Just found out about this and am disgusted with Amazon's total fucktard of a policy. Yet again the problem seems to be with anything involving Teh Ghey because we all know that Teh Ghey gives you cooties and can in fact make you Teh Ghey just by looking at it in a ranking list but worse, they can't even implement their own fuckwit policy in a coherent manner.
At this point, they have a choice. They can make this right very, very fast - or try to, at least - or they are going to get SPANKED. Hard. And not in the fun way. No matter how much of a business behemoth they might be, the Internet is a very active place with a lot of loud voices and the power of the purse. If Amazon doesn't come to their senses very soon, the place is going to be a ghost town in short order.
Ghost town? Hardly. A lot of people (albeit far from the majority, I imagine) would agree with the sentiment of hiding gays. A lot more would simply never hear about the whole affair - lots of people use Internet for shopping, not livng.
It will hurt them, though, unless they come up with some good excuse quickly.
Thing is, this isn't going to be an internet-only backlash. The LA Times has already gotten wind and is running with this; other "standard" news sources will follow suit.
There are those who will applaud Amazon for this, and those who will not care. But there are going to be a LOT of people, even outside of fandom and even outside of the rareified universe of highly active internet users, who are infuriated by this, and who will take their business elsewhere. Amazon is going to be hurting in a big, big way very soon.
And given how stupid their reaction has been thus far - a smug form letter sent to a complaining author followed by their customer service reps claiming that it is a "website glitch" - even a good excuse isn't going to go as far as they may be hoping.
Try doing a search for "homosexuality" and weep at the results. Teh ghey is bad, mkay?
What gets me is that online companies continue to not get how the internet works. From someone getting @neilhimself to rt the link to the thing going supernova took about an hour....and that was just the little corner of internet I keep an eye on!
And that was a good two hours after I saw it break on LJ. Now it has EXPLODED on Twitter and...my god, the instant Stephen Fry tweets this, it's going to flash-fry Amazon like nothing else ever.
That is what will cause the real storm which will affect them, Amazon have weathered "we'll boycott Amazon forevers!" before. However using Fry as an example of their policy shoves it under the noses of "normal" people that this is a stupid policy and is probably driven by a religious special interest group.
Twitter noise ain't going to cut it, most of the MSM couldn't really care unless there's a political / famous person angle to play.
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Twatwads. All of them.
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Ah, Stephen Fry, notoriously corrupting our nation's youth and making them think that being smart might be rather cool.
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It will hurt them, though, unless they come up with some good excuse quickly.
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There are those who will applaud Amazon for this, and those who will not care. But there are going to be a LOT of people, even outside of fandom and even outside of the rareified universe of highly active internet users, who are infuriated by this, and who will take their business elsewhere. Amazon is going to be hurting in a big, big way very soon.
And given how stupid their reaction has been thus far - a smug form letter sent to a complaining author followed by their customer service reps claiming that it is a "website glitch" - even a good excuse isn't going to go as far as they may be hoping.
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What gets me is that online companies continue to not get how the internet works. From someone getting @neilhimself to rt the link to the thing going supernova took about an hour....and that was just the little corner of internet I keep an eye on!
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Twitter noise ain't going to cut it, most of the MSM couldn't really care unless there's a political / famous person angle to play.
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They've taken the ranking of Heather has Two Mommies which is a picture book for children to help them understand non-traditional families. *headdesk*
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