AmazonFail

[netmouse]

"Fail" seems to be the new internet version of "gate" as Brian just commented to me.

Anyway, I got home tonight from a lovely 3-day weekend trip to NY with my sister, sat down to work on taxes and promptly got distracted reading AmazonFail, all about something Amazon has done (maybe policy, maybe glitch, probably both?) that has made it very hard to find many many books. (And if you have any doubt how horrid this is, go to amazon.com and do a search for "Homosexuality"). There's a book for helping teens accept their homosexuality and not commit suicide that no longer shows up. Instead? offensive dreck IMNHO.

For more details and good commentary, see here (links to other sources at the bottom of her post), here, and here.

I have canceled the one open order I had with amazon and posted to the amazon associates discussion board, and signed the petition.

Comments

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

indications are (http://bryant.livejournal.com/672165.html) he's a meta-troll. In other words, not him, sorry.

[narbat.livejournal.com]

He may or may not be the culprit, but it sure looks to me like someone has gamed Amazon's ranking system. I would be surprised to find that this is a corporate policy decision.

[skyfire1228.livejournal.com]

Well, sure. I don't have enough grasp of codemonkey-speak to be able to judge whether weev was legit in his claim or meta-trolling; I just figured it was another possibility for why this all went down. Much like this guy, I find it likely that there's an abuse of Amazon's flagging system, rather than Amazon deciding to further marginalize the LGBTQI community.

One more!

[skyfire1228.livejournal.com]

And now, a supposed Amazon insider says it was an internal person who (accidentally? on purpose?) tagged everything, further debunking the hacker's claim.

This is fascinating.