Amazon Troll Busting

[bryant]

The original post which prompted this one is now inaccessible accessible again. C'est la vie.

Hopefully you weren't thinking of this as a news post, but just in case

Comments

[anonymous]

I rather thought so... thanks for checking, though: It's always better to know rather than assume.

Form a common sense standpoint, his story would not explain the two Amazon reps' response template about adult content.

Thank you.

[peitso]

The 'adult' content policy messages could have been a PR move because they really had no idea what was going on. No company ever tells the public that it's dealing with a massive crisis that hasn't surfaced yet--there's no need if it's not public. If that was the case, it was still a bad move.

[bernmarx]

Actually, ironically, just last week I got an email reply from Amazon's digital music department that not only answered my question but gave me a phone number to call to walk me through my number (which I called, and which walked me through my problem).

[bernmarx]

And, oh yeah, I got the first email reply within about an hour of writing.

Ah, the halcyon days when Amazon's customer service didn't have anything to do. That is to say, last week. ;)

[anonymous]

[i]because they really had no idea what was going on[/i]

Well, this seems unlikely since the first one dates back to February and it apparently took the author several emails back and forth as well as involving his agent to get an adult content response:

http://craigspoplife.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-amazon-homophobic.html

So old 'adult content' excuse was not a panicked answer while Amazon tried to figure out the problem. It is most likely a correct answer reflecting corporate policy.

Amazon's current backtracking and smoke-mirroring with 'just a glitch' stuff is however totally understandable considering the amount of outrage expressed all over Twitter etc.

[bryant]

I tend to believe that there's some automated filtering going on vis a vis adult content, which is not the most horrendous thing I can think of. For one thing, if you filter adult content out of sales rank lists, you avoid a whole different set of trolls.

(Fun for everyone: do a small-scale organized "everyone on 4chan spends 10 bucks" trick which pumps something hardcore pornographic to the top of the sales ranks for a day.)

The real problem here is whatever mechanism got inappropriate books tagged as adult. That's probably where the glitch is.

[anonymous]

Excellent point about the advisability of some adult filtering: and yes you are right, it's obviously the fine-tuning the parameters which is the underlying problem here. The details of the filtering being based on the publishers' meta data which explains inconsistencies between editions of the same books makes that clear.

But Amazon management seems to have forgotten or never known how fast an internet minute it. By now, amazonFail is centuries old for most of us. And damage control is nearly more important than the technical fix, IMO.

Personally I'd rather they have added the word 'Twilight' to their filters because the Twilight-related in your face advertising all over Amazon.com is seriously getting on my nerves... :D

[peitso]

The amount of time it took to come up with that excuse shows that they didn't have any idea what was happening and so because they needed to give him some response decided to give a vague no-response while they tried to figure it out.

I can't imagine a book company changing corporate policy regarding literature that they have a bestseller section for? I mean...was it just going to be empty? It doesn't make any sense. Kindle rankings are not affected. Different versions of the same book are not affected, and many gay lit books are still ranked. All the still-ranked adult-themed books that people are so upset about imply that it is in fact a glitch and not some move to censor what we're reading.

And as for the "glitch" (no one official called it "just a glitch") announcement--it will take days or weeks to diagnose what the glitch is. Calling it a "glitch" is the only capacity they have for describing the problem right now. But since this is the internet 20 minutes feels like 2 days.

[bernmarx]

From the various things I've seen, it seems like every six months or so, some author or other complains that their book specifically was blocked. Amazon drags its heels in investigating, decides the block was inappropriate, and rescinds the block. Because they really do have some sort of hardcore search blocking mechanism. Mark R. Probst's complaint post could have wound up being just another case of this.

What appears to have made this weekend different, and what has Amazon in such a tizzy, is that for whatever reason, it wasn't just a few books here and there incorrectly listed, but major, major swaths of them, including truly illogical ones like Ellen Degeneres's biography and Unfriendly Fire.

So Amazon may have a canned response for the average gay erotica-writing author whose book complaints reached the threshold for deranking, but they're utterly flummoxed as to how their system was gamed or failed to the scale it apparently did this weekend.

[just_ruth]

Love your icon, my daughter is currently going to college on a music scholorship because of her viola.

[7kim_moon]

The policy statement was extremely accurate. It was Amazon's policy to target "adult" books. What the boilerplate response does NOT say is that it was Amazon policy to target LGBT books.

Enter some mechanism for arbitrarily tagging all LGBT books as "adult" and ... you get the picture.

I can answer this one...

[gerrib]

Why the canned email/phone response?

Simple. Y'all think you're talking to amazon.com. You're not. You're talking to an outsourcing company in either central U.S. or Indonesia depending on the time of day. They have a list of responses that they are programmed to give out depending on the problem. Book or other material listed as offensive material flagged? Punt out the adult clause. Note the complaint, get you off the phone or be done with the email, move on to the next thing. They have 4.5 minutes to get you in, deal with you, and get you out.

On a weekend, esp. a religious holiday? I'm betting no one was in the home office to deal with this mess.

I'm inclined to believe this is an outside job(not speculating whom, not really interested), but amazon.com left themselves highly vulnerable to this kind of situation by automating and outsourcing far too much.

Re: I can answer this one...

[atara]

That was my thought as well. Scripted call centers are killing good customer service, and reducing the ability of large companies to spot issues when they arise - BEFORE they go nuclear.

Re: I can answer this one...

[azurelunatic]

Lucky stiffs. I only had 4.36 minutes.