A book that was highly recommended, but that I found very unsettling, by everything from the setting of in media giant Hexa, to the disassociation the moderators have from all the rotten stuff they have to wade through, determining if it can be posted or not. The book got great reviews from sources I have found authentic in the past. For me here were distinct times I didn't want to read any more, yet I'd still pick up the book again, to see where this train wreck of humanity was going. Did I like the story? No. Am I sure the what the author intended in the premise? No. Do I think there is some truth to in the content of the novella? Yes indeed. My big question is how do I rate it?

i guess you really can turn any great premise into a boring, underwhelming story if you try hard enough ( )

saw all the negative reviews and still decided to read this because the plot sounded too good to be bad……. but this was indeed very bad. ( )

"We Had to Remove This Post" isn't the best novel I've ever read. In fact, I'm not sure it's a particularly good novel. But it is, for what it's worth, post-modern in the best sense. It carefully shows a reader what happens to jobs — and life — when the categories and overarching explanations that people have assumed for years were permanent simply collapse in a matter of weeks. Of course, the internet is the perfect place for that to happen. No points awarded for guessing that.

As for the book's plot, it centers around a handful of friends who start working at a semi-fictitious company that contracts its services to a never-named social media company. The characters we meet have been hired as content moderators: yes, they're the ones who decide which shockingly racist, disturbing, or offensive videos can stay up on the site and which must — according to company policy and little else — be taken down. Predictably, this job takes its toll on our cast of characters: people drink more and engage in risky sexual behavior. The line between day and night seems to vanish. As does the line between home and office. As does, ultimately, a fair amount of our characters' moral bearing and basic decency. Nothing, it seems, can survive the unstoppable pull of the information economy, modern life's own black hole. The book may not be a pleasure to read. Bervoets prose style tracks pretty closely to personality-free "white writing" and, if I'm not wrong, it's set in a nameless, but probably anglophone environment that robs this book of some of the specificity it might have had. Even so, it certainly gets its point across. I can't say I felt the psychic scars that the characters we met accumulated as the events described here played out, but they're certainly there, and they feel like a warning to anyone who spends too much time on the computer. Recommended to people concerned about the effect of information-age technology on the human psyche, and, at this point, shouldn't that be everyone? ( )

Short and bleak psychological horror. Probably could stand to have a content warning. ( )