#amazonfail

Why do Internet companies do stupid things?(net.effect)

Thus, I can't reasonably explain what good Amazon expected to gain by removing sales ranking data from all LGBT books that it sells. All it did was to fuel a Twitter-swarm that is now ripping Amazon apart (not surprisingly, using a shared Twitter tag of "#amazonfail"). Even though LGBT books are not singled out by the company's policy and are included as part of the "adult" category, I thought that a company like Amazon - weren't they supposed be the powerhouse of tags and labels, the emperor in the kingdom of the miscellany, the master of the new digital disorder?- would know the value of tags as emotional symbols and wouldn't stupidly insist on a policy, which, to say the least, is misguided and belongs to the pre-digital world. It's as if they didn't know that anyone armed with Amazon's own search engine would discover those books within seconds anyway - why even bother with removing sales ranking? This is no longer a physical vault, where stealing the catalog would leave people without access to the books they need...

But deranking Lady Chatterley's Lover, seriously? What year is this, 1928?