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Amazon Fail: Another Update
Interesting stuff. No public statement yet from Amazon, and they really could use one. One guy claims responsibility. Another guy calls bullshit.
Much more important, I have received a message from someone who works for Amazon (who wants to remain anonymous), saying on good authority that it really actually was a glitch. Somebody did something stupid, and the problem is that the sheer scale of what happened means it will take awhile to sort out. But they are on it.
I don't know any of this for sure myself (although I'm inclined to believe the Amazon employee); we'll see what goes on. However, I did have to tell you guys about one thing. Last night, I was speaking with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sazettel, who suggested a possible way of affecting Amazon directly if it did turn out to be their fault and deliberate: Everyone who has one return their Kindle.
At which point I started laughing like a loon, and created these:
I probably should get the domain putthekindleback.com or something, but I don't care all that much. And, who knows, they may fix everything up this afternoon. But I at least wanted to share the joke. If you use 'em, please credit me and tomsmithonline.com.
ETA: the info from the Amazon employee.
Much more important, I have received a message from someone who works for Amazon (who wants to remain anonymous), saying on good authority that it really actually was a glitch. Somebody did something stupid, and the problem is that the sheer scale of what happened means it will take awhile to sort out. But they are on it.
I don't know any of this for sure myself (although I'm inclined to believe the Amazon employee); we'll see what goes on. However, I did have to tell you guys about one thing. Last night, I was speaking with
sazettel, who suggested a possible way of affecting Amazon directly if it did turn out to be their fault and deliberate: Everyone who has one return their Kindle.At which point I started laughing like a loon, and created these:
I probably should get the domain putthekindleback.com or something, but I don't care all that much. And, who knows, they may fix everything up this afternoon. But I at least wanted to share the joke. If you use 'em, please credit me and tomsmithonline.com.
ETA: the info from the Amazon employee.
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The roots of Proposition H8 run deeply.
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Off the top of my head?
Badly-coded search algorithim. See also Yahoo groups trying to stop "adult" discussion by banning words like "breast", without thinking of breast cancer, breast feeding, and so on.
A list of "adult" books purchased from a vendor which claimed to be assembled according to one set of standards but was actually assembled according to another. The last software test conference I went to had a hilarious set of examples from the Google Maps group on how they've learned to QA the data they import for Maps. If an import suddenly doubles the number of airports, for example, it probably means they weren't picked up as duplicates. Or the bus stop that appeared in the middle of Antarctica, no where near a road... ;)
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That said, I'm leaning more toward a misrepresented list myself.
ETA: Also interesting that the "Women En Large" book of fat nudes is not ranked but Leonard Nimoy’s much more recent book of fat nudes is ranked.
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...but Fun Home had its rank removed. (It's back, now, and I'm sorry I didn't think to check the rest of Alison Bechdel's titles when I saw that it had been added to the list at
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I spent 20 years as a computer programmer. Believe me, it's not necessary to impute malice even to something like this when there are so many ways for inconsistency, incompetence, and the "it's not working the way you think it's working" bug to combine to create the same results.
None of which is to say that the effect isn't bad, and I'm not happy that Amazon is still stonewalling about the fact that it happened at all. "We messed something up, and we're working as fast as we can to fix it without making matters even worse" would have gone a long way.
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For whatever reason, the coding that was previously in place was causing things like Brokeback Mountain to come up as suggested if you liked Harry Potter. No big deal, but we must think of the innocent children buying Harry Potter with Daddy's credit card unsupervised, so let's put in a script that will prevent certain types of things from being cross-referenced when suggesting other titles one might enjoy. Kind of makes sense *cough* if you're homophobic *cough*... especially if you don't really know what's inside the other books...
Except something goes wrong with this bit of programming, human error or something of that matter. Instead of just preventing it from cross-referencing on the "suggested" section, it stops you from searching for it altogether *AND* removes the ratings. A bit much.
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I've never figured that one out. Pretty funny though... unless you actually have to explain to your ten year old that NO, you're not going to buy him Brokeback Mountain.
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Also, checking the F/SF genre: I took a look at the pages on Mercedes Lackey's "The Last Herald Mage" trilogy, whose protagonist is openly gay, and those still appear to have their stars. Things that make you say Hmmm.
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From what I've been able to see, it has to do with what the publisher's put in their data about the books. Heather Has Two Mommies was pulled, but Emma and Meesha My Boy: A Two Mom Story wasn't.
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The confirmation of an actual policy change that some authors received a while back makes it very, very difficult to believe that Amazon is entirely innocent in this matter.
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Finally, Proposition 8 was a deliberate denial of fundamental rights to a class of people. This is an inadvertent removal of books from a certain set of search results - they still showed up on others, and they still were present on the Amazon site. Linking the two is ridiculous.