#amazonfail - an architechtural vulnerability?

Much of the world has been twittering and blogging over the weekend about how Amazon appears to have been removing certain works from its sales rank algorithms. The works are removed because they are (allegedly) “adult” but in fact the real issue common feature is that these books seem to be about homosexuality rather than other “adult” issues.

There is, of course, much outrage - particularly because Amazon’s “glitch” excuse simply fails to meet the usual definition of a glitch. This problem seems to have started in February if not last year and to have gradually ramped up over the last couple of days. All in all this doesn’t sound like a “glitch” so much as a major software failure that has been exploited by humans.

I’m not alone in this basic viewpont, it seems to be shared by Information Week’s Mitch Wagner amongst others. Indeed there are some livejournal posts that indicate that the explot is the work of either a single hacker or a small group.

However the issue is not so much whether it is a hack or a concerted group so muchas to shine a light onto a what may be an architectural weakness of Amazon’s site. Amazon basically relies on site visitors to provide tags and to flag things as objectionable. It seems likely that for the most part these flags and tags pass through the Amazon system with no human supervision. This is probably partly because there are simply too many for a single human to verify and partly because for legal liabilty reasons Amazon found it better to not have someone make a corporate decision on the matter of “objectionable material”.

If the problem is indeed that people are gaming the system then fixing it while retaining the benefits of the “wisdom of crowds” approach that helps Amazon scale so well is going to be hard to fix - indeed it may be impossible. I’m sure that Amazon programmers are busy rolling back the auto-objectionable code and that someone is about to permit “objectionable” material back into the Amazon ranking systems but that is a short term fix and doesn’t solve the problem that Amazon faces regarding people not wishing to see “objectionable” content.

This problem is partly caused by the fact that different people have very different ideas about what is “objectionable” so no large group of people will ever agree. However it is exacerbated by the fact that Amazon attempts to present a single storeface to all. The situation then gets huge visibility because Amazon is such a major reseller that books often depend on Amazon ranking and Amazon visibility for success. Thus removing certain works from the ranking scheme is bound to get those associated with the works in question very worked up because they can see their revenue disappearing into a rankless desert.