Amazon Rank
http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank/

Amazonfail -- their little 'glitch'...

amazon rank Function: verb Inflected Form(s): amazon ranked 1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies). 2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.

"amazon rank Function: verb Inflected Form(s): amazon ranked 1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies). 2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense. ..."

Unresolvable

cool story about web community and instant media gone horribly wrong; see also griefers

"It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it. It's also obvious that there aren't too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (& search ranking) of pornography & sex toys & other seemingly "objectionable" materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around & very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked & becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question. To me, this looks like one of two things: 1. Some "Family"-type organization astroturfing Amazon in an attempt to rid the world of EVIL PRO-HOMOSEXUAL FILTH!! 2. Bantown ... a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other"

Amazonfail theory about it being a "glitch." I call bullshit, though.

Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations

we got it wrong

Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act.

interesting analysis. I was entirely offline last weekend, so I pretty much came in at the waaaay tail end.

smart people being stupid

Open and honest account of jumping to conclusions.

We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.