Saturday, April 10, 2010

Amazon Discussion Board: Closed to the Public?

Have you noticed that the Amazon Discussion Board now seems to require logging in even in order to read it? It used to be widely open; you needed to log in only if you wanted to post something. Why such an interesting change? One can't help wondering is some of the action by the house shills there ("not a requirement" and the like) was determined too open for the general reader... Here's one example.

3 comments:

Mark Baker said...

Amazon has been trying to kill off that board for at least a year. No easy to find links. I thought people had been complaining about needing to log in before, too.

Even if the log in thing is new, it's just another step in their efforts to kill the board without actually taking it down. (Frankly, since they don't want it any more, they should delete it and get it over with. Maybe the company that hosts the board for Amazon won't let them for some reason.

Malleus said...

Really? I didn't know... just discovered this yesterday, accidentally. Why would they want to kill it off though?

Mark Baker said...

They feel they don't need it any more since they have all their in house message boards now.

At least that's the best theory I've heard so far.