Gawker 
Enter your username and password.
New York, 4:02 AM
Sun Nov 22
12 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip Your Editors:
tips@gawker.com
Tipline: 646-214-8138
Editor-in-Chief:
Gabriel Snyder | Email
West Coast Editor:
Richard Rushfield | Email
Contributing Editors:
Valleywag:
Ryan Tate | Email
Media:
Hamilton Nolan | Email
Politics:
Alex Pareene | Email
Investigations:
John Cook | Email
Entertainment:
Brian Moylan | Email
Nights:
Adrian Chen | Email
Azaria Jagger | Email
Ravi Somaiya | Email
Weekends:
Foster Kamer | Email
Video Editor:
Richard Blakeley | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
04/16/09
Amazon has a problem with their catalog system, that no one notices until someone fucks it up.
A thing gets fucked up, and a whole bunch of people get mad about it, and tell them.
Amazon fixes it.
I thought that this was supposed to be the ideal model for how systems like this were going to self-regulate--informed consumers dictating the corporation's social policy.
I'm not sure why anyone should have ever given Amazon the benefit of the doubt--it's not like Amazon is a person, with feelings that can be hurt. Isn't "being suspicious of their motives" synonymous with "getting informed about their business practices"?
04/16/09
It doesn't matter if this was a glitch. Regardless of intent, Amazon put me through the emotional wringer and made me feel like a victim of discrimination. I deserve an apology from them, and some acknowledgment of the gravity of the issue. This wasn't a harmless computer glitch; this was really devastating for a lot of people, and Amazon has yet to show any sympathy for the harm that was caused by their business, however unintentionally it may have been.
I'm not outraged and screaming for blood, but I'm not ready to let this go, either. Real damage has been done, and I won't be satisfied until it's fixed.
04/16/09
And, I guess, to take your analogy a little further--sentencing a killer to prison doesn't bring a dead person back to life. How would apologizing to you make it so that you hadn't felt bad about this in the first place? Especially considering that you know that the apology you're demanding would only be a PR move on their part, anyway? If the damage that was done was this emotional harm during the event, there is no satisfactory way to rectify it--again, as is the case when you run someone over with your car.
04/16/09
Let's try this one. If you're walking down the street and someone knocks you over, says "oops" and keeps walking, you're probably going to think that person is a jerk and wonder if maybe they had something against you personally. Whereas if someone knocks you down on the street, apologizes and makes sure you're okay, you're probably going to accept it as an honest mistake, with no hard feelings. In both cases, you've eaten pavement, but in the former, you're left with a bad impression of your unintentional assailant, while in the latter, you're left with a good or neutral impression. Amazon has knocked me over, and I'm still waiting for an apology. Seeing as how their business depends on me and all the other millions of people they 'knocked over' with this incident, you'd think they'd be bending over backwards trying to convince us that they're not jerks and they never meant to hurt us, and we should definitely keep spending our money with them. The lack of it is really glaring, and it's not giving me a very good impression of their business.
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
At the same time, the way the rankings disappeared and Amazon's lack of any true response in the immediate wake of the furor helped build it up into such a big deal. I'm not saying the fact that, in Amazon's words, it affected, "Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica" negates the fact that so many GLBT books were affected, but I saw way too many sloppy headlines claiming that only gay books were affected.
I think the link between Amazonfail and the Tawana Brawley case is a pretty big stretch. With Amazonfail, there isn't "evidence that the event didn't actually happen." It did; we could all see it by going to Amazon. How it happened and why remained to be seen, but the fact that sales rankings went missing and searches weren't coming up for many, many books were verifiable, plus there was the customer service email to Probst that started it all and I think was the biggest catalyst for Amazonfail. I found out about Probst's post because I blogged about my missing rankings and someone pointed out to me that mine wasn't an isolated case.
I think many authors were outraged because we are also Amazon customers (or at least, I am) and it's frustrating as a consumer to not be able to navigate a site that's usually pretty easy to navigate. If Amazon had responded sooner, say, on Sunday with more than the "glitch" line, even if just to say, "We're looking into it; we're fixing it; we did not intend to target GLBT books," I think the clamor would've been a bit more subdued. Especially on Monday, which was not a holiday, the fact that they took so long while news stories came pouring in from the NYT to ET speaks for itself.
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
No one gets cataloging "right" in any perfect sense, and no algorithm returns the "correct" results. We know that, because we see it every day, in every large-scale system we use. No set of labels or algorithms solves anything once and for all; any working system for showing data to the user is a bag of optimizations and tradeoffs that are a lot worse than some Platonic ideal, but a lot better than nothing.
Too true, but sometimes hard to get across when compared with the more stable programming cycle (bugs, testing, QA, build cycles). I feel sorry for whatever Amazon lackey made the tweak that caused this; they'll be waking up with cold sweats for a while.
04/15/09
But they *did* Blanche, they did! And I'm sure they would have fixed it incredibly quickly had there not been a public furor (based on their forthcomingness with explanations).
Amazon owes more than an apology. They owe REPARATIONS. (Tawana Brawley hoax reference - srsly? I think that's an automatic disqualifaction to be considered "insightful")
Finally - WHERE ARE THE COUGAR ADS??? ::sob::
04/15/09
04/15/09
So I'm not browbeating you here, but my work is all about sortation engines and nodes and taxonomies and tagging, and Amazon's explanation is one of the first things I suspected when this blew up. Bad tag somewhere, or reclassified node, or a remote fix with bad repercussions.
04/15/09
04/15/09
Internet media is the most efficient ignorance engine ever created. Every irresponsible emotional can find all manner of references, sympathy, and prefabricated comment-length arguments to support and weaponize the conclusion.
Today, if you're irrational, you can easily "Like" hundreds of other idiots just like you in a matter of seconds. You can "Heart" them, reblog them, twitter them, RSS their bullshit, sign petitions, etc. Never before in human history has the cult of personality mattered more and rationality mattered less. Never before has so much power rested in the hands of editors.
Kinda scary, but I drink, so I'll be fine
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
For now, I'll continue to enjoy getting into proper arguments with strangers in Starbucks.
04/15/09
"If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations."
Nonsense. These kinds of stupidities are normalized in society and I rarely see them discussed. How often are their posts like Mary's on TechCrunch?
"Intention is what we were reacting to"
Speak for yourself. Many of the people I talked to are reacting to yet another example of silencing the voices of LGBTs, feminists, and people with disabilities (who you don't even bother to mention in your post). Many are reacting to Amazon's dismissiveness in calling it a "glitch". Many are reacting to Amazon's ongoing lack of a real apology or executive involvement. Many are reacting to the revelation that Amazon has been manipulating their best-seller information. Many are reacting to the shocking fact that Amazon doesn't appear to have any defenses against intentional manipulation (whether or not that happened in this case). Many are reacting to the impact of market dominance in ways that hadn't quite struck home before. And so on.
Maybe none of those things matter to you. And maybe *you* assumed intentionality. Don't project your beliefs on others.
I'm proud to have been a small part of #amazonfail, and grateful to those who put far more time and energy in than I did. I'm disappointed that somebody like you who's championed social networks' ability to lower the bar for organizing doesn't see it that way.
jon
04/15/09
Rational, logical thought doesn't seem to have played a part in the #amazonfail network's movements -- it was running high off of emotion. So much of what went on was all in the vein of "Amazon has done a deliberate, malicious wrong to the LGBT community!", that became the starting-off point.
Truly, most of what I saw presented Amazon's guilt as a done deal - conveniently packaged with the theory that now they'd been found out, they'd deny it. As your average algorithm nerd, I was surprised the social mob had seemingly leaped right over the cause of the glitch, and were already claiming it intentional.
04/15/09
04/15/09
Would you perpetuate the rumour that Amazon discriminates against LGBT, or revoke your account citing that as a reason, to make that example? Despite knowing that it's posturing, and that Amazon's error was a node glitch?
04/15/09
Rational, logical thought doesn't seem to have played a part in the #amazonfail network's movements -- it was running high off of emotion.
Well, as I said, my experience was different. How much time did you spend engaging with people on different blogs and via Twitter -- the authors who were affected, LGBTQ and disability rights activists, etc.? If you're just making judgments based on the tweetstream and some of the over-the-top blog posts, then you may well be drawing the wrong conclusions.
jon
04/15/09
The thing people don't seem to understand is that matching algorithms are inherently unfair. They are designed and tweaked and maintained to cater to marketing demands, they are NOT the more traditional, puritanical trees you might see in more scientific or archival disciplines. This isn't a bias against any particular group, it's a market force. So no, gay books are unlikely to split algorithm time 50/50 with non-gay themed books. Because Amazon's audience isn't 50% gay, the clickrate on gay books will be lower, and it will be less financially viable to present gay works alongside straight fare (I am excluding cross-tagging here). And that's just ONE manipulation of the taxonomy.
The Amazon thing exploded, not with any sort of intellectual curiosity as to why it happened, but with activist rage. Buoyed by the evidence of two gay authors who'd gotten unfortunately rote replies (but who'd also seen their sales rank restored after investigation) I saw constant assertion that Amazon was actively, consciously discriminating against gay materials and readers. It was barely questioned; people were thrilling off of canceling accounts and writing emails and whipping up sentiment, inserting doubt into every explanation offered.
In this case, I think the bar lowered too low, too quickly. It meant the movement started with barely any information and no guidance, so there was no core. And now, I can't see how this incident would be a good thing for the LGBT community, because it looks like a massive, hysteric overreaction. I don't see how that can help activism.
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
When you take it apart, it just makes no damn sense for Amazon to hide LGBT books. None. I can't see a motive for any of the shady theories advanced, because they all rely on the basic premise that Amazon, for some ungodly reason, either hates gay people or wants to stop selling their books. Which seems absurd for a generally liberally-inclined online bookseller during an economic downturn.
If anyone's got a good motive for Amazon to maliciously cause the delisting, I'm all ears.
04/15/09
04/15/09
The PR thing, I don't know what to tell you. I'd only be involved in the tech side, so I'd be more focused on finding the actual flaw and providing an explanation. Maybe the PR people didn't want to end up in a situation where they'd give one response, then have to backtrack when tech turned up a different explanation. Maybe they were actually manipulated by a troll or hacker, and didn't want to get into that PR war.
I do think one of their major stumbles was assuming that #amazonfail was more about finding the cause of the event, rather than demanding reparation for the result. It's since become pretty clear that the issue morphed quickly into a situation where Amazon was immutably "wrong" in the eyes of the majority, and so explanation was no longer the overriding demand; Amazon PR should have come out with assurance that the search results were a mistake, that there was no public policy against LGBT, that they were working to fix it. I think they lingered, trying to provide an explanation. But hey, I don't know what the PR tradeoffs would've been.
04/16/09
04/14/09
I believe them, that this is a categorization error, especially your man from France -- I once outsourced a medical classification system, and when I got it back the New Delhi-based team had classified homosexuality as "a mental illness of the genital area". This is one node, mind you, buried in about seventy pages of medical jargon, intended for Western content. I caught it before we launched it, but I can only imagine what would've happened if that team had been working on tagging rather than creating the classification structure. And when I'd gone looking for the tags, at first glance it would've just read "Homosexuality".
Considering all this blew up on Easter weekend, when everyone would've been away from any logs, I'm not surprised PR didn't have an immediate answer for the masses. Discovering the glitch is one thing; crawling through the enormous Amazon taxonomy to find what's throwing it? That's a nightmare.
04/14/09
04/14/09
04/13/09