I was in a writing chat earlier this week where people were saying they avoided giving negative reviews because they didn't want to hurt writers. I kept trying, without much success, to explain that while a bad review might hurt a writer's feelings, there was no real evidence it would hurt the book.

(With an exception made -- maybe -- for bad reviews places like SLJ, where reviews do influence how librarians spend limited budgets ... but those aren't the reviews everyone's usually talking about, anyway/)