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Don't ever do that marginalization thing
Apr. 17th, 2009 08:32 pmWait, should I do a follow-up post on that #AmazonFail thing? You all heard about the kinda-sorta resolution from everyone else already, right? Yeah.
So I dunno. I'm surely not in a boycottin' mood; the magnitude of the thing and the associated certainty of its discovery makes me pretty sure that there was no coherent and unified plan behind it.
But the fact that it was obviously some sort of cock-up doesn't mean that it wasn't a suspicious or potentially revealing cock-up. For one thing, we now know that Amazon has a stealthily implemented search-censoring system in place, and that it was already in the habit of playing nanny with no openness or disclosure. This seems like an important thing to know. And the fact that whoever had their finger on the trigger was inclined in the first place to hold gay material to a higher standard of "adult"-ness than straight material is both worrying and unsurprising. In other words, the situation was a fuckup, but the existence of the conditions that enabled the fuckup still implies a certain amount of moral failure. If you get me.
So I'm not in a boycottin' mood, but I'm also disinclined to go on about poor li'l Amazon getting piled-on. They can take their lumps, clean up their act, and we'll all move forward from there.
So I dunno. I'm surely not in a boycottin' mood; the magnitude of the thing and the associated certainty of its discovery makes me pretty sure that there was no coherent and unified plan behind it.
But the fact that it was obviously some sort of cock-up doesn't mean that it wasn't a suspicious or potentially revealing cock-up. For one thing, we now know that Amazon has a stealthily implemented search-censoring system in place, and that it was already in the habit of playing nanny with no openness or disclosure. This seems like an important thing to know. And the fact that whoever had their finger on the trigger was inclined in the first place to hold gay material to a higher standard of "adult"-ness than straight material is both worrying and unsurprising. In other words, the situation was a fuckup, but the existence of the conditions that enabled the fuckup still implies a certain amount of moral failure. If you get me.
So I'm not in a boycottin' mood, but I'm also disinclined to go on about poor li'l Amazon getting piled-on. They can take their lumps, clean up their act, and we'll all move forward from there.
(no subject)
Apr. 12th, 2009 08:15 pmAt work yesterday, I was talking with the co-workers about the Somali pirates, and dropping some science I'd heard several months ago about how they started off as basically a freelance coastguard after the government died, and how they didn't get into the more traditional violent hijacking game for a good while after that. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwz linked to a cool-looking article about that today, so I thought I'd share with all of you, too.
And as I'm checking my friends page, it looks like Amazon.com is stripping the sales rank info for GLBT books, including totally innocuous stuff. (It sounds like Heather Has Two Mommies got on the too gay for sales-rank list?! WTF!) It looks like someone's collecting links to stories about it over here, and you may have already seen other roundups elsewhere. (It sounds Neil Gaiman's on the job now too?)
I don't have the juice right now to go off on a proper disdain-and-fury tear, but Dear Amazon, THIS IS NOT OKAY. It is, in fact, bullshit, so CUT IT OUT.
EDIT: Oh, I should have just phoned Candy about that one—Smart Bitches is totally doing the googlebomb thing on ye olde Amazon Rank.
jwz linked to a cool-looking article about that today, so I thought I'd share with all of you, too.And as I'm checking my friends page, it looks like Amazon.com is stripping the sales rank info for GLBT books, including totally innocuous stuff. (It sounds like Heather Has Two Mommies got on the too gay for sales-rank list?! WTF!) It looks like someone's collecting links to stories about it over here, and you may have already seen other roundups elsewhere. (It sounds Neil Gaiman's on the job now too?)
I don't have the juice right now to go off on a proper disdain-and-fury tear, but Dear Amazon, THIS IS NOT OKAY. It is, in fact, bullshit, so CUT IT OUT.
EDIT: Oh, I should have just phoned Candy about that one—Smart Bitches is totally doing the googlebomb thing on ye olde Amazon Rank.
