Slog tipper Meg emailed Amazon to voice her displeasure over their de-ranking of gay-themed material (see here and here), and received the following response:
Hello,Thanks for contacting us. We recently discovered a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed.
Thanks again for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.
Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:
If yes, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=cghwbxyf3479710617
If not, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=cghwbxyf3479710617Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.
To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.
Best regards,
Vijay E.
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
"Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company" better come up with a serious and credible explanation for this "glitch," even if it's embarrassing. They also may want to reconsider the juxtaposition of that tag-line and the part about not accepting incoming email. This email is carefully constructed to end all discussion of the matter, and provides no way to follow-up. How Customer-Centric of them.
I imagine their strategy is to repeat the "glitch" line over and over until they've backed out whatever change was made, and then wait until the issue fades away. It will be very interested to see if this strategy works. I personally will remain seriously offended and increasingly insulted if they fail to provide an actual explanation of this "glitch," not least so I can stop having to put quotes around it.
Was it a "glitch" as in:
We started filtering "adult" titles not realizing our algorithms were weighting gay-themed titles extremely highly (which for some reason is taking days to clear up)?
Or... Our software de-ranks books based on number of complaints submitted through some automated system, and anti-gay forces engaged in a targeted complaint-attack on these titles (which for some reason is taking days to clear up)?
Or... Not a glitch at all but a deliberate decision to placate bigots?
Come on, what was it? Hackers? Terrorists? Locusts? Pirates??!?
