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chris_gerribSo, the Irene Gallo affair continues. Vox Day, citing an anonymous Tor employee on Reddit, claims that Tor considers all the emails they got calling for Gallo's firing to be botnets. Now, ignoring for the moment that the sourcing for this allegation is too weak for even the old Weekly World News to run with, and further ignoring how there is no connection between Sad and Rabid Puppies (except that when Vox barks, so do the other Puppies) I find a notable fact buried in the piles of puppy-doo.
I'm going to dig said fact out and clean it up for you. I'm doing this because facts have been one thing in short supply in this debate. For the most part, what we get are vague statements that some unnamed person committed some undefined offense sometime during a large event. But now we have a fact.
Per Vox, 765 individual people emailed Tor complaining about Gallo. That sounds like a lot, except, 79,279 people bought a copy of Redshirts in 2013. So, if you take 765 and divide it by 79,279, you get .00964. In other words, less than 1% of the people who bought one book from Tor are complaining. You'd have to magnify that complaint number by an order of magnitude to get anybody's attention.
I'm going to dig said fact out and clean it up for you. I'm doing this because facts have been one thing in short supply in this debate. For the most part, what we get are vague statements that some unnamed person committed some undefined offense sometime during a large event. But now we have a fact.
Per Vox, 765 individual people emailed Tor complaining about Gallo. That sounds like a lot, except, 79,279 people bought a copy of Redshirts in 2013. So, if you take 765 and divide it by 79,279, you get .00964. In other words, less than 1% of the people who bought one book from Tor are complaining. You'd have to magnify that complaint number by an order of magnitude to get anybody's attention.
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Re: Not for nothing, but. . .
Date: 2015-06-18 01:44 pm (UTC)In fairness, the acceptable level of complaint varies by type and company. If you run a company making industrial fasteners, 1% calling to complain about unexpected breakage of the fastener is a big deal.
If you run a chain of coffee shops, you probably have a process in place to track cold coffee complaints, send out apology / have a coffee on us letters, and a system to track which stores are unusually complaint-prone.
If you get a rash of complaints about which politician your CEO shook hands with, or the same-sex couple in your TV ad, a 1% complaint rate equals an "attaboy" to the PR team.
Publishers are quasi-consumer businesses used to pissing off people since Gutenberg cranked out his second edition.