Monday, November 14, 2022

Cancel Cultured

I bought a pretty fantastic magnetic tool on Amazon for drawing circles. Amazon pestered me to leave reviews, so I opted to comply. After submitting the following one sentence glowing review with this video demonstrating the product in all of its glory, Amazon deleted all of my reviews and has warned me to follow their guidelines. By the way, ignoring these guidelines can apparently lead to my account being suspended. Since I own Kindle books and am not much of a risk taker, no more Amazon reviews from me. Ever.



Welcome to social media dystopian crazy metropolis, which is a few steps up from crazy town. We've come a long way since the days I deleted my Twitter account for being shadow banned due to posting puppy pictures. A long, long way. You don't even need to incite an insurrection. Progress!

We are so headed down the doom scrolling dystopian path, and with it the illusion of prosperity will surely prosper. The illusion that is, not so much the prosperity. Sigh.

6 comments:

  1. If any squares were offended in any way by my circle drawing video, I am truly sorry. I tried my best. I even kept completely silent, so as not to offend any mimes. I know that’s no excuse if you are a square. I really should have factored in everyone’s pain and suffering when posting such a deeply disturbing and insensitive video. ;)

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  2. No good deed goes unpunished on social media.

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  3. Try wearing a glove, and try again.

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  4. Anonymous,

    Perfect use of the phrase! Yes!!

    Shookie,

    Naked hand! It all makes sense now! :)

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  5. I can't imagine why that was flagged. Of course, it was a broken algorithm, but getting a human to fix it is almost impossible. The Internet is generating too much content for it to be curated by humans. The best the big platforms can do right now is use poorly performing algorithms and AI to make judgment calls.

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  6. My guess is that since I posted the review within an hour of receiving the product, I was assumed to be a paid shill. Which would also explain why all 4 of my similarly glowing reviews were deleted. News flash: I only took the time to review products I loved.

    In my defense, it doesn’t take an hour to decide how useful a circle drawing tool is. As seen in the video, my zero word dialogue was certainly not hard to write. Unlike many Internet influencers, I felt no great need to sensationalize the drawing of a circle, lol. ;)

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