Thanks, that was a breath of fresh air. I like that she points out the old-school reviewing system isn't always so genteel, either.
What I just don't understand are the commenters on that piece who insist that one bad review can ruin a book and an author forever. Maybe I'm naive, but that seems totally implausible to me unless the review appears in the NYT or something (and even then, doubtful). I'm thinking of one recentish instance on Goodreads where an author got in trouble for responding poorly to a snarky (but civil) review by a prominent blogger: Despite some readers' public vows to avoid that author, the book and its sequels sold extremely well.
Sure, there are these myths about poor sensitive writers being "murdered" by bad reviews. Shelley was so convinced that was what killed Keats that he wrote a whole amazing poem about it. But scholars know from Keats' letters that's far from the truth.
Not to mention, the proliferation of amateur reviews today means that every review has less weight. When I skim reviews, I see a lot more diversity of opinion than "ganging up" going on. When I do see ganging up, I discount it. There's no reason to assume that the readers of reviews are naive enough to take the first one they see or the loudest voices as gospel truth.
And anyone who chooses books or films entirely by star ratings, the way they might choose a vacuum cleaner, is going to be disappointed. Taste happens. With a vacuum cleaner, we all have the same goal: we want it to work. When it comes to creative work, people can have radically different goals (one person wants character development; another prioritizes kick-ass action) and hence radically different takeaways (that book was mindless/ that book was kick-ass).
The trick is to find trusted reviewers whose goals in reading a genre more or less align with yours.