Re:How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads
by jordoh on Monday March 25, 2013 @05:17PM
(#5439748)
How do you level the playing field in this case? One account has 50% disallowed items (50 of 100) and another account has 0.005% disallowed items (50 of 1,000,000). You could bias _against_ large accounts by banning when they reach a fixed number of disallowed items - but then you let little guys (or any big guy that makes lots of small accounts) skate by under some arbitrary limit.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Agreed, unless the fixed number is zero.
You ban anyone selling banned items. I think vendors would respond quickly by self-censoring, especially the big guys.
Assisted-opening knives are a tiny fraction of Amazon's sales. If assisted-opening knife advertisements cut off Amazon's entire account, as has happened with Knife Depot, I'm pretty sure that Amazon would de-list assisted-opening knives.
A zero-tolerance policy, coupled with ample forgiveness for infractions, would be fair. Alternatively, you let anyone advertise anything.
Anything in-between turns Google into a kingmaker.
(NB - the very notion of censoring listings at all carries its own troubles, not at issue here)