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Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

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Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#141

Post by spoondan »

dang wrote: post #74

That title is over the top, so we replaced it with the much more neutral first sentence of the article.

The first sentence of the article is, "Amazon is relatively new to the job of running an app store, and some of their mistakes are either hilarious or infuriating, depending on how much money you’ve lost trying to deal with them."

The decision to switch the submission title away from the article's actual title is unjustified. The decision to switch it to a selective edit of the article's first sentence is even worse.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#142

Post by overgard »

venning wrote: post #137
meesterdude wrote: post #124

Actual title: Amazon has absolutely no idea how to run an app store Why did the title change? It used to be the same as the original article, but now it's been needlessly editorialized to be kinder to amazon. Seriously? What the fuck. That's not HN's job, and is a disservice to the article, and the community.

The HN Guidelines [1] state that submissions "should use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." While I am sure the emotions of the developers affected by this are legitimate and strong, the original title borders pretty heavily on linkbait; though I appreciate there is some debate there. HN may strive to provide intellectually superior content, but that doesn't make me any less susceptible to link…

IMO, "these people don't know what they're doing" isn't linkbait, it's a very specific criticism that the people in charge of the app store are either naive or incompetent. You could complain that's a pretty harsh take, but the truth of the statement has nothing to do with the harshness of it, it lies in the evidence they provide. You can even test it! Do they make good decisions or poor decisions?

I think there's a lot more "editorializing" going on by inserting an implicit excuse into the title, that wasn't asked for and wasn't needed.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#143

Post by wavefunction »

coderdude wrote: post #135
meesterdude wrote: post #124

Actual title: Amazon has absolutely no idea how to run an app store Why did the title change? It used to be the same as the original article, but now it's been needlessly editorialized to be kinder to amazon. Seriously? What the fuck. That's not HN's job, and is a disservice to the article, and the community.

The submitted article and especially its title are both emotional to a fault and sensationalist. The arguments presented are backed up only by anecdote and cherry-picked comments from other people who have been rejected by Amazon. I've seen all this before. There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection. In the same way a rant about PayPal tends to exclude certain details that deflate the a…

It's apparently resonating with the HN audience. I've seen poorly presented material get flagged into null before, so why wouldn't that be the case for this article, if it t'were true?

I am _not_ glad to see the title change, as it goes against the stated rule of titles matching the title of the submitted content and is blatant editorializing that is supposedly verboten on HN. It's ridiculous and unwelcome from my perspective. Especially since it's a multi-billion dollar company involved who can certainly deal with some mild criticism.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#144

Post by venning »

overgard wrote: post #142
venning wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN Guidelines [1] state that submissions "should use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." While I am sure the emotions of the developers affected by this are legitimate and strong, the original title borders pretty heavily on linkbait; though I appreciate there is some debate there. HN may strive to provide intellectually superior content, but that doesn't make me any less susceptible to link…

IMO, "these people don't know what they're doing" isn't linkbait, it's a very specific criticism that the people in charge of the app store are either naive or incompetent. You could complain that's a pretty harsh take, but the truth of the statement has nothing to do with the harshness of it, it lies in the evidence they provide. You can even test it! Do they make good decisions or poor decisions? I think there's a…

I think it is precisely that harshness that pushes the original title towards linkbait. Again, I'm not questioning the legitimacy of the involved developers' emotions.

The point of a linkbait title is to elicit an emotional response that is disproportionately strong compared to that of the actual content. As such, they are worded strongly.

I agree that "relatively new" was a bad emendation. I probably just would have removed "absolutely" from the original title and left it at that.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#145

Post by coderdude »

wavefunction wrote: post #143
coderdude wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The submitted article and especially its title are both emotional to a fault and sensationalist. The arguments presented are backed up only by anecdote and cherry-picked comments from other people who have been rejected by Amazon. I've seen all this before. There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection. In the same way a rant about PayPal tends to exclude certain details that deflate the a…

It's apparently resonating with the HN audience. I've seen poorly presented material get flagged into null before, so why wouldn't that be the case for this article, if it t'were true? I am _not_ glad to see the title change, as it goes against the stated rule of titles matching the title of the submitted content and is blatant editorializing that is supposedly verboten on HN. It's ridiculous and unwelcome from my pe…

Right now it's fashionable to dislike Amazon. Rants about Amazon are a formula for karma success right now. That's my guess as to why it hasn't been flagged to death. I wouldn't attribute a lack of flagging to legitimacy. HN isn't immune to BS.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#146

Post by overgard »

dang wrote: post #74

That title is over the top, so we replaced it with the much more neutral first sentence of the article.

There's nothing neutral about this -- the original title accurately described the posts content (IE: they were infuriated at amazon). The new title doesn't reflect that at all -- you could imagine all sorts of alternate ways the article could go. "Amazon is new to running app stores" could be a profile of how amazon has developed their app store, or it could be about the general challenges of companies starting an app store, etc. This new title is impressively vague as to what the article is actually about, it tells me nothing. The original title was obviously about some people that were very upset about amazon's policies. The outrage was an important part of the title! The point of the article is that people are upset. If you take that out, you're just obfuscating things.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#147

Post by overgard »

venning wrote: post #144
overgard wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, "these people don't know what they're doing" isn't linkbait, it's a very specific criticism that the people in charge of the app store are either naive or incompetent. You could complain that's a pretty harsh take, but the truth of the statement has nothing to do with the harshness of it, it lies in the evidence they provide. You can even test it! Do they make good decisions or poor decisions? I think there's a…

I think it is precisely that harshness that pushes the original title towards linkbait. Again, I'm not questioning the legitimacy of the involved developers' emotions. The point of a linkbait title is to elicit an emotional response that is disproportionately strong compared to that of the actual content. As such, they are worded strongly. I agree that "relatively new" was a bad emendation. I probably just would have…

Why is eliciting an emotional response bad? Sure, emotion devoid of anything else is just rage, but in this case the irritation the developers had was an important part of the story.

Removing emotional context doesn't make a story more "objective". If someone wrote a story like "russia invades china", and the story got edited to "russia parks some tanks in the capital of china", clearly even though both stories are "accurate", the second one has actually lost information.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#148

Post by lkrubner »

coderdude wrote: post #135
meesterdude wrote: post #124

Actual title: Amazon has absolutely no idea how to run an app store Why did the title change? It used to be the same as the original article, but now it's been needlessly editorialized to be kinder to amazon. Seriously? What the fuck. That's not HN's job, and is a disservice to the article, and the community.

The submitted article and especially its title are both emotional to a fault and sensationalist. The arguments presented are backed up only by anecdote and cherry-picked comments from other people who have been rejected by Amazon. I've seen all this before. There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection. In the same way a rant about PayPal tends to exclude certain details that deflate the a…

This is a strange thing to say:

"There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection"

Did you click through the link to the page where the developers were discussing the certification process on the Amazon developer forum? This is the link the article above:

https://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?messa...

This seems as detailed as you will find for a critique of an app store.

And additionally, both of those developers linked to their own blog posts where they offered still more details:

http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/on-the-topic-of-certification

http://ocean-of-storms.com/tsatsatzu/explaining-amazons-indi...

You say the final paragraph is the "icing on the cake". The final paragraph is a summary of what Joseph Jaquinta suggested in his longer post. The above linked blog post would be redundant if it simply copy-and-pasted everything that developers had written over at the Amazon developer forums. Like any blog post, it was written with the assumption that some people would click through the links to see the source material.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#149

Post by venning »

overgard wrote: post #147
venning wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is precisely that harshness that pushes the original title towards linkbait. Again, I'm not questioning the legitimacy of the involved developers' emotions. The point of a linkbait title is to elicit an emotional response that is disproportionately strong compared to that of the actual content. As such, they are worded strongly. I agree that "relatively new" was a bad emendation. I probably just would have…

Why is eliciting an emotional response bad? Sure, emotion devoid of anything else is just rage, but in this case the irritation the developers had was an important part of the story. Removing emotional context doesn't make a story more "objective". If someone wrote a story like "russia invades china", and the story got edited to "russia parks some tanks in the capital of china", clearly even though both stories are "…

> ...disproportionately strong...

Emotion is great. I want to understand other people's emotions, which means titles should express them if they are present. It's for precisely that reason that I appreciate tamping down "over the top" linkbait, if that's what this is.

Understanding others' emotions gets hard if everything is a life-threatening emergency†. It's like watching CNN during their worst years: every possible event got a "BREAKING NEWS" banner. It made it hard to stratify emergencies. If every title devolves into "THE INTERNET IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE because git just went to v2.8" HN would become useless to read.

† I'm not saying that's what this article is doing, just making an example.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#150

Post by deegles »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #113
erikpukinskis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also have started sucking in buying things, with things like "pantry" which require you to buy a box for $5 so you can get things like soap. Delivering batches of household goods of arbitrary size profitably is a hard problem that no one has figured out. Everyone is fiddling with business models trying to make it work. I think at the end of the day shipping is expensive and trying to hide that from customers w…

Delivering batches of household goods of arbitrary size profitably is a hard problem that no one has figured out. Wait, wait, I think I've figured it out. Raise the price. Repeat until either the transaction is sufficiently profitable, or the customers go away. That will work better for everyone than what Amazon has started to do lately, which is prevent you from buying certain items at any price until your order exc…

Maybe the current prices are already low enough that raising them would make the customers go away?
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