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I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions. > There are books t

I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions. > There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is. YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=transgender https://www.amazon.com/s?k=transgender > But did you know that, for contested entries, Wikipedia assigns editors, some of whom are ideologically committed activists, many of whom have very particular views they want you to walk away with. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but this is still a gross misrepresentation of how admins and the editing process operate on contested topics. It is interesting though that Wikipedia's Transgender page does not mention the rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy at all though. > a 22 year old biological male at Penn who was competing on the men’s team as recently as November of 2019. That male athlete now holds multiple U.S. records in women’s swimming, erasing the hard work of so many of our best female athletes This appears to be a reference to Lia (Will) Thomas, who as far as I can tell does not hold any U.S. records in women's swimming. https://ussanews.com/swimmer-who-once-was-male-now-shattering-records-against-women/ https://ussanews.com/swimmer-who-once-was-male-now-shatterin...

badlucklottery 5y ago
> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book. Yup, I'm seeing the same thing here. And this blog post was created 7h ago so I kind of doubt that's a recent change. I'm starting to think there's a lot of easy advertising to be had on the "I'm being silenced!" circuit nowadays. And it probably directly targets the type of people who'd be into this book.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  It's because the transgender "cause" is not very interesting: either you re a fucktard and have a strong opinion on it but you're most likely low impact on society, or you don't care because it's so rare it will prob never matter to you. So trying to get any sort of noise around your cause (because you like the attention, or you're tired of the fucktards for some reason) means you need to pretend there are very powerful people who care negatively. But it's likely Amazon or Wiki treat the "transgender" namespace just like the "carrot" namespace and care not at all what result it yields or what people have to say about it. Any result this person would ever reach would be for more people to say "meh it's true it doesn't matter what gender you want to be" which probably will never satisfy someone proud of being trans to the point of organizing speeches around it.
deleted 5y ago
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harshreality 5y ago
Recommendations aren't the same as search results. Is she making up her Amazon recommendation shadowban? Was she misinformed? Is/was there a shadowban, but one caused by third parties manipulating Amazon's ranking signals rather than by Amazon's own minions? Maybe. I have no idea. However, just try to search for "When Harry Became Sally". When you discover that you can't find it, you might be curious to know why Amazon decided to censor it, not by deranking it in searches or recommendations, but by outright refusing to sell it at all (after initially offering it for sale).[1] Amazon has a history of problems with rankings for culturally sus books. There were issues about a decade ago with certain feminist and LGBT books getting flagged as adult and therefore downranked or hidden. Whether they did that intentionally (with human intervention) or whether it was an automatic result of signals, doesn't matter, though the fact that books with a LGBT flavor were adult-flagged while straight-flavored books weren't either goes to willful conduct or horrifically inadequate algorithms. The pattern of Shrier's allegation now is similar to the problem back then, although the content is different. The moral panic back then was people (particularly minors) unwittingly stumbling across adult content. The moral panic today is anything critical of LGBTQ++. [1] https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/statement-on-amazon/ https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/statement-on-amazon/
szeptik 5y ago
> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book. My understanding of the author's point is that the book does not show up in a "you may also be interested in these books" kind of list, not the result of an explicit search.
tzs 5y ago
> This appears to be a reference to Lia (Will) Thomas, who as far as I can tell does not hold any U.S. records in women's swimming This [1] and some others say that those times that your link says set meet and pool records are also the best times in the country. [1] https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/07/trans-swimmer-lia-thomas-womens-records/ https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/07/trans-swimmer-lia-thom...
leephillips 5y ago
All three of your examples are correct statements on the author’s part. Recommendations and search results are not the same thing. The swimmer does hold records. And Wikipedia does assign editors.

badlucklottery 5y ago

> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book. Yup, I'm seeing the same thing here. And this blog post was created 7h ago so I kind of doubt that's a recent change. I'm starting to think there's a lot of easy advertising to be had on the "I'm being silenced!" circuit nowadays. And it probably directly targets the type of people who'd be into this book.

xwolfi 5y ago
It's because the transgender "cause" is not very interesting: either you re a fucktard and have a strong opinion on it but you're most likely low impact on society, or you don't care because it's so rare it will prob never matter to you. So trying to get any sort of noise around your cause (because you like the attention, or you're tired of the fucktards for some reason) means you need to pretend there are very powerful people who care negatively. But it's likely Amazon or Wiki treat the "transgender" namespace just like the "carrot" namespace and care not at all what result it yields or what people have to say about it. Any result this person would ever reach would be for more people to say "meh it's true it doesn't matter what gender you want to be" which probably will never satisfy someone proud of being trans to the point of organizing speeches around it.

deleted 5y ago

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harshreality 5y ago

Recommendations aren't the same as search results. Is she making up her Amazon recommendation shadowban? Was she misinformed? Is/was there a shadowban, but one caused by third parties manipulating Amazon's ranking signals rather than by Amazon's own minions? Maybe. I have no idea. However, just try to search for "When Harry Became Sally". When you discover that you can't find it, you might be curious to know why Amazon decided to censor it, not by deranking it in searches or recommendations, but by outright refusing to sell it at all (after initially offering it for sale).[1] Amazon has a history of problems with rankings for culturally sus books. There were issues about a decade ago with certain feminist and LGBT books getting flagged as adult and therefore downranked or hidden. Whether they did that intentionally (with human intervention) or whether it was an automatic result of signals, doesn't matter, though the fact that books with a LGBT flavor were adult-flagged while straight-flavored books weren't either goes to willful conduct or horrifically inadequate algorithms. The pattern of Shrier's allegation now is similar to the problem back then, although the content is different. The moral panic back then was people (particularly minors) unwittingly stumbling across adult content. The moral panic today is anything critical of LGBTQ++. [1] https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/statement-on-amazon/ https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/statement-on-amazon/

szeptik 5y ago

> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book. My understanding of the author's point is that the book does not show up in a "you may also be interested in these books" kind of list, not the result of an explicit search.

tzs 5y ago

> This appears to be a reference to Lia (Will) Thomas, who as far as I can tell does not hold any U.S. records in women's swimming This [1] and some others say that those times that your link says set meet and pool records are also the best times in the country. [1] https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/07/trans-swimmer-lia-thomas-womens-records/ https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/07/trans-swimmer-lia-thom...

leephillips 5y ago

All three of your examples are correct statements on the author’s part. Recommendations and search results are not the same thing. The swimmer does hold records. And Wikipedia does assign editors.