moment for my thought of:
oh yeah the network page is a thing!Okay, so.
This was months ago and I wasn't involved because I already wasn't on Goodreads so I
may miss some of the details, but:
The core Thing That Set This Off was that two speculative fiction magazines, FIYAH Literary Magazine and Anathema Magazine, both of which feature (explicitly) work by authors of colour (FIYAH is "Black speculative fiction", Anathema is "spec fic by queer POC/Indigenous/Aboriginals") had all of their issues removed from Goodreads.
There was a general reaction of Wait What from people, who noted that it was
only the black magazines that were removed.
An argument ensued in which various people claimed that Goodreads doesn't list magazines (it does). They hammered the argument that Goodreads is only for books! (It isn't, people listed dozens of magazines that are on Goodreads and weren't removed.)
Someone then posted the actual rules on Goodreads... which explicitly allow magazines without ISBNs. Explicitly.
Meanwhile, assorted goodreads editors were clutching their pearls and declaring it "vile" even to
suggest that someone deleting the black magazines (and only the black magazines) was in any way racist and HOW VERY DARE THEY.
Despite the fact that Goodreads have explicitly allowed colouring books and, in some circumstances, calendars.
Goodreads
officially stayed very quiet through most of this... and then, when they were finally prompted to address the issue, handwaved the whole part about their rules
explicitly allowing magazines and all the non-deleted non-black-oriented magazines, waved off any of the issues involved, and then pretty much threatened to ban anyone who continued to be so terribly uncivil as to suggest that the people deleting black/POC/indigenous magazines and
only those could possibly be doing so for any reason other than the proper application of Goodreads policies.
You know, the policies that specifically say that magazines are in fact allowed.
And that they're not applying to magazines that are less... brown.
(They did apply it to another magazine that isn't explicitly black... but which is edited by a dude who was involved in criticism of the deletion of FIYAH and Anathema.)
I saw a lot of this discussion go down on Twitter, but that dude had a giant megathread of stuff about it
here, which has links to some of the Goodreads discussions if they're still up, but I warn you also has a zillion screenshots and I cannot emphasise enough, is an
extremely long thread.
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