Thursday, February 25, 2016

Attention Peasants! Stop Reading The Wrong Things

File this under true confessions - a liberal whining about Amazon admits their real problem with it:
In its early days, Amazon emulated a traditional bookstore model, with a bunch of editors and critics choosing which books were recommended on the site. Once Jeff Bezos realised an algorithm could do this better and more cheaply, the editorial team was canned. Over the years, this algorithm has been tuned into a supreme money-making engine – shaping the Amazon shopfront to appeal to your wallet via your existing preferences.
The beasts! Using their platform to show you stuff you might be interested in and not what a bunch of Certified Smart People want you to read.

Yeah, yeah, he knows what you people are like: without the guidance of Snootly T Snootlington you morons would be busy reading books with actual plots, believable dialog and likeable characters, instead of books that have a dragon on the cover, but turn out to be ham handed allegories for transgenderism.

While Amazon is accused of introducing people to books they might like, liberals are stopping books being produced in the first place. That's what happens when publishers get colonised by Social Justice Warriors. The agenda has to be shoehorned into everything, no matter how absurd that makes the story. Hence why novels set in the Napoleonic wars always include a female character who can take down six of the Imperial Guard while armed only with a teaspoon.

What the success of self-publishing proves is that a lot of the big publisher's potential customers are saying stop right there: a story where six guys sit round talking about how cool it is being gay is not science fiction, even if they are on a space station.