The Failure of #amazonfail
shirky.com
shirky.com
Okay, fine, Amazon screwed up and there was a glitch or a security hole or whatever it really was. Their bad, they should fix that and people have a right to be upset that their books lost sales or whatever was the case. But moral outrage? Protest logos? Petitions? People either need to lighten up or get lives that lack the required free time to get that worked up over a conspiracy that was obviously irrational.
I'm not going to say that you're wrong. You're not wrong: That was a crazy conclusion for people to come to, because it is something that Amazon would never do.
But I am going to take a wild guess: are you significantly older than thirty? I'm guessing the answer is no.
Those of us who came of age before the Internet were raised in a world where it was intuitively obvious that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general public. That's the way the world worked.
It's easy to retrain the front of the brain. It's a lot harder to retrain the instincts that you learned as a kid. Especially if those instincts were forged under stress. And gay people and their friends, especially those over a certain age, are intuitively aware that it is (or, at least, was) entirely possible for big, public entities to wake up one day and decide to screw LGBT people over. That used to be the norm.
I sincerely hope that we reach the state where open maliciousness towards gay people becomes unthinkably weird, but it's going to take at least a few more years.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560075
Do you feel that he was faking it?
I read Twitter by occasionally surfing to the website and scrolling through the backlog of Tweets from the fairly small list of people that I follow. Which is to say: I'm probably some sort of neanderthal. In this mode, hashtags are kind of useless.
But apparently the cutting-edge users of Twitter spend their days plugged into a client which lets them do nifty tricks like following hashtags in real time. I tried that last month, using TweetGrid. It was hypnotic, and kind of fun, but way too much volume. And it featured spam and trolls. Finally, I understood why some people complain about Twitter spam! It would appear that anyone can create a random Twitter account under a fake name and start spewing arbitrarily-hashtagged crap!
So I lost interest. But apparently many people have not. Do other folks just inhale all the hashtagged stuff, spam and trolls and Amazon-hating hysteria-inducing agents provocateurs and all? Or do serious Twitter users just follow so many people that they actually find the hashtags useful, just to sort through the Tweets from people they are following? Is there some nifty client software, which everyone but me knows about, that does something different from either of these strategies?
If it's easy to understand, people with little imagination have an easy time understanding it and heralding it as revolutionary. It's not.
(The other one was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552160 )
Amazon is a progressive company. They're headquartered in Seattle, a fairly progressive city. Their employees do not enjoy being treated like pariahs.
Amazon's best customers tend to be highly literate people who react to book-banning like they've been personally knifed. And Amazon is smart: The company knows that authors and publishers watch their Amazon sales rankings on an hourly basis (if not minute-by-minute) and will commence an immediate shitstorm if those rankings change in an unusual fashion, let alone vanish. Amazon would have an explanation ready. They would roll any change out carefully. They would have approached someone in the publishing industry to discuss such a drastic move before making it.
Because -- most importantly -- Amazon has a big financial incentive not to ban books. Amazon makes money by selling books. Every GLBT book they don't sell is money they don't make. If they were going to bow to pressure and take thousands of titles off the site the pressure would have to be really costly. Hence, presumably, quite visible. Where is it? And wouldn't the company have tried negotiation, first? Taken one or two shocking-looking titles off the list and then publicized that fact? Or tried the case in public, where librarians and publishers of (nearly) all stripes could help them push back against the pressure?
The very fact that the act blew up so quickly is evidence of how stupid it was. And it's impossible to believe that Amazon is really that stupid. (Though, as has been pointed out, it is easy to believe that an AI is that stupid. Be careful when letting AIs make your business decisions.)
That's the rough equivalent of saying that, just because we have a president who hasn't pushed for slavery reparations, "progressive" states like California have disproportionate numbers of minority convicts, and the Supreme Court has saddled us with imperfect affirmative action laws, we shouldn't be surprised about rumors of Amazon censoring black literature.
The part about people justifying their anger post-explanation is really true and is present in some of the comments on the post. It seems to mean chastising Amazon for taking too long to address the serious situation – which seems code for giving people too much time to make fools of themselves.
People need to slow down and think.
"it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out."
Didn't they answer in a day or two? That is fucking fast, esp for a giant corporation.
and "it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters;"
What I remember reading sounded very un PR-ese. Trying to find their press release to reread... They don't have one / I can't find it. That is bad. This is what I read http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp I guess that's not official release.
The worst I can think of would affect a person's psyche, but Amazon is not a person. The analogy is not apt.
Amazon is a "virtual" person under US Law. I don't like it but it's the reality of corporatism. Amazon can receive justice or injustice. In this case the mob delivered them a heap of injustice.
(or was that a rhetorical question?)
The troll did seem a little too perfect, but Amazon's "oops-a-daisy!" explanation doesn't smell so good either. Anyone know the real story? Or at least of substantiation details to make the "official" lines, on either side, sound a little more plausible?
Basically, an employee in France (possibly due to a language barrier) flipped the "adult" bit on a bunch of stuff he shouldn't have, which interacted badly with recent changes to remove adult content from places where kids might stumble across it. It sucks that it affected a bunch of LGBT stuff, but it wasn't intentional.
If you're a developer who is like me, this is exactly the kind of thing you have nightmares about doing, because you know it could happen to anyone. How many times have you typed something, or committed something, and moments later felt the dawning horror of deleting some essential files or missing some essential step? Obviously we erect processes and technical solutions to make it rare for this kind of thing to make it into production, but it still happens.
"Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult," the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from 'false' to 'true.')"
Oh yeah real technical.
The problem is, without more information, I do not believe a word of that. Filled in a form incorrectly? What form do they have that does that kind of thing? And how can an employee in France cause some kind of cascading re-categorisation of data in the USA?
That explanation sounds like total BS to me. For now, the trolling/CSRF explanation is more likely, IMO. The "troll" has given specific technical details, all of which at least pass the smell test. Amazon's explanation - a foreign employee filling in forms wrong - is just too cute.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to order more tinfoil hats on Amazon ....
The external flag-bombing initially sounded most credible to me -- as with 'Google-bombing', there's a precedent for such campaigns, either by earnest folks with a content agenda or pranksters. And Amazon would have reason to downplay any such explanation, to avoid encouraging copycats. But I don't think people linked to Amazon would lie to cover such an event.
I suspect the troll/CSRF might be the simplest explanation here.
For what it's worth, my friends still working at Amazon who went and looked at the trouble ticket and the resulting changes say that it was indeed just a stupid mistake.