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

[emeraldsedai]

Appreciate the knowledgeable counter-perspective. I did, in fact, read the post on brutal_honesty, along with everything else that's been linked a zillion times on Twitter. (Honestly, the internet was FUN last night!), and though I can't vet the guy's code, my tentative conclusion matches yours: nothing I've read so far makes total sense of the facts.

[bryant]

I really /want/ to know what happened, because running big Internet stuff happens to be my job. I am sad that I probably won't ever really know.

It's damned well a good lesson in the vulnerabilities of centralization, no matter what. Same applies to Google. Same applies to UPS and FedEx. Single points of failure, right?

[emeraldsedai]

Same applies to the A3 Network. Hellooo Twitter. ;)

[emeraldsedai]

Portland blog The Fluent Self has a take on amazonfail today that I think is germane to your point.

[bryant]

I have to admit I don't like that post, mostly because... how is anything about this at all convenient for Amazon? It's incredibly inconvenient.

Amazon isn't saints. But every questionable thing he lists is an effort to get more sales. Pushing their own POD service -- getting more sales. Selling fur -- getting more sales. Etc., etc.

Delisting books prevents sales.

[shadowflyer]

The only way it makes sense to call this charlie foxtrot "convenient" for Amazon is if they were getting really heavy pressure from Focus on the Family and all the other usual suspects on the right - and the level of pressure it would require to make this fiasco even a marginal win would require mobilizing Faux News, i.e., we'd have heard about it and Left Blogsylvania would have been springing to Amazon's defense before now. So I agree, no, not convenient.