was an understatement. Yeah all ages of people use this website, but I mean come on most of the people I had talked to were at least over 17 years old, I would think at that this point we would be done with this. And I know bullying exist even in adulthood. But I never thought that the small community I was part of would never do that. Until it happened. A book that I enjoyed I gave it a 4 stars - a really good rating and all this, well the Author started popping up in my newsfeed. So I wanted to see what was up. The author was being bullied, and I realized how bad of a problem it could be. 

              Now Goodreads is putting in a new policy, which I respect because in some cases it is truly needed, like I have heard rumors of bookshelves talking about doing horrible things to the authors. Sometimes there are bookshelves called author's behaving badly, which I find hard to disagree with having because even if some authors are being bullied, authors are bullying reviewers. In the end there really is no end in sight for this battle, and some people are going to end up beyond pissed, and some people are going to be totally alright with this. I am in the middle. I have seen both ends, an author being bullied - who I ended up contacting privately and found out she was an absolute mess, and other times when an author called her readers something not so nice. What I have learned from all this mess is that while we should focus our attention on eliminating bullying from schools, so the younger generation never grows up with it, we need to step back as adults and do it ourselves.