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Thinking that one is bogus, though. Someone already pointed out that his code doesn't work, and I don't recall ever seeing a "Report this book" link on any book at Amazon.
The fact that it's hitting books in specific meta categories indiscriminately suggests it is a glitch, but the letters sent out to author beforehand suggest that it's a matter of degree, not policy. As in, they had planned to do something to reduce the public presence of "adult" books but hadn't planned to be this widespread. And this post explains why it might not be fixed very quickly.
However, the continued lack of an apology beyond "it's a glitch" astounds me. Their PR department should be all over the Web today, explaining the problem (or the direction of the problem) and stressing their appreciation for their GLBT readers (and authors). Inexplicably they have not, and the longer they take the less it will be believed.
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Why should Amazon even care? Are they going to lose that many sales from a minority of book buyers? For once I would like a high profile company to shrug their shoulders and ignore (no matter how angry they might be) the homos. In fact, I predict such open actions would actually end up INCREASING sales.
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The only "report inappropriate content" on Amazon pages that I can see is on reader comments. You can report a comment as inappropriate, but not a book.
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(*Psst* When Katharina is calling for moderation in rhetoric, it may not be the best time to pretty much shoot her in the back by literally providing an example of what The Pixiest is railing against. With friends like these ... and all that)
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No, but I find that a lot of people who make unpleasant comments against gay people are not racist. Sometimes it helps to illustrate the point.
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Occasional, the dismissive name-calling is exactly that, and that's bad.
----
What do I think of all this? I think we don't know the story yet - I'm waiting to find out what's happened.
I mean, the top result for "Mormon" and "LDS" is anti-Mormon stuff, but I don't think that's a conspiracy led by people like Pixiest. I think we'll get more actual information soon.
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quote:Originally posted by Occasional: Why should Amazon even care? Are they going to lose that many sales from a minority of book buyers? For once I would like a high profile company to shrug their shoulders and ignore (no matter how angry they might be) the homos. In fact, I predict such open actions would actually end up INCREASING sales.
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So long as gays see themselves as the "new blacks," then maybe I should seek to take away the "rights" of blacks so that the gays can't accuse me of discrimination.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: The only "report inappropriate content" on Amazon pages that I can see is on reader comments. You can report a comment as inappropriate, but not a book.
Its possible they may have tried to data-mine the reviews/comments for particular books for information on which books may be inappropriately adult. Since (using examples from the OP?) books like the Two Mommies books may attract angry comments disproportionately from more obvious adult heterosexual books, its possible that a glitch amplified the problem and caused them to fall right out.
rivka: Someone gaming the system is possible too, but I'm having difficulty thinking of ways myself. As a total guess, maybe they're experimenting with an algorithm that measures how many adult sites link to a particular book to identify adult books and someone did the equivalent of a Google-bombing? I dunno. Sounds interesting though.
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Occasional, for one, that's just saying you agree with their characterization. For another: why would advocating racism ever be okay? Ever? It isn't.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: *rolls eyes* But religion = hate groups you're okay with?
You can disagree with her, but she's made a case. Using ethnic slurs like "homos" (no different than "kikes" or "niggers" or "ragheads") is the mark of a true scumbag.
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quote:Originally posted by Occasional: So long as gays see themselves as the "new blacks," then maybe I should seek to take away the "rights" of blacks so that the gays can't accuse me of discrimination.
So your goal would be to be the new...what? What would be the "new" equivalent to the people who discriminated against black people? I do not understand your thinking here.
If you are concerned with being accused of discrimination, you could try not discriminating against people. Thjat seems a more obvious choice than discriminating against more people.
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quote:Originally posted by Occasional: So long as gays see themselves as the "new blacks," then maybe I should seek to take away the "rights" of blacks so that the gays can't accuse me of discrimination.
Doesn't surprise me at all. Bigots are bigots.
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My point, kmbboots, was that I wasn't worried about getting accused of discrimination. It was a snarky response to the chestnut; What if this was said about blacks, Jews, etc.? Homos aren't blacks (although blacks can be homos), they are homos.
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It's not a chestnut. It's an illustration. Sometimes people have a blindspot and don't realize that they're being bigoted, and an illustration is useful. In your case, of course, it's unnecessary.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: rivka: Someone gaming the system is possible too, but I'm having difficulty thinking of ways myself. As a total guess, maybe they're experimenting with an algorithm that measures how many adult sites link to a particular book to identify adult books and someone did the equivalent of a Google-bombing? I dunno. Sounds interesting though.
Not my theory. IMO, it replaces one conspiracy theory with another. But it's at least as plausible as most of the other theories people are ranting about.
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Occasional, please refrain from the slurs. Argue your point if you care to, and believe what you wish -- I'm not thought police -- but Lisa's point (regarding your diction) is well-taken. Check that language at the door.
quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: andi: it's true, there ARE good christians who take the words of Jesus, "love thy neighbor as thyself," seriously. Boots springs to mind.
But they are a minority. Pix
(.
No, no we aren't.We just aren't as newsworthy as the bigoted ones.
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rivka: I find it unlikely too, I would have expected someone to claim credit by now and its a pretty non-obvious prank. (Non-obvious in the sense thats its a lot of work for little obvious gain, as opposed to say converting all listings for homosexual books to rickrolls or something)
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quote:Originally posted by Occasional: My point, kmbboots, was that I wasn't worried about getting accused of discrimination. It was a snarky response to the chestnut; What if this was said about blacks, Jews, etc.? Homos aren't blacks (although blacks can be homos), they are homos.
Instead of being snarky, you could answer the question. What if it were? Or you could try to show how the analogy is not apt although why you think that discrimination against either group is okay is beyond me.
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Pixiest hasn't made a case anymore than Occasional has. It's a case only a child could believe holds anything like logic. She could argue in a kangaroo court, but that's it. It holds as much validity as the argument that the earth is flat.
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quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: andi: it's true, there ARE good christians who take the words of Jesus, "love thy neighbor as thyself," seriously. Boots springs to mind.
But they are a minority. Pix
(.
No, no we aren't.We just aren't as newsworthy as the bigoted ones.
I see, the great silent majority.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: rivka: I find it unlikely too, I would have expected someone to claim credit by now and its a pretty non-obvious prank. (Non-obvious in the sense thats its a lot of work for little obvious gain, as opposed to say converting all listings for homosexual books to rickrolls or something)
It wasn't being suggested so much as a prank as the work of some conservative religious group. Confessing would be counterproductive in that case, neh?
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quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: andi: it's true, there ARE good christians who take the words of Jesus, "love thy neighbor as thyself," seriously. Boots springs to mind.
But they are a minority. Pix
(.
No, no we aren't.We just aren't as newsworthy as the bigoted ones.
I want to believe that, but...
Where were they when we needed them in November?
When it was time to stand up and be counted at the ballot box, the more religious someone was, the more likely they were to vote for Prop Hate.
How is that loving one's neighbor?
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quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: andi: it's true, there ARE good christians who take the words of Jesus, "love thy neighbor as thyself," seriously. Boots springs to mind.
But they are a minority. Pix
(.
No, no we aren't.We just aren't as newsworthy as the bigoted ones.
I see, the great silent majority.
Not so much silent as not inclined to political organization. The "Christian Right" made a very concerted effort to organize in the 70s and 80s. "Think" tanks and marketing strategies and PACS and so forth. They have a thirty (or more) year head start on us. And, being liberal, we are harder to herd.
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I agree with all of that but the last sentence. There are and have been plenty of liberal herds.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Man, Twit-storms are so funny to watch from the outside.
What in hell are they? Suddenly I feel like I was transplanted into 2007, and I don't know what facebook is. I've heard of twitter, but exactly how immense is it now?
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quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: andi: it's true, there ARE good christians who take the words of Jesus, "love thy neighbor as thyself," seriously. Boots springs to mind.
But they are a minority. Pix
(.
No, no we aren't.We just aren't as newsworthy as the bigoted ones.
Or as worrisome. It's like anything. I try and notice when my daughter behaves well and praise her for it as much as I notice when she misbehaves and criticize her for it. But it's hard. What we consider to be appropriate tends to fade into the background, while what doesn't tends to jump out at us. And maybe Pix is remiss in not noticing Christians like you as much as she notices Christians like Occasional, but it's human nature.
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In my opinion, liberal Christians aren't taking a lead on this civil rights and social justice issue - as they did during civil rights and abolition and workers' rights and education and poverty and so forth - partly because it deals with sex. The intersection between Christianity and sex has long been complex and weird.
quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: In my opinion, liberal Christians aren't taking a lead on this civil rights and social justice issue - as they did during civil rights and abolition and workers' rights and education and poverty and so forth - partly because it deals with sex. The intersection between Christianity and sex has long been complex and weird.
ETA: That is a reason, not an excuse.
I accept it as an excuse. I don't see why they should have to lead the pack. I'd be happy enough with keeping all religious sentiments out of the issue, since it's a purely civil one.
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I think a Playboy book (not periodical or newsstand item) was still ranked.
Some companies put Playboy in an exception list for porn filters. Strange but true.
I think it's entirely plausible that they used a mechanism to flag adult content that was insufficiently vetted by competent humans. Perhaps they used review content keywords, perhaps tagging keywords, perhaps they outsourced the work to incompetents...perhaps they track complaints about content and happened to have categorized those complaints internally in an unfortunate way. Lots of ways this could happen that don't amount to any person at Amazon making a judgment about "heather has two mommies."
It's also plausible that they employed someone who simply was too naive or judgmental to realize that not everything "gay" was "adult."
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On the upside, if I hadn't gone a-searching for Fingersmith to see if it had been de-ranked (it has - I really hope this is a glitch because it's idiotic), I wouldn't have discovered that Sarah Waters is releasing a new book at the end of this month!
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It's been determined by several sites runnning analyses on which books kept their rank and which ones did not that books in certain meta categories, determined by the publishers, got the axe. Gay & Lesbian, erotica, sexuality, etc. So a nonfiction book on suicide prevention got deranked because it was also listed under Gay & Lesbian, as well as other categories, whereas the book on Preventing Homosexuality in Your Child stayed ranked because it was listed under nonfiction. Ron Jeremy's explicit porn career bio stayed because it was Non-fiction and Biography, while the innocuous Ellen Degeneres bio was deranked.
Still a massive screwup, but not necessarily anti-gay.
quote:This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
Doesn't explain the responses authors received last week indicating that Amazon had a policy about adult material, but at least it does address the current issue. And books are slowly getting their ranks back.
I still suspect that someone at Amazon is working on just such a filter to make more family-friendly searches possible, and were that an opt-in function (like Google Image Search has) I'll be all for it. But doing it wholesale by category plainly does not work.
"Why should Amazon even care? Are they going to lose that many sales from a minority of book buyers? For once I would like a high profile company to shrug their shoulders and ignore (no matter how angry they might be) the homos. In fact, I predict such open actions would actually end up INCREASING sales."
Occasional, why is the world would you think only gay people would be upset?
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Yes, Occ. Many of us are merely "homo enablers."
*smirk*
Actually, I merely have a knee-jerk anti-censorship reaction. It comes from my Christian School days, when we read about Thoreau in lit class, but were not given any of his actual work to read. Then the school closed and I went to public school, where I got to read Thoreau for myself and found that I had been misinformed about the content of his ideas by people who, in their misguided way, were trying to protect me.
I get grumpy and ornery when anyone tries to keep me away from information or ideas. It just sticks in my craw.
Chris, I would be very happy if this became an opt-in type of thing, for searches, but everything else remained the same. I could work with that. The Book Depository is filling my head with its hypnotic charm, though.
*swirly eyes*
I'm signed up as an Amazon Affiliate for my website, so it would be decidedly inconvenient for me to change it now. But I will, if this doesn't become an opt-in search filter thing instead of a lets-pretend-*stuff*-doesn't-exist for-general-searches thing. I'm just contrary enough to do it.
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"Doesn't explain the responses authors received last week indicating that Amazon had a policy about adult material"
There's a very simple, very likely reason for those responses: Amazon, like pretty much every other big company, employs hordes of poorly trained customer service reps who are given a limited set of canned responses, and required to respond to between 12 and 20 customers per hour using that content. Except when a machine responds first to the ones that look familiar to the machine.
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: like pretty much every other big company, employs hordes of poorly trained customer service reps who are given a limited set of canned responses, and required to respond to between 12 and 20 customers per hour using that content. Except when a machine responds first to the ones that look familiar to the machine.
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But the Probst guy had Publisher status with Amazon, and used that to get the answer that he got. I wonder if they have the same pool of CS reps for publishers.
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Judging by the kooky, garbled, nonsensical emails I've personally gotten from obviously over-worked and under-trained Amazon staff in the past, I wouldn't doubt he got in touch with someone who had no real idea what they were doing or saying. No matter what his status.
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Probst's more recent blog entry states that he thinks it probably was a glitch.
quote: I’ve been contemplating how to respond to the statement from the Amazon representative as reported by Publisher’s Weekly. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction was – They're lying. After some careful thought, I realized, no I don’t think they were. Amazon is undoubtedly embarrassed, and they are trying to set things right.
He goes on to say that there is no "new" adult policy (but Amazon has always had one) and that probably someone tried to be lazy when rewriting code to better enforce it.
Maybe it was a glitch, maybe it wasn't. Unless amazon becomes more forthcoming about exactly what happened, I suspect that most people will assume it was deliberate. If only for Amazon's own sales and business, they should be more forthcoming about what happened, because as it stands most people seem to be assuming that it was not a glitch, and that the company was deliberately removing GLBT books from their rankings and lists. This is going to alienate a lot of people who use Amazon. As I stated in a previous post yesterday, I don't generally use amazon, I shop online through companies that will give me money back through Upromise, Mr. Rebates, or Ebates whenever possible. Amazon doesn't participate in those programs, so they get very little of my online business.
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The problem, I think, with assuming it was deliberate is that there is no apparent reason to suspect Amazon (by which I mean any representative chunk of its management) would have thought this was a good business decision.
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The Book Depository is filling my head with its hypnotic charm, though.
