

The Failure of #amazonfail - coglethorpe
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfail/

======
tdavis
The fact that anyone was actually outraged in the first place is the real
failure here. I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would
be stupid enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and
unapologetically de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or
categorize it as "adult").

Okay, fine, Amazon screwed up and there was a glitch or a security hole or
whatever it really was. Their bad, they should fix that and people have a
right to be upset that their books lost sales or whatever was the case. But
_moral outrage_? Protest logos? Petitions? People either need to lighten up or
get lives that lack the required free time to get _that_ worked up over a
conspiracy that was obviously irrational.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stupid
enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and unapologetically
de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or categorize it as
"adult")._

I'm not going to say that you're wrong. You're not wrong: That _was_ a crazy
conclusion for people to come to, because it _is_ something that Amazon would
never do.

But I am going to take a wild guess: are you significantly older than thirty?
I'm guessing the answer is no.

Those of us who came of age before the Internet were raised in a world where
it was _intuitively obvious_ that GLBT literature _would_ be openly,
unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general
public. That's the way the world worked.

It's easy to retrain the front of the brain. It's a lot harder to retrain the
instincts that you learned as a kid. Especially if those instincts were forged
under stress. And gay people and their friends, especially those over a
certain age, are intuitively aware that it is (or, at least, was) _entirely_
possible for big, public entities to wake up one day and decide to screw LGBT
people over. That used to be the norm.

I sincerely hope that we reach the state where open maliciousness towards gay
people becomes unthinkably weird, but it's going to take at least a few more
years.

~~~
dejb
I haven't seen solid enough evidence to convince me that this wasn't the
result of an action by an Amazon employee for whom it was 'intuitively obvious
that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and
kept hidden away from the general public'. It would seem pretty easy for them
to classify this as a 'glitch'. Without complete transparency you can only
really judge an organisation by it's actions.

~~~
Retric
It was killed, but someone posted how they had hacked amazon.com.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560075>

Do you feel that he was faking it?

~~~
dejb
I think there is substantial doubt that this was true.

------
mechanical_fish
Can anyone tell me how people like Clay Shirky are using Twitter?

I read Twitter by occasionally surfing to the website and scrolling through
the backlog of Tweets from the fairly small list of people that I follow.
Which is to say: I'm probably some sort of neanderthal. In this mode, hashtags
are kind of useless.

But apparently the cutting-edge users of Twitter spend their days plugged into
a client which lets them do nifty tricks like following hashtags in real time.
I tried that last month, using TweetGrid. It was hypnotic, and kind of fun,
but way too much volume. And it featured spam and trolls. Finally, I
understood why some people complain about Twitter spam! It would appear that
anyone can create a random Twitter account under a fake name and start spewing
arbitrarily-hashtagged crap!

So I lost interest. But apparently many people have not. Do other folks just
_inhale_ all the hashtagged stuff, spam and trolls and Amazon-hating hysteria-
inducing _agents provocateurs_ and all? Or do serious Twitter users just
follow so many people that they actually find the hashtags useful, just to
sort through the Tweets from people they are _following_? Is there some nifty
client software, which everyone but me knows about, that does something
different from either of these strategies?

~~~
silentOpen
I'm relatively new to Twitter but I think the answer is "no". The interface
really does suck. Imho, Twitter has very good uses that many people like and
suggests many more potential uses that would be powerful except the platform
itself is a piece of crap. Twitter is powerful because of its users, nothing
else -- MIT's zephyr has supported all of Twitter's use cases and more (and
better) for ~20 years now.

If it's easy to understand, people with little imagination have an easy time
understanding it and heralding it as revolutionary. It's not.

------
paulgb
This is the second major twitter witch-hunt in the last couple weeks that
turned out to be targeting the wrong person. I wish people would wait for the
facts before bringing out the pitchforks. I guess that's the downside in a
medium of communication as instant and viral as twitter.

(The other one was this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552160> )

~~~
cmars232
A twitter witch-hunt? That's a "twitch hunt"!

------
chez17
I'm surprised by the number of comments here that say "Amazon would _never_ do
that". Look at our society, we have a black president openly advocating
separate but equal treatment of gay people which to me is mind blowing. We
have states voting to make it illegal for gay couples to adopt children,
because they are _so_ much better off without a stable family, right? We have
once progressive states like CA taking steps back. The simple fact is the
majority of people don't see gays as equals. It would not be unheard of for a
large company to bow to pressure on subjects like this. I didn't sign any
petitions but when I heard the news my first thought wasn't of Amazon.com's
benevolence. I learned my lesson from the last internet fiasco and waited this
one out. I just think it's premature to suggest we live in a enlightened time
where people are free from sexual orientation prejudices.

~~~
mechanical_fish
It's not that the act is fundamentally unthinkable. It's the preponderance of
evidence against this being an intentional plan.

Amazon is a progressive company. They're headquartered in Seattle, a fairly
progressive city. Their employees do not enjoy being treated like pariahs.

Amazon's best customers tend to be highly literate people who react to book-
banning like they've been personally knifed. And Amazon is smart: The company
_knows_ that authors and publishers watch their Amazon sales rankings on an
hourly basis (if not minute-by-minute) and will commence an _immediate_
shitstorm if those rankings _change_ in an unusual fashion, let alone
_vanish_. Amazon would have an explanation ready. They would roll any change
out carefully. They would have approached _someone_ in the publishing industry
to discuss such a drastic move before making it.

Because -- most importantly -- Amazon has _a big financial incentive_ not to
ban books. Amazon makes _money_ by selling books. Every GLBT book they don't
sell is money they don't make. If they were going to bow to pressure and take
thousands of titles off the site the pressure would have to be _really
costly_. Hence, presumably, quite visible. Where is it? And wouldn't the
company have tried negotiation, first? Taken one or two shocking-looking
titles off the list and then publicized that fact? Or tried the case in
public, where librarians and publishers of (nearly) all stripes could help
them push back against the pressure?

The very fact that the act blew up so quickly is evidence of how stupid it
was. And it's impossible to believe that Amazon is really that stupid.
(Though, as has been pointed out, it _is_ easy to believe that an AI is that
stupid. Be careful when letting AIs make your business decisions.)

------
bouncingsoul
I really respect Clay for this post (though I am floored that anyone would
believe Amazon intended what happened), because it's definitely not socially
required to apologize or feel embarrassed for being wrong about anger if the
thing was bad enough.

The part about people justifying their anger post-explanation is really true
and is present in some of the comments on the post. It seems to mean
chastising Amazon for taking too long to address the _serious_ situation –
which seems code for giving people too much time to make fools of themselves.

People need to slow down and think.

~~~
bouncingsoul
I want to clarify that I don't mean it's foolish to make a scene about real
book banning. I mean that it's foolish to get so up in arms over an
_accusation_ of book banning without waiting for evidence.

------
njharman
I suspect(and hope) most people don't believe lynch mobs should be permitted
in society. What I don't understand is why the electronic equivalent is
socially acceptable?

"it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out."

Didn't they answer in a day or two? That is fucking fast, esp for a giant
corporation.

and "it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that
really matters;"

What I remember reading sounded very un PR-ese. Trying to find their press
release to reread... They don't have one / I can't find it. That is bad. This
is what I read <http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp> I guess
that's not official release.

~~~
wingo
Lynch mobs do not have electronic equivalents.

The worst I can think of would affect a person's psyche, but Amazon is not a
person. The analogy is not apt.

~~~
njharman
I meant the figurative meaning of "Lynch mob"(which perhaps only I hold) I
should have used "mob justice".

Amazon is a "virtual" person under US Law. I don't like it but it's the
reality of corporatism. Amazon can receive justice or injustice. In this case
the mob delivered them a heap of injustice.

------
defen
Kudos to him for admitting his error, but can someone remind me why this guy
is famous?

~~~
frossie
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky>

(or was that a rhetorical question?)

------
sho
Does anyone have any good information regarding what actually happened?
Amazon's corporate PR and random LJ posts have about the same level of
credibility to me; they both have a single objective, to make themselves look
good.

The troll did seem a little too perfect, but Amazon's "oops-a-daisy!"
explanation doesn't smell so good either. Anyone know the real story? Or at
least of substantiation details to make the "official" lines, on either side,
sound a little more plausible?

~~~
decode
Here's an interview with an unnamed Amazon employee about it:
<http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166384.asp>

Basically, an employee in France (possibly due to a language barrier) flipped
the "adult" bit on a bunch of stuff he shouldn't have, which interacted badly
with recent changes to remove adult content from places where kids might
stumble across it. It sucks that it affected a bunch of LGBT stuff, but it
wasn't intentional.

If you're a developer who is like me, this is exactly the kind of thing you
have nightmares about doing, because you know it could happen to anyone. How
many times have you typed something, or committed something, and moments later
felt the dawning horror of deleting some essential files or missing some
essential step? Obviously we erect processes and technical solutions to make
it rare for this kind of thing to make it into production, but it still
happens.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I keep trying to imagine the database query that would have resulted in this
particular subset of items being altered the way they were. I guess my
imagination isn't that great.

I suspect the troll/CSRF might be the simplest explanation here.

~~~
sho
Yeah, exactly my line of thought.

