It was at Amazon and I don't remember exactly what the service was called, I think it was AdSomething. It was while I worked on the Kindle Special Offers (taking advantage of the "off" screen of an e-ink Kindle to show ads) project. I find that to be one of the less offensive forms of advertising, so I was generally pretty happy on that team for a time.
But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a sub-site of Amazon.com and just casually? recreationally? vote between two ads. You would be presented with two B&W images and click the one you liked more. I don't know that there was any incentive to do this, but I think it was a Bezos idea.
I didn't develop it, but all the routine maintenance tasks that came along (remove this deprecated library, migrate to new hardware, update your pipeline) needed to be done for AdWhatever too. That stupid service lingered for years after it was clear nobody used it, but we had to keep maintaining it until we got the go-ahead to tear it down.
I always marvel at how bizarre it is that there's a permanent ad on the Kindle even when it's "off". The books they recommend are never pertinent to me in the slightest.
It's possible things have changed, but at least while I still worked there, virtually nobody paid to turn the ads off. It was a vanishingly tiny number.
Though fun fact, some execs did the math before making the smart cover, and figured they'd make more money from that, than they lost from people not being able to see and interact with ads.
Yeah, the ease of avoiding the ads (not logging in, jailbreaking it, or just getting a cover) were all big parts of why I felt like kindle ads were so much less offensive than most online advertising.
This is so painful. Kindle still after all these years cannot select a single word without a comma. So, dictionary does not work.
Such simple thing could be fixed, but you did all this bullshit work instead.
I’ve used a Kindle since 2012 and I don’t think I have ever seen that kind of dictionary issue. On my Kindle, even though text highlighting behaves as you describe, dictionary lookups still work because punctuation is stripped before searching. For example I just highlighted “doing,” (including the comma) and the dictionary shows the definition of the word “doing”. I wonder if it works differently for languages other than English. (There is a different problem, that the stemming/trimming can be too aggressive and gets you irrelevant words in searches — i.e. ‘several’ when you search ‘severance’.)
What got me was the kindle’s inability to not have ragged edges on the right. It’s really not that hard to implement I’d assume, LaTeX and the kobo do it well. Switched to kobo + calibre years ago, never looked back.
Also, I try my best not to buy anything Amazon anymore because Bezos is a gigantic prick.
But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a sub-site of Amazon.com and just casually? recreationally? vote between two ads. You would be presented with two B&W images and click the one you liked more. I don't know that there was any incentive to do this, but I think it was a Bezos idea.
I didn't develop it, but all the routine maintenance tasks that came along (remove this deprecated library, migrate to new hardware, update your pipeline) needed to be done for AdWhatever too. That stupid service lingered for years after it was clear nobody used it, but we had to keep maintaining it until we got the go-ahead to tear it down.