Being caught in a mass tag notification blitz has prompted me to vow never to urge my own readers to write reviews or vote in polls for me after I'm published.
Since my name was embedded in a comment among at least 20 other names on a post that had numerous responses coming in left and right from people I've never heard of in my life, and since I was keeping sounds on my phone waiting for one of the kids to text with info I was waiting on, and since it's a holiday weekend and I was also waiting to hear from other people in real life, I facepalmed through a really weird 10-15 minutes of trying to get that to stop.
Blocking never works on mass tagging. Unfollowing, muting, stopping notifications on a particular post- none of that works on mass tags in a comment. And then a joke came through about the media host not allowing any more tagging for periods of time because it had reached spam level, but brave attempts were being made again every so many minutes.
I like the authors I follow, especially the ones who are part of the gang, but that wasn't cool, and it's embarrassing to have to break through with a comment to please don't in future because it makes me look like a bad guy not being supportive.
So, yeah. If the only reason a book is moving up in a poll is because a bunch of people are being aggressively encouraged to go vote as often as possible, that doesn't speak well for the quality of the content, in my opinion. The polls are ridiculous in the first place. Very few people pay attention to those, and so many books in the list had zero votes, it's hard not to stop and say srsly?
I've made the decision not to purchase and read that book. It could be the best book ever written, but that annoyance stuck with me and every time I see that book cover now I will remember the day my phone blitzed to the point where I was ready to throw it out a window.
I'm not saying this to be mean or petty. I'm not going to name the book or author or say anything negative anywhere else. I'm just saying don't tag me any more for that kind of stuff. If you've never been on the receiving end of tag spam (and I have multiple times, I know a lot of people), just please go read Social Media Netiquette and The Top 10 Rules of Netiquette for Social Media.
All those memes click back to original sources.
