elsajeni | (no subject)

Well, I was going to write a post about how Amazon has been CAUSING TROUBLE and TICKING ME (and the rest of the internet) OFF, what with this whole "removing adult content" business -- which in effect removed a bunch of GLBT-themed fiction, autobiographies, picture books (we all know about the graphic gay sex in "Heather Has Two Mommies"), textbooks, and a ridiculous number of other things that had anything to do with sex or sexuality in an even vaguely non-completely-vanilla way, and left all the porn and dildos (you can buy dildos on Amazon!) still sitting there in plain sight -- but then I got a response to the cranky letter I wrote them yesterday, which opened, "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection."

So, at least they're admitting it was embarrassing and stupid. I'm still not entirely convinced it was all a matter of error/sloppiness/whatever, although I'm willing to believe that was the better part of it -- more things can be attributed to ineptitude than to malice, really. But at least they seem to have grasped that it was dumb, and are apparently trying to fix it.

Threaded | Flat

Yeah, I'm pretty convinced that it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Which is good, because I like amazon and i want to be able to forget this and move on.

FWIW, there's a troll who's taking credit for gaming the Amazon "flag as inappropriate" system:

http://i.gizmodo.com/5210424/hacker-claims-he-shoved-amazon-into-the-closet-using-inappropriate-flag-exploit

Also, wait, you can buy dildos on Amazon? What department do you have to search to find those?!

Please tell me it's "Toys & Games", oh please...

They say it was a glitch, but I'm wondering what kind of a glitch it was that left all the right-wing books on "curing" homosexuality untouched.

My theory is that someone on the business side of the company made the decision to do this, word got out to the press, word got back to the (somewhat boisterous) Amazon internal mailing lists, and the mailing lists raised such unholy hell that eventually word got back to the higher-ups that everyone hates this idea and that you should change it. Cue CYA press release where it's called a "glitch".

I'm convinced that this sort of scenario is an inevitable result of putting engineers and businesspeople in the same company.

Huh. This had passed under my radar completely. Weird. And so soon after Iowa and Vermont (like I'm the first person to make *that* observation).