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Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?
New York, 9:07 AM
Tue Dec 1
67 posts in the last 24 hours
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Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books? |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
04/13/09
04/13/09
Per Update 10, "Writer Lilith Saintcrow" is saying that Amazon claimed it has a policy in writing. This just flatly isn't true -- some Amazon drone sent out a pretty generic email saying they unrank adult content (as you can see at the link she provides on her site). Anyone who looked at the Amazon email would see that it's just a brush-off letter, no need to read "policy" into it (especially as that word doesn't appear in the email AT ALL).
Secondly, I'm going to guess that the overwhelming majority of these #amazonfail rioters have never been near a ranking system or any other sort of complex content management hierarchy. The way they blithely assert that there's only one way the system works is just flat-out wrong; there are a million different ways to create a system like that, and it depends enormously on who creates it, how the team maintains it, how old it is, is it weighted, how many levels are there, is it cross-tagged, are those tags exclusionary, are there trip-filters...
What I'm saying is, you can't say that "How To Stop Being Gay, by a Christian" surviving and "Heather Has Two Mommies" losing its rank is all the proof you need that Amazon are LGBT-hating asshats. Sortation systems glitch ALL THE TIME; this is just a bad glitch, and I suspect it's being exploited by trolls.
And what's not even being discussed is how this actually might be a case of neglect. Maybe a book gets a "twenty strikes you're out" rule, if complained about for adult content. Maybe it's been that way for years. Over the years, Amazon may have been dealing with these books on a case-by-case basis, tossing them into the unranked queue once they hit a critical mass of complaints. Unless someone was keeping an eye on those titles, they may not even have noticed that their friendly little user-generated system, which was keeping certain segments of the audience happy, was also steadily trapping mostly gay content. And that could've been exploited, too, by trolls or special interest groups.
It makes no sense for Amazon to be withholding gay content out of some previously unknown anti-LGBT agenda, "glitches" are an unfortunate fact of life in this sort of work, and I think the entire LGBT community is being majorly, majorly trolled.
04/13/09
04/13/09
There doesn't seem to have been much rationality or reason employed before the pitchforks were hauled out of storage, and if it's a false alarm, it devalues future, ACTUAL problems.
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04/13/09
1. Amazon seems to be in the process of fixing this right now. I've searched some of the books listed as "adult" in this post by book title (e.g. Brokeback Mountain, Rubyfruit Jungle, etc..) and they now come up in searches. About half of them, when I checked about an hour ago, had their rankings added back in as well.
If you aren't seeing this changes yourself, you probably have to wait for the changes to their database servers to propagate to all of their other servers.
It will also take time for them to recompute all of the listings for the various searches you might try. This isn't an instant change.
2. Amazon seems (from when I checked, I may be doing something wrong) to have removed the "Would you like to report this content as inappropriate?" button. It was there about an hour ago on the book The Filly.
---
I agree with tehdely's explanation on their LiveJournal blog (http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html).
The two suggested theories are (and keep in mind these can work in combination):
A) Trolls using scripts to continually vote to mark the content inappropriate on some of the top listings for LGBT-themed books. This has been done on other sites and is certainly plausible. Said trolls are unlikely to be conservative and just want to cause chaos (trust me, most trolls are not anti-gay).
B) Meat puppets. Conservatives start telling each other to mark LGBT-themed books as adult, spreading the word to many people.
This may have started slower at first, just affecting a few books, then something could have spread the word faster, causing more people to do this (assuming that this is truly sudden, rather than having been overlooked and not checked this extensively before).
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In response to "why didn't Amazon do this or that": 1) PR people are often in the dark at first, especially when taken by surprise and don't understand technical details and 2) Amazon probably receives of complaints all the time about books from authors and others and has trouble prioritizing things--they are not a smooth, well oiled machine when it comes to manually addressing problems.
04/13/09
Watching this explode has been very frustrating. I understand about passionate causes, but damn. There didn't seem to be rationale behind this in the first place, but the mob was already off and running.
04/13/09
It's really sad.
04/13/09
I believe they are doing their rank strippage by keyword. So no, it can't be a glitch - they are using a logical method.
04/13/09
We don't know what Amazon's sortation's like, but I can tell you there are a million ways that classification hierarchies can go wrong. Or this could be triggered by badly-monitored user complaints. Or any number of other explanations. You could also be right that they've classified all of those terms above as "adult" terms, and that when a certain threshold of adult terms is reached, the rank gets stripped to artificially deflate the results.
I know those are all hypothetical, but trust me: when tweaking one of these engines, you can be logical as hell and STILL see it throw an unexpected glitch down the line. And I am yet to see any evidence that Amazon has motive or history when it comes to anti-LGBT stuff; what am I missing?
04/12/09
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04/12/09
[tehdely.livejournal.com]
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04/13/09
It may just be that it's easier to believed that right-wing woodenheadedness is behind this than my beloved Amazon.
04/12/09
Wee! Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is safe!
04/12/09
Oh, really? Then why did this start in February, and why have authors been told it's part of a new policy? That's a very systematic glitch.
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People who openly complain about lit they disagree with are people who don't believe you should be able to have conflicting opinions or at least should give up or hide your conflicting opinion to "protect the children!!!111!". Those that don't complain about what offends them are those who believe in being able to have conflicting opinions and the right to be able to access material which you believe to be right. So, bottom line, our own open mindedness is fucking us. :(
04/12/09