Thing is, most YAGate nonsense is directed at trad published books, not self-published, which isn't surprising because from what I can tell the real issue these teenybopper Torquemadas have with the authors they attack are the fat six figure contracts most of them seem to get before getting thrown in the barrel.
It also makes me think of Requires Hate, who while being (or claiming to be) a gay female PoC somehow managed to reserve most of her hatred for... other women of colour and queer writers. It's very crab bucket - after all, how dare some other queer/female/PoC/disabled/troon writer get published instead of
me?
They're much more eager to take out their competition for minority status than they are to go after their boogeyman of straight white men; though they do pile on those men, they seem to reserve the most vitriol and targeted harassment for minority writers who, I'm presuming, they think are taking up a slot on a roster that should, by rights, go to them.
I mean, it should be common knowledge that once you do become a published author that not everyone is going to enjoy your works.
That’s fine, people are entitled to their preferences just as authors are entitled to write what they want
Yeah, that's where we hit the snag, though. There's authors being too sensitive to criticism (see that Hale woman who went and stalked a GoodReads reviewer who left her a bad review), and then there's criticism which most of these assholes produce which is along the lines of 'This book is morally bad and you are a bad person for writing it and neither it, nor you, should exist.' Quality of the book is unimportant, it's not about errors or bad prose or poor plotting - it's about casting a moral judgement over the book itself and always finding it wanting, and therefore it shouldn't exist.
It's SJW fundamentalism. If this offends me, it's not on me to just ignore it - it can't be allowed to even exist. That something they don't like is in the same dimension as themselves is an affront, and the idea that people might be able to enjoy something they don't is basically evil and must be wiped out.
As always, it's a balancing act with shades of grey about where and when criticism has its uses. But there's a group of people who have decided they are morally arbiters of right and wrong and they are trying to force everyone else to live by their rules. Fortunately - incrementally, and hard to do when these people are in positions of authority, but still - people are starting to realise that the only way to deal with these assholes is to ignore them. They only have as much power over you as you give them, and the sooner more companies learn the lesson of 'get woke go broke' the better.