Plaidophile

As a former Amazon employee (who left the company voluntarily on very good terms two years ago), I should share some of my thoughts.

4:15 PM Read this. Mike Daisey's explanation makes perfect sense. Of course my main point is that you should put the damn pitchforks down because the actual situation is much more complicated than what the Internet masses want to believe. Whatever the root cause was, I am positive it wasn't the result of directed malice from anyone at Amazon.

First off, I never had to deal with the catalog system directly, but my understanding is that it's actually a fairly byzantine system which has a lot of fiddly bits. It doesn't update instantaneously (there are several layers of caching which go on — it's a big database, so this is necessary), and its category/tag/etc. structure is pretty ad-hoc. Pushing out code and content updates takes a while. You-the-public see it as a single site but every single page request touches hundreds of servers on the backend.

I don't know how the "safe" search is implemented, and I don't know what criteria are used to exclude an item from search or salesrank. Here is what I do know about the situation:

• Amazon has an extremely active internal GLBT community (called GLAmazon) which is very vocal, large, and would never, ever allow this action to knowingly occur, purposeful or not.
• The Amazon catalog is huge. I can't emphasize how big it is. There are literally millions of books. There is absolutely no way they could be individually tagged and excluded from search results.
• Defining even something as simple as "adult" content is extremely difficult. There are false positives. There are false negatives. Things have to happen based on keywords and data which comes from the publishers and from user-submitted tags. Anywhere along this chain it is quite conceivable that something that correlates with "GLBT material" ended up getting on the adult filter list.
• Amazon is based in Seattle, which has one of the highest GLBT per capita in the US, if not the world. Many of its core engineers are openly gay. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this would be a conscious decision made by anyone high up in the organization. If it was a conscious decision, it was probably by a single person whose contribution wasn't being appropriately audited.
• The firestorm hit on a day when most people are busy with their families, the flames being fanned by people who see Amazon as idiots and/or bigots. Several people are trying to capitalize on this by opening CafePress stores protesting Amazon which is, frankly, sickening.
• It is completely unreasonable to think that an error of this scale could be fixed or even diagnosed during a few normal work hours, much less on a holiday, but because an hour feels like a year on the Internet, a lack of instantaneous Twitter-style responses and apologies is seen as arrogance, ignorance, or malice. But believe it or not, Amazon attempts to be a responsible company, and part of that means not shooting from the hip and spamming the Internet with off-the-cuff responses to every little uninformed gripe.
• I mean, seriously, what are they supposed to do, personally reply to every single twitter post with an instantaneous, detailed apology?

Obviously, if there is a problem with a company's attitude, it must be addressed, but holy cow, try to find out if there's actually a problem first. Give them a chance to at least fix it.