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New York, 7:12 PM
Fri Nov 27
15 posts in the last 24 hours
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04/18/09
But as silly as the Kutcher/CNN war was, the point is that a shitload of people not only heard about anti-malaria efforts, but could click on a link and immediately donate. For me, that's the exact opposite of the #amazonfail lunacy -- one was a viral and fundamentally misguided exercise in social networking, and the other is a way social networking can be used for good in supporting a worthy (and longstanding and researched) cause.
Kutcher and Oprah and King aside, read up on Malarianomore.org. They're good people, and anything that prevents a kid from contracting malaria (and stopping malaria from becoming drug-resistant) is worthwhile.
04/14/09
It's hardly the first time that Amazon's screwed up...
04/14/09
Thank you, I needed that.
04/14/09
How many of you have ever dealt with really, really large databases and really, really complex software?
I came to Jezebel through Valleywag and Consumerist and stuck around because I really enjoy the articles and comments here. But today, folks, chill.
I work for one of the largest IT companies in the world. Not Amazon, but beyond that, I'm going to say who. I know only one person who works for Amazon, and only slightly, and I have not had any contact with that person about this matter. In other words, I have some background in this arena, but I don't have a dog in this race.
Here's how this sort of thing goes down.
Person 1 gets an assignment, or decides on his own to do something new and useful. Person 1 screws it up. Either he's a complete idiot with too much access to the system, or he just makes a really bad assumption. Perhaps he screws it up incrementally over an extended period of time. Anyhow...
Easter weekend (for the Christain folks) comes along AND someone notices the oddity. This being the internet age, real-time discussions start happening. Twitter. Blogs. Online news sites.
Some folks start asking Amazon customer support (though how they found the contact information escapes me) about what is happening. Support knows nothing about good old Person 1 and explains some semi-related aspect of the site (that the "adult" stuff is excluded from rankings, if I have it right). Because it is semi-related and something is obviously happening, much speculation ensues. Then an internet shit-storm forms.
Eventually someone at Amazon notices. Either customer support realizes that they are getting a lot of hits on the subject, or someone else in the company is reading the internet on Sunday, but a bug -- and probably a very high severity one -- is opened. People start getting called in.
At this point, the situation is probably going to be described as a "glitch". Cause until they find out what the reason behind the problem is, what else can they possibly call it?
And maybe they *are* working on some way to permit filtering on results, and they think that some of that code got into the production side. They speak too soon, so now you've gone from policy to glitch to new feature.
Then you've got some random person claiming that he did it by exploiting a weakness in their feedback system. (And maybe that is true and there is no Person 1, but let's go with Person 1 for this example.) Policy to glitch to new feature with a side order of hacking. Just in case it is a hacker exploiting the feedback mechanism, they disable the mechanism in question. (I think I read that they had done so.)
At this point, people of the VP rank and higher are probably standing in Amazon geeks' offices (or cubes, whatever) breathing fire. But until someone at Amazon has a chance to look at the data, the logs, and the applications, they don't know what the problem is.
Frankly, I'm amazed that they tracked it down as quickly as they did. Maybe Person 1 was reading the internet too, and realized that his project was probably to blame. (And if that's the case, I hope that they don't deal too harshly with him if it was an honest mistake.)
Amazon has nothing to gain from intentionally doing this and a lot to lose, as we can see.
Syrenia's rule for technology-related problems: Always assume incompetence until proven otherwise. For example: I didn't mean to destroy the entire knowledge base with one poorly written SQL query, but nonetheless I did. Oops. Good thing we had those backup tapes.
Syrenia's corollary for conspiracies: They are too much freaking work. It's probably just incompetence.
I was totally ready to cancel my Amazon Prime and drop them entirely. I was even looking for another source for my British sci-fi DVDs. But this sequence of events is totally believable to me, as someone with more than a decade in IT. Either this is what really happened, or they are the best liars in the world. If they had had one single explanation -- if the explanation hadn't evolved in the sort of way that it did, I wouldn't have believed them.
04/14/09
04/14/09
The general attitude (not yours) that I've been seeing has been: "I want an explanation, and I want it now, and it better be one that I like. And I don't care that it's only been three hours since the problem was even brought to your attention and you've only gotten hold of three DBAs and one sys admin, and that it's Easter weekend and half your staff is on vacation. And even when you do explain, I've already made up my mind that you are evil because this happened at all, so there."
From the LA Times article on the subject: In striking contrast to all of the online uproar, Amazon -- a leading Internet company and media pioneer -- remained nearly silent. It issued a brief statement Sunday evening, citing "a glitch," then waited most of Monday before issuing the mea culpa. [ [www.latimes.com] ]
My post and many others like it (see Limber's excellent 10:58 comment) are just trying to provide context to people who are fortunate enough to not deal with these sorts of things on a regular basis.
The better initial response would have been: "We have become aware of this problem and have called in staff to investigate it. We will have no further comment until we have determined the cause and a course of corrective action." But unfortunately, even if you could get a PR person who was willing to issue such a statement, nobody was willing to give them even one full day to figure it out.
I have to disagree with you about the apology. I don't think that they need to be apologetic about it. Ultimately, what real harm has been done? For a few days, the search results are screwed up. (And I tested it yesterday with the book that is pictured in this article -- on a search of "dating guide lesbian" it was the number one hit Sunday evening. So it wasn't that the title couldn't be found at all.)
I think that we've reached a point as a society where too many apologies are made for too many things and they don't mean anything anymore. "I'm sorry" has become the most meaningless phrase in the English language.
Frankly, I was impressed by the phrasing of their statement, which is refreshingly blunt and conveys to me more real feeling than any corporate apology ever has or will.
04/14/09
I guess from a PR perspective, I find it hard to believe that people who value what you call "bluntness," will stop shopping there if they apologize, whereas if I don't feel like they get that they hurt people and they're sorry and they mean it, I won't shop there again. So to me, it seems like it's in the interest of not being an asshole and in the interest of business to say sorry, but if they only want to cater to the consumers who prefer the blunt get over it attitude, I can take my business elsewhere. I think businesses, even anonymous internet businesses, should think of customers first as human beings. I worked in a big chain bbookstore, and if I felt the customer was upset in good faith, I apologized for all kinds of things that were not directly my fault, even if I couldn't change the policy or make it right in he way they wanted, because I didn't want them to think of our store as a space where they were humiliated or treated badly.
04/14/09
It's not so much the human error (which is what I would call the "glitch" since it probably originated from a human judgment call rather than a bad line of code.) but the way that anything outside of the mainstream gets lumped together in a way that makes it all too easy to accidentally exclude.
I agree that incompetence is probably the best explanation -- but this incompetence was only possibly because everything about gays and feminists had already been lumped together in their taxonomy.
04/14/09
(And no, I can't be any more specific than that, other than to say their job involves govt. controlled databases)
04/14/09
04/13/09
04/13/09
You also have to keep in mind the purpose of matching algorithms. Part of tweaking the engine is trying to provide the most appropriate matches to the most receptive audience. It is not designed to be an egalitarian system, and tweaks will attempt to guide users towards the content they're most likely to buy. It's a marketing tool, not a faithful factual tree like animal classification.
04/13/09
The scenario described by Amazon is totally feasible. Tagging can be like coding; a single error in a single node can have far-reaching consequences. It takes a long time to trace back that error. The lack of instant, flawless pinpointing of the problem... It's unrealistic.
It's invigorating to be angry and activist, and getting Amazon to fix the glitch is worthwhile, but damn. People are cancelling their accounts due to a simple and probably benign tagging error. The tagging error Amazon proposes is not only plausible, but it's enormously likely, and a scenario I have experienced time and again while working with matching algorithms. It fits.
04/13/09
04/13/09
04/13/09
Their explanations were probably half-assed because they had no idea what the fuck was happening. It could be tagging, it could be trolling, it could be hacking -- what are they going to do, come out saying "we have no idea what the fuck's going on"? So they came out with "We have a glitch", which just meant they acknowledged the error, and bought them time to find the actual cause. The hasty relisting we saw yesterday is probably a quick fix that they'll eventually have to replace with the longer-term catalog fix.
If this is what they say it is, and I'm telling you that the patterns of product matches makes me think that is INCREDIBLY LIKELY, then all of this canceling and activist rage is largely misplaced. It's not intentional, it's an error in the process, they'll QA the hell out of it and it's fixed. Tagging and tweaking in these cases is more of an art form than a mechanical exercise.
04/13/09
If it was just a computational error, why couldn't they just straight up say that and move on? Apologize for the error (recognizing that it happened), and then do something to fix it. If it wasn't a deliberate and homophobic thing, then they wouldn't have had to be so sketchy about the whole issue, they could have just explained and apologized. They didn't. That means either that they are trying to hide something, or they are comfortable lying to their customers if they think nobody will notice. Neither response is acceptable, especially when it comes to something as serious as effecting censorship.
Lots of people make coding mistakes, and people understand that. But how, where, and when the mistakes happen do matter. If someone in the government made a mistake and deleted everyone in New York's social security number (or something), there would be a big fucking deal made about it. This isn't the same thing, but it's also not a commenting problem at Jezebel or something. It's a volatile subject for a lot of people, and deserves an apprpriate response. Theirs was not.
04/13/09
04/13/09
Reserving judgment is absolutely reasonable, and hopefully Amazon will come out with a concise explanation once they're sure of what it is (though I assume people will still be suspicious). But expecting PR to be immediately omniscient and all-knowing strikes me as weird; I don't think they COULD have given a firm rationale for what was happening at first, I don't think they'd found the category error yet. If they'd come out immediately with a cause, they'd've been lying.
04/13/09
The biggest two questions people have are why this started months ago, and why only books with a certain political slant were affected. Amazon's official explanation ignores the first question, and glosses over the second. "It wasn't just gay books, it was feminist and sex positive books too," does not make the situation better or answer the questions about political bent. "We have systems in place to try to keep people browsing for GLBT interest books from being bombarded by anti-gay propoganda, so those books are categorized differently," might answer the question, but if it's that simple, why hasn't anyone said it yet?
04/13/09
04/14/09
"We are having problems with X,Y,Z. We apologize to the authors effected and for the inconvenience to our customers." That takes what? 30 minutes? An hour?
Instead they let the the internet come to it's own conclusions for almost two days. Amazon of all companies should know how fast information moves on the internet. The only way to handle these problems is to get out ahead of the controversy. They failed to do that and they still haven't apologized. Whether it was intentional or not, it still effected thousands of authors, publishers and customers. Amazon totally deserves blame for this, they dropped the ball in a major way.
04/14/09
But if the PR people for a major corporation that just, intentionally or not, made an already atacked and marginalized demographic feel more attacked and marginalized, want to take the same huffy it-was-just-a-mistake-chillax-already tone, that's a huge problem. It's not like anyone who cares about this sort of thing hadn't heard about it yet. Along with plausible answers for the big questions (which they have not yet offered),there should have been an apology on the home page, a better worded form email that actually made it sound like they were sorry about what had happened and valued their offended customers' business, and possibly a sale or some kind of featured section with some of the deranked books, to show "See, how crazy is it to think that we would have done this on purpose? We value these books and authors and the customers who seek them out." Beat Powell's to the GLBT sale, show your customer base you mean it, and you're not catering to any element who would find a main page apology offensive.
04/14/09
You raise a good point, and maybe this will help some people (myself included) take a step back, see how Amazon deals with it (as it's only been about 48 hours since everyone realized what was going on) and then decide to support/not support amazon.
04/13/09
04/13/09
Officially we're done until they prove they were not at fault with this 'glitch'. I don't see that happening anytime soon, but the burden of proof lies with Amazon.
04/13/09
Did I miss something or is it exactly what I think it is?
04/13/09
It would take noting a pattern to make combing through the taxonomy worthwhile. And now a pattern's been noted -- unfortunately, it's being whipped up as a discrimination issue while the employees are likely desperately searching for the causal relationship that's making this happen.
04/13/09
Although I'd say this clusterfuck is more like "Side-of-beef-fisted."
04/13/09
Even if you're d-listing hardcore S&M erotica, this is not okay. You're a retailer, not my mom, and you don't get to make moral judgments. If your corporation is not comfortable with these things, then don't sell them.
Instead of trying to hide the "adult" books away, they need to implement a filter like Google's, so one can opt in or out of returning "adult" items.
04/13/09
Sily me, I thought we were against censorship in this country.
04/13/09
04/13/09
Is that a lesbian joke?
04/13/09
04/13/09
If this really WAS a 'ham-fisted cataloging error', it would have been fixed by today, you would have apologized to all of your customers and offered compensation to the authors and publishers of the books affected. Do I see that going on? No.
Do I think you had a secret agenda to de-rank and catalogue feminist and gay studies books in favor of homophobic shit? Abso-fucking-lutely.
04/13/09
04/13/09
04/14/09
yeah, as i posted elsewhere, maybe they should have gamed it out in the first place, maybe?~
even if it was an honest mistake, their public response seems totes asshattery to me...i am getting more and more disgusted and hurt that the top hits are still books on how evil gay ppl are and/or how to coerce them into being str8...
ppl make mistakes, true character and values are shown by how ppl handle their mistakes...
04/14/09
The complaining about the PR -- well, hell, how do you deal with people feeling like your cataloging error has been a direct, personal insult to them? I feel like a great deal of rationality has left the building, and people are just thrilling off emotion. As I've said elsewhere, an instant response is only possible if the Amazon gang knew what was causing the glitch, and I don't think they did. I expect we'll hear more out of them about what happened and how sorry they are later, but this immediate gratification thing ("apologize for offending me before you even know what happened!") is weird.
04/14/09
04/14/09
04/13/09
I just emailed them back suggesting they donate some money to HRC or PFLAG. Pipe dream, but it made me feel better.
04/13/09
There is no contradiction.
04/14/09
04/14/09
In this case, I'm pretty sure code didn't cause this, and the PR usage of the word is in the more generic way rather than the programmer code.