The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by CharlesP:

I admit I've only skimmed the responses after the first hundred or so (which I read yesterday)... so this may have already been covered... but to address the "#SorryAmazon" tag I think it was because so much of the twitter outrage was just that, outrageous outrage. The equivalent of yelling and screaming and calling the company bigots (which many people did).

On top of that, there was an effort by some people (who thought it was gaming the system with tags that caused the problems) to go out and start tagging other books to try and de-list them (tagging bibles with "gay sex" and such). This was bratty 'throwing rocks at the school windows' behavior IMHO, and didn't help anything (and now just makes it more difficult for amazon to reliably say "you might like this").

That is what the #SorryAmazon should be about. Not apologizing for bringing up that something was screwed up, or publicizing it, or making it a big deal. Those were things the on-line community had every right and reason to do, but what they should have been better about, was instead of screwing with the rest of their data and calling for boycotts because they are "obviously bigoted" calling for reasoned explanation and action. One simply doesn't get treated with respect by acting like a raving mob, even if it can get results.

@106 is disturbingly similar to how I recall major issues going down when I worked there (when you put that "ships in 24 hours" thing on a product you get antsy if something, anything, is down for 25% of that time). I would hope the process is more robust than it once was (in 99 we were still flying by the seat of our pants it seemed... and I wasn't even in the corporate website side of things), but it's a big complicated web site and I'm sure to some degree there has been a fair bit of "did we do this, or was this done to us?" going on... tracking down all the changes made in the last few days to decide if it was a set of internal decisions working together, checking traffic patterns to see how/if ratings/rankings/taggings fluctuated in the last few days.

Thank you Meg, I always forget the name by the time I have chance to use it again (and I seem to use it a lot).

@34 yes, they've gradually implemented many ways for users to refine what is recommended and such. Which is why I think that this is more a means of "we turned a few things on that allowed us to be gamed" than "we don't like gay people" thing... the corporate culture was never one that was anti-gay, but it has always been "customer-centric" and if they thought they had developed a means of helping remove "blatantly offensive" material from coming up when you were searching for a historian (a la #39) it would "fit" with their general goals.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be taken to task for this, but that the "it couldn't be a GLITCH!" mentality seems to be driven more by knee-jerk taking of offense than really looking at what is likely to have happened (and that "it's a glitch" is likely Corp Comm speak for "this wasn't our intent but we don't want to say more"). I don't want to put words in her mouth, but Mur Lafferty has a piece on this over on her ISBW blog and it seems she's pointing out we may be missing the bigger picture here. It's not about amazon hating LGBT, it's about censorship and we need to point that out (and if I'm right that it was a combination of corporate screw-up and outside forces then we need to talk more about the cultural drive to censor than we do to talk about the corporation screwing something up).

I've posted this basic idea a few other places discussing the #amazonfail phenomenon, but like to contribute it where I can because the furor over this seems to be largely that people think Amazon did this intentionally. I wish I could remember the exact quote, but it goes something like "Never attribute malice as an explanation, when incompetence will do."

Patrick has laid forth an entirely plausible explanation, let me give you another.

*disclosure, I used to work for Amazon a decade or so ago*

As Patrick laid out, somebody was given the edict to unrank things that are more "adult" in nature, but built an algorithm that used a combination of original meta data, tags by users, ratings by users (or "offensive material" button clicking in the review area), or any number of other factors. Amazon uses these sorts of algorithms to tell you "you might also like this". They are almost always trying to improve this process as I understand it.

If you put that scenario together with a religious conservative group with an interest in making it more difficult to find these items, it's just a matter of time before somebody figures out how to game the system. There are creationist vote-bot networks that have plagued evolution videos on youtube, it doesn't seem unlikely that there have been individuals within a community that disapproves of LGBT literature who have put an effort into figuring this sort of thing out.

I think either Patrick's explanation, or mine, lay forth a very likely scenario for how this happens AND that it is a "glitch". Corp Comm people aren't going to give out large amounts of information regarding the means of the system not working as planned, especially while fixing it. A glitch could be two internal projects which inadvertently killed ranking for these titles, or code designed to improve something being gamed by outside groups (one assumes Amazon didn't INTEND for the system to be gamed).

As an aside, in my time with Amazon the culture was very far from anti-LGBT. That was a decade ago and corporate cultures change, but I don't think they changed that much.

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