We Had to Remove This Post
Ratings72
Average rating3.1
This had such a strong start and the premise is interesting but it just...ends? I don't mind a meandering narrative or even that the hook of the story becomes background to a character-based relationship drama but like...I shouldn't be checking to see if the copy of the book is missing pages. I dunno, maybe this is the fault of me, the reader! Either way, 2 content-moderated stars out of 5.
This was sort of interesting but I felt it misunderstood its own premise/hook and the ending is sort of flat as a result.
I'm not sure if it was the translation that went wrong or the very short length of this novel that made the story feel incomplete and incoherent. However, I recognized the potential it had and the unique profession it explored, and I wished it had been done better.
When I learned this is a book about a woman who works as a content moderator for a large social media platform and how she copes with the graphic content she encounters, I knew I had to read it.
Many years ago, I worked for a company contracted by Google not to moderate content, but to help guarantee that Google users receive results relevant to their searches. So if, for example, someone searched for “where to buy a computer,” I was part of the process that ensures the results that come up are appropriate for the query. In this example, the most helpful results would be electronics stores, websites that sell computers, etc., and not results like shoe stores or Olive Garden locations. A lot of the work I did was that simple. But there was also a much darker, very depressing side to it. People use Google to search for all kinds of messed up shit. I had to see not only the searches but the results and I sincerely wish I could forget some of those things.
The the first sentence, “So what kinds of things did you see?,” made me laugh out loud because this question is literally the reason I stopped telling people about that job. I wondered if I'd see myself in the rest of Kayleigh's story. Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooooooooooo.
From what I can tell, We Had to Remove this Post is only categorized as horror in some places. I definitely felt a sense of dread while reading that I get from some horror I've read. The dread didn't come from the graphic content Kayleigh had to moderate, but from witnessing the way she embraced the rules of content moderation and applied them to real life. I think you're meant to start this book thinking you're going to get a surface-level shock from some “Trigger Warning on The Internet” type stuff, but by the end, those things aren't the most shocking parts of the book at all.
An uneasy dark dive into the impacts of dissociation. The protagonist is the last person to be aware of how the violence in the systems she inhabits has permeated her behaviour. Powerful.
This one hit a little too close to home for me. It's Black Mirror-esque and does an awesome job exploring work trauma. We have an unreliable narrator and it just felt unfinished. Many of the characters are thinly sketched out. I just wanted more. It seemed more like a great rough draft of an amazing novel.
I think my mileage with this book is different since I went in almost entirely blind (I knew nothing of the content aside from it being marked as LGBTQIA+) so I had absolutely no expectations but I actually enjoyed this one a lot. I enjoyed that it was structured like a strange somewhat convoluted letter and I thought it was a pretty engaging story.
This book had so much potential. I loved the premise and the idea of it. It started off very promising and I was invested quick. The format of her writing a letter to a lawyer because a lawsuit is happening kinda confused me and then it didn't end up having any payoff either. Which is a theme in the reading of this novella.
Nothing has any fucking pay-off. She constantly keeps referring to a thing she did that is like crazy or something so shocking that is about to happen and then it's the most bland thing. The characters were largely unrelatable. Halfway through the book, I was so invested in what happens to them but most of the side characters are ignored in the ending. None of the crazy things they start to believe are led anywhere. I guess it just ends with all those people believing all these conspiracies and there is no payoff to that either.
This could have been so good if it dug a little deeper and focussed on all the characters and how they got into and perhaps out of these rabbit holes but it fully ignored that as if it didn't just spend half the book setting it up. Could have been great, I did enjoy reading it but the more I think about it the more I hate it.
i can see why this wouldn't work for a lot of people and i found the end quite disappointing, but i appreciated the commentary on desensitization of violence and voyeurism. i find the reviews saying they thought the moderation content should have been more graphic interesting because the mc starts off by talking about how alienated she feels by everyone she knows asking her to talk about the most fucked up things she's seen. i think the point was to withhold graphic content and instead show its impact but i agree that wasn't done as throughly as i would have hoped.
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this novella wasn't even horror tbh and literally was just a long winded explanation of a relationship that developed from an interesting workplace with some partial relationships explained. the characterization was horrible, there was no plot, and no horror. overall just extremely boring tbh
Hm.
This short novel is almost a tragicomedy, except any humor is internal to the characters. It is a bleak little number about a crew of content mediators who work for a fictional social media company. If follows our protagonist Kayleigh in her brief employ and even briefer relationship with a co-worker named Sigrid.
I plowed through it, interested–this isn't really a novel to enjoy so much as to question humanity–until the abrupt end. It's all work and relationship trauma, and hood human cruelty affects is all, in sometimes incalculable ways.
an exceptionally written story that doesn't always fit its format. i feel like i'll remember the parts that turned my stomach more than anything.
Short and bleak psychological horror. Probably could stand to have a content warning.
this was a very anticipated read for me so i went into it with big hopes. wasnt at all what i expected but im not mad. i think the book was more abt the wlw relationship and the main character than the work itself, but at the same time the work did impact her relationships and what she did so i was fine with that. not a fan of the ending, wish we got a bit more there.