Commenting on a post about the #Amazon(filter)Fail at Pandagon Ms Kate went for the cross-post mashup snark of the week
...sometime ago, an inside contact on these things told me that a big part of this “offensive” content problem is the simple fact that wingnuts buy a lot of “adult content”, and that makes it so that people who buy an item that is tangential – say, a very floridly illustrated bible – get recomendations for all sorts of bondage-themed novels and the like.
It isn’t that the search engines are recommending things that are inappropriate – it is that the people who buy certain things tend to buy certain other things that are solidly adult content.
Ms Kate on 04/14 at 08:01 PM
Ouch! The reference, in case you missed it, being to last month’s red-state/on-line porn report.
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I originally meant to stop here but after sleeping on it I realized that minus the delightfully snarky wingnut porn/religion angle Ms Kate’s hypothesis doesn’t sound that far off.
People do order a lot of erotic material online in areas where eyebrows would be raised if local vendors sold it… let alone if local residents purchased it.
I think I’ve mentioned that during the whole eBay craze I had some friends who resold clothes from yard sales. They stumbed across a huge stash of very large women’s shoes from an out-of-business shop and put them online… and they were snapped up almost instantly. They tracked down more such shoes and… they were instantly snapped up. Eventually they actually ordered new extra-large shoes made and for several years did a booming business. It actually took them a while to realize their primary market was midwestern and southern cross-dressing men who socially couldn’t afford to buy them for themselves in local stores.
The other day a somewhat skeptical Rachel Kramer Bussel mentioned a rumor she keeps hearing that Barnes & Noble hates erotica. Which, if true would be funny since I’m pretty sure the big reason for their leap to national prominence over much larger and better-established vendors in the then-mail-order days was that unlike anyone else they included the sort of erotica titles (from “anonymous” Victorians to specialty fetish to Mapplethorpe coffee-table photography) that… you can find in their stores today. (They also, years ahead of their time, carried LGBT titles including LGBT erotica.) Which, again, must have helped lower the reluctance threshhold… or the blunt availability threshold… for thousands or millions of readers.
Anyway, given the possibly natural tendency for the shy and embarrassed to pay “I just read it for the articles,” it’s probably fairly common to order somewhat thematically-similar “straight” titles associated with the erotic materials for “oh there must have been a mix-up in my order” excuse making if I was designing a “you might also like…” or “people who bought this also bought…” feature for an on-line bookstore I’d probably add tweaks to make sure kids who selected the 80’s hit “Indiana Jones” presented with the 80’s schlock-porn hit “Indiana Jane.”
Doh! I just realized why this line of thinking seemed so familiar!
A while ago I ordered a Tony Comstock video, Heather Corinna’s S.E.X, and Pamela Drucker’s cross-cultural adultery report Lust in Translation and Amazon suggested that people who bought those titles also bought… Tracey Rihll’s Catapult: A History (Weapons in History)! Which at the time I saw as completely, 100% random… but maybe not.
I’m not saying that’s what Amazon did, just that I’d probably do that if I was coding out suggested sales. Although evidently unlike Amazon I’d also give users a chance to opt in or out.
