Thursday, May 24, 2007

"Deleted by Amazon 1 hour ago"

In a few of the Grady Harp comments sections my posts were "Deleted by Amazon 1 hour ago" (for example here). Anyone remember what was there? I think they contained tables of timestamps -- but first, they (Amz) didn't seem to remove this kind before, and second, there are other GH reviews where my timestamp-tables remain untouched. ???

5 comments:

KT Grant said...

The question I have, how can he get 60 votes so quickly? Does he have 60+ user names and uses them all to make his reviews look good? Maybe he has spies at Amazon who do the voting for him?
Amazon has to see something is up!
In all honesty, they should get rid of the top reviewers and ranking overall and allow anyone just to review for the fun of it. If people have issues with the reviews they are still welcome to comment on them.

Misfit said...

JJJS, as far as I recall you haven't done anything other than what I've done, is the time stamp and vote count. If that's the case, mine underneath your removed one is still there.

Malleus said...

Kinda weird, ain't it?

Barbara Delaney said...

I have found the question of what Amazon chooses to delete and what they do not to be mystifying. I had a few people say to me back when I complained about people leaving remarks on my reviews that all I had to do to have them removed was to report them to Amazon. Did they seriously think I had not tried that? In one instance I know that there were four people who had reported a comment as abuse but it remained.

There have been other remarks which I've been completely unable to ascertain the reason for their removal. The first comment that I had removed contained three consecutive words beginning with the letter K. I said something about the Kosmic Kult of Klausner, or close to it. I received an email from someone who objected to it on the grounds that they believed I was trying to find a surreptitious way to draw attention to the "real" KKK. Oddly enogh though, a comment made by someone else who used the exact wording was not removed. (they were commenting on my post, so perhaps the complaining party did not feel they shared my devious intent)

There was a comment by MK that was removed for containing a reference to diarrhea. I thought that was particularly unjust since Harriet Klausner had written a review where she spoke of a "shitting beach" where she said "everyone went to take a communal dump".

I've heard many explanations offered as to when and why comments are deleted. I don't think anyone actually knows. I know there was not anything offensive about JJJS's comments, but here's a thought; maybe an Amazon removal bot took them to be spam, not that they were, but because Grady Harp's reviews arrived with such regularity that JJJS's monitoring of the votes looked repetitive.

Malleus said...

I thought about the latter, but: not all such notes were removed, only some. Well, who knows... it's another mystery. :-)