Repeating Myself, with added eyerolling

[neadods]

There are now apparently six comms dedicated to critiquing the nominees for the Children of Time awards, so many run by sock puppets that the latest stakes its claim to fame specifically as the non-sock comm. (Why does CoT continue to soak up this nonsense? It's not like there are multiple comms SMOFing about calufrax recs.)


I'm going to take this opportunity to repeat myself: by openly posting reviews under my name, I have gotten work. Semi-professional work. (Reviewing the Evidence, I Love a Mystery Newsletter) Paying work. (Once Written, Firefox News) Even the stuff that doesn't pay in cash or goods (Unreality SF) is adding to my portfolio so I can get more work (and things are being negotiated for future lines).

Four years of negative reviews in Reviewing the Evidence, and I have yet to be spit on or run out of (or even shunned at) Malice Domestic or Bouchercon. It hasn't been six days since I looked a professional author right in the eyes and explained why I gave her next-to-latest book a partially negative review. Mary Stanton was amazingly cool about it. We had a long conversation about those points in her series and her plans.


So frankly y'all, I have LESS than no sympathy for anyone who thinks that they "have" to hide their identity to "honestly" give an opinion.

Comments

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

So... you're saying the main, erm, let's call it a "disadvantage", as you see it, is that an anonymous review would have to be judged on its own internal merits? Cos that doesn't seem a suitable cause for hand-wringing to me... but possibly I'm being obtuse (it has been known)?

[fyrdrakken]

That was me thinking out loud, so to speak.

Like I noted, an "advantage" in terms of getting rid of the halo effect -- which cuts two ways, in terms of the unpopular with something intelligent to say getting heard on their statements' merits rather than automatically dogpiled by their enemies, and in terms of BNFs who may have grown lazy discovering that they don't get an automatic chorus of enthusiastic agreement when their name isn't attached.

A "disadvantage" in terms of the reader not having that baseline awareness of the author's known biases and previous statements, and of the author being able to make disingenuous statements under the cover of anonymity. (I think that latter is edging towards the border between true anonymity and sockpuppetry. Not actually saying what they honestly feel and are merely hampered by fear of retribution from speaking under their own name, but rather deliberate manipulation of public opinion through calculated dishonesty.)

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

That all seems reasonable to me, yes.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

deliberate manipulation of public opinion through calculated dishonesty

Oh, I LIKE that! It sums up my opinion quite tidily of socks in general... and it's hard to see what the "good" of a sock puppet can be when you've seen the bad of socks and anons. (Including the anon meme; as far as I can tell from people talking about it, it's not at all mean to people except the people it's mean to, and it's not at all going to turn on the people who love it, except for the times that it does.)

Or, to say it shortly: when posting anonymously is too wanky for Fandom Wank, it is well past what a reasonable fan would consider reasonable discourse.

ETA: The only reason I haven't replied to your comments is I don't want to type IAWTC that many times. :)

[fyrdrakken]

I'm definitely playing devil's advocate here -- I don't doubt that you've seen anonymity play out in horrifically wanky ways in fandom many times in the past, as it gets used as a cover for grudges and as anonymice get outed. But I'm also in agreement with the premise that sometimes an author comes with too much baggage for anyone to pay attention to their message if their name is attached, and that anonymity is another layer protecting someone from retribution for their statements on- or offline.

And I'm seriously vested in the premise that a longstanding pseudonym counts as a genuine identity. (I just googled FyrDrakken vs. my RL name again to check my results. That's six pages of FyrDrakken results all of which were me (I got tired of scanning and didn't check the later pages) and nine pages on my RL name that weren't me before I quit reading.) It's definitely worth noting that we all make the distinction between a "genuine" pseudonym/fanname/userID and a sock puppet.