"AmazonFail"

[juldea]

So what I'd kind of like to see is some apologies from people who completely knee-jerk flew off the handle assuming persecution around every corner calling down hellfire, brimstone, and a boycott against a company so huge and diverse that there's no way there was ever a company policy to piss off such a large portion of its own consumer base.

Or at least, if the last thing you posted online was about how holy shit you're never buying from Amazon again, maybe make another post explaining how it was in fact one stupid fucking troll and that the company you defamed is in fact not to be lynched for the thing it didn't do.

Yeah, I'm on a high horse here, but I'm one of seemingly few people who never thought for a minute that any sufficiently large corporation would do anything for more than monetary reasons, and monetary reasons dictate never taking actions that drastic.

Comments

[lbmango.livejournal.com]

"stupid fucking troll" implies that someone did it on purpose. Do we know that? it looks like simply an epic screwup...

So, honest mistake, or one person being an asshat?

[etherial.livejournal.com]

weev took credit for it over on brutal_honesty. The code he posted works.

I find it somewhat ironic that I strongly suspected it was a troll to beginwith, but that it hasn't changed my opinion of what Amazon did do, which was develop a way to prevent me from actually searching their database without telling me in the interest of protecting "the children". I'm getting pretty sick of being shat on on behalf of incompetent parents, and I don't need a bookstore making it impossible for me to search a category and see all books in it because some are "adult". I've worked pretty damned hard to become a responsible adult, the last thing I want is a bookstore treating me like a child.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

I have seen the post in b_h from the troll who claimed they hacked the system, and I've seen people go, "Well, no because this problem was first reported in February, and also his code doesn't actually work.

So I don't think it was that troll- I think he's just claiming responsibilty for the lulz. I am not sure what happened, but things are getting cleaned up. It would be nice if we could get a conherent answer on what the deal was, but I'm doing okay with the "Yeah, wow, that was such a cock up and we're sorry." that we've gotten from Amazon.

[shogunhb.livejournal.com]

Though I did not make a post, my comments stand.

"This is a problem, I will not buy from Amazon until it is fixed."

I have seen a lot of speculation about what happened, Amazon has stated "glitch", but aside from a troll claiming responsibility, there is no confirmation of that. I don't care.

I WATCHED as books were yanked from the rankings which have still not returned, shadowravyn has screenshots.

Once they fix it, I'll go back to shopping with Amazon. If they do not, I will not.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

And I find your response acceptable, if more pessimistic than my own. Certainly if they had NOT fixed things, I would then feel there is cause to assume they are Against things I care about and act accordingly. But I felt no reason to assume they wouldn't fix them, given the amazing market pressure from the internet generation.

I do agree with etherial, however, that the entire premise of the "adult" material not showing up on searches is a crock.

[londo.livejournal.com]

I'm just going to copy and link this.

[slammerkinbabe.livejournal.com]

Hunh? That troll turned out to be lying. I can't even begin to link all of the varying posts that break this down, but yeah, computer geeks have attempted to hack the system in the way he claimed to have done, and it's just not the way it works. There was also a policy memo released by Amazon awhile back that illuminates some of what happened. What I understand of what happened is this:

The way it seems to have shaken down was that it was a stupid corporate policy that turned into a bad game of telephone. They decided to prevent "adult" material -- meaning, explicitly pornographic material -- from turning up in searches on innocuous words, which meant deranking them. The theory there seems to have been that if those things popped up in such searches it would be likely to make conservatives and/or prudes angry, and they wanted to avoid such controversy.

It's not 100% clear what happened from there -- certainly the policy affected far more things than it was meant to. Some have theorized that between one person writing this part of the code and another one writing that part of the code and so on and so on, gay/lesbian stuff got identified as "adult" by one person who was a dumbass, and so on. It is clear that those people who think that Amazon deliberately instituted a top-down policy to do this are mistaken.

With that said, Amazon is, in the end, responsible for what it does and what its employees do. And listing gay/lesbian material as "adult" is entirely, entirely unacceptable. When I read about not being able to find stuff like Stone Butch Blues, Gender Outlaw, and even fucking Well of Loneliness and Maurice on Amazon while this policy was in place, I seriously get chills, because there is no way to overstate how important those books have been in giving a voice to a group of people who had been censored and voiceless in the mainstream for so long. We're talking about books that have been at the core of social revolution, books that have shown queer people that they are not alone in the world and that they too can speak out. So I don't care what exactly the fuckup was. If it had been one homophobic troll I'd be pissed at the one homophobic troll, but as noted, that's not the case. As it is I'm pissed that someone decided to tag GLBT stuff as adult. I'm pissed at society for regarding such things as "adult" in general, because whatever the mistake was, that's where it came from. It's the same thing that causes parents to complain when their small children have access to books like Heather Has Two Mommies at school, because apparently kids aren't supposed to know about the existence of gays and lesbians. It's the same thing that caused a guy to come up to me and my wife when we were on our honeymoon, holding hands and being lovey-dovey, and ask us to cut it out "so my daughter don't see". It's the same thing that caused a mother to cover the eyes of her son that same day, as we were walking by them holding hands (and, I might add, she was focused on us and not on him, so she walked him into a trash can.) Somewhere along the line someone reflexively listed "gay and lesbian" for "adult". I'm sure it wasn't done out of malice prepense, I'm sure it wasn't a giant corporate policy, and I'm sure it probably wasn't done with much consideration at all. None of that matters to me. It's precisely that kind of careless, reflexive thinking that makes a whole lot of bad shit happen. This is not a small issue.

[goldbug.livejournal.com]

I thought trollguy hacked the system, and Amazon went in and changed things so that that sort of hack doesn't work any more, which is why his code no longer works.

[pezzonovante.livejournal.com]

I had a political science professor in college who used to drill into us the phrase "Never accept malice as an explanation when incompetence suffices." Words to live by.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Ding!