In my ideal world, Amazon would offer it's products to people in foreign countries on an all or none basis. Which would be foisting the American value of freedom of the press on foreign countries. I don't have a problem with that.
In your ideal world, have the US embargos on Cuba, Iran, or North Korea made life any better for the ordinary inhabitants of those countries? Did UN sanctions on Iraq help folks live healthier, happier lives? Because in the real world, this kind of blanket ban usually makes things worse, not better.
I'm a software developer dealing with large databases (actually, very large), and the impression I got was indeed bad design leading to bad coding... for which, as a developer, I have some sympathetic tolerance.
I also think that Sy's invoking the "incompetence rather than malice" approach works and can be softened a bit to include a more likely "it got too big too fast to work under the original design", and they just didn't work fast enough to catch up.
Some developers are (ahem) both eminently competent and sympathetic to users, and we still manage to piss them off regularly. The best software has defects. The trick is to find most of them before the users get their fingers on it. Any development cycle that is less than 40% testing is going to fail that trick.
I also have a friend who works for Amazon (and who happens to be bi, and has often talked about what a GLBT-friendly workplace it is), and what little she has said fits with what you've paraphrased here.
that's not quite the story i heard, butpir_anhaApril 15 2009, 04:13:19 UTC
i totally believe that it was due to some arcane bit of editor for the tagging system having its paws in database tables in which it should probably not have had its paws. anyone who has worked on large database systems that have organically grown over time has seen that sort of thing. i never believed that amazon was suddenly turning homophobic.
however, i am not letting them off the hook, because there are some bad/wrongheaded/stupid aspects to this, even totally disregarding their fail to consider internet time:
- nobody should have to have their total amazon sales rank yanked just because people in, say, china, have a big brother government that doesn't want to let them see anything gay. sales ranks and searches should in fact have very little to do with each other per se (it might be useful to include rank when searching for "most poular", but it's not otherwise needed at all).
- apparently the decision to not rank (some) adult materials in the US was made earlier, and has been communicated to inquiring authors and
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Sean
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I also think that Sy's invoking the "incompetence rather than malice" approach works and can be softened a bit to include a more likely "it got too big too fast to work under the original design", and they just didn't work fast enough to catch up.
Some developers are (ahem) both eminently competent and sympathetic to users, and we still manage to piss them off regularly. The best software has defects. The trick is to find most of them before the users get their fingers on it. Any development cycle that is less than 40% testing is going to fail that trick.
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however, i am not letting them off the hook, because there are some bad/wrongheaded/stupid aspects to this, even totally disregarding their fail to consider internet time:
- nobody should have to have their total amazon sales rank yanked just because people in, say, china, have a big brother government that doesn't want to let them see anything gay. sales ranks and searches should in fact have very little to do with each other per se (it might be useful to include rank when searching for "most poular", but it's not otherwise needed at all).
- apparently the decision to not rank (some) adult materials in the US was made earlier, and has been communicated to inquiring authors and ( ... )
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