Walmart’s Christmas Site

Erm, I took the suggestion that one of the elves could (not will) lose his job as a joke — as indicated by the other elve’s ‘ha ha, very funny’ response.
That being said — the site is indeed vile.

I think religious conservatives will enjoy the light-hearted gay banter between the elves.

I really rarely join in complaints against consumerism, Christmas-time or otherwise, but that definitely is a pretty bad site. From lots of perspectives. Though not, I hasten to add, for the queer elves.

What good could come of this for the wider world?

Obviously, properly incentivized, the elves will shape up and work harder. Which is especially good for the wide world.

Wow. All the mad magazine cartoons of my youth are coming true. Pay attention to today’s satire, because it is tomorrow’s reality!

Come on, you’re getting your panties in a twist over nothing.

Anyway. The advertising does provide useful information (though arguably to the wrong source). I had no idea what kind of kids’ toys were out there these days.

Also, either I’m too cynical or too optimistic but I think most kids would be sharp enough to find them elves vapid and stupid.

when you reject a toy one of the elves says that the other elf will lose his job

I don’t think that is a completely fair description of what happens when you go to the site. First, like Josh mentioned, it is in the tone of a joke. Second, it’s not something the elf says every time a user rejects a toy (the quoted description made it sound that way), it’s just a silly comment after the first rejection.

And hey, want an upside? At least you don’t have to say whether you are a boy or a girl when you start using the tool, which is better than most times when you walk into a store looking to buy a toy.

I’m not defending the site and I’m certainly not defending Walmart, but in this case I didn’t think the critique was completely legit.

I may have misrepresented what Linn said; she may have said “could”. (I was listening in real time, and surprised by the item). I think the joke is lame. ANyway, that comment was a throwaway; the central complaint is that this is a case of Walmart particularly flagrantly leveraging the nag factor, which all kid marketers know about and try to use, and which is corrosive of family relationships. SO the central complaint is fair.

On telling them whether you’re a boy or a girl. I wondered about this, and tried out a couple of strategies. It seems that if you refuse a boy toy, you get offered a girl toy; and vice versa; once you have a pattern of boy toys that’s all you are offered. I only had two goes at it, and can’t be bothered to do more!

From the “Spiritual Activism” article;

“Spiritual progressives need to make clear that although…”

DIE HIPPY!!!
The high content of self-righteous smugness in that phrase alone prevented me from reading any further.

On the “boy toy”/”girl toy” tip: it is fairly likely that there is no tag or label that says a toy is for boys or girls anywhere in the system.

I do not know anything about the Walmart system in particular, but it sounds like a typical correlated items/recommendation system, not dissimilar from what Amazon uses for its recommendations. It’s very simple in concept: when you declare an interest in one item (in this case, by putting it on your wish list), the system looks at other people who have bought that item, looks and what else they bought, and offers you the things that they have bought most commonly.

You could invert this system for the child rejecting toys — if they have no interest in this toy, show them a toy that nobody who bought this toy also bought.

If there are, in fact, toys that boys like/parents buy for boys, and toys that girls like/parents buy for girls, then such a system could easily and quickly become a de facto gender-linked system, without anyone ever really intending it to be, and without any explicit or implicit parts of the coding forcing it to be.

There is probably some interesting work to be done in the area of unexpected consequences of learning algorithms. I used to work for a search engine (Lycos) which unintentionally biased itself to catalog almost exclusively pornography. You see, it tried to find things that were “like” what people had previously succesfully found. And what is the internet for?

I got the “out of a job” joke too – and the elf says “ha ha very funny – not”, NOT “ha ha very funny” – big intonation difference!

I said yes to a laptop as the first thing and then got a heap of trucks, which I rejected, and eventually got a make-over set, which I also rejected, then it was back to the trucks!

Something to give stressed out grad students, I think.

radek, something tells me you have no children.

Harry, to be clear, I think there are a lot of problems with how various products are being marketed to kids and often the methods are disgusting. I just didn’t think the way this case was presented here was the best method to make that point.

And you can’t ask them to not visit the site, or ignore the result? I completely sympathize with the objection to commercialization, but it seems like you’re singling one out, on what may have been a mistaken premise.

If someone develops the equivalent of a candy-free checkout line for the web, I’ll steer towards it, but until then . . .

WADR: balls. Children do need protecting from certain sorts of social manipulation which they don’t yet understand.

Harry, all this raises an interesting question (or perhaps this has been your point all along): are such approaches on the Web worse than on TV? I guess part of the issue may be that on TV you may have certain messages come at you, but you aren’t interacting with those messages so a Web site like this can draw users in more and hold their attention longer leading to who-knows-what implications for relating to parents and merchandise, etc. The other side of that, however, is that visiting Web sites seems to have a more pro-active component than seeing TV ads. I guess this is an empirical question and I know of no studies on this, but one may assume it would take more energy to find the remote and change the channel away from an ad than to decide not to visit (or leave) a Web site.

Given these two differences (interactive feature that draws users in and pro-active feature that requires more action on the part of users) it’s hard to say how a site of this sort would compare to similar messages conveyed on TV or other media.

think that 7 year olds should be allowed to vote? To drive? To be tried as adults?

Oh no! I failed to realize how serious this was! Henry, thank you for the alert! The fact that Wal-Mart might actually try to sell its toys means that any day now we’ll have 4 yr olds voting for Bush and spiritual progressives everywhere will be forced into a tactical retreat against those of us who think that, well, its ultimately the parents who happen to have the money which can purchase the toys. And once this happens then KIDS WILL DRIVE!!!!!!! You’re freakin’ right, this is some sillpery slope that we don’t evem want to consider. And once this happens (again, again) kids drivin’ and all, then they’ll be tried as adults becuase they bought some silly toy from a WalMart commercial.
Next thing we know, all our children (oh no, think of the children!!!!) we’ll be on death row. This is our system is. Please reject it. You don’t want your kids to wind up on death row do you? So WalMart. Bad. Yes, Bad.

well radek, now we’ve established that you do, indeed, apparently a priori, exempt commercial activity from the very possibility that it might harm children, but are not a silly child liberationist. Just someone who doesn’t recognise mildly whimsical humour, attempts to interpret your opponents in argument as uncharitably as possible, and can’t be bothered to figure out their names. Harry, not Henry. (Not offended by the way, everyone does it, even some of our gang).

Yeah, alright, I’ve gone off into troll territory. But hey, one over reaction deserves another.
Apologies on the name – that part was not intentional tomfoolery.

What good could come of this for the wider world?

Further evidence that some people get worked up over the strangest things?

Proof, dammit.