Reddit reviews Blue is the Warmest Color (English Subtitled)

Was a little busy to post this last week, but VioletBlue was delisted from Amazon's Affiliate program. Typical combination of "we're only mentioning what you did, where you did it, or what you'd need to change in the vaguest sense" with "also, we're keeping the money".

This isn't the first time she's run into problems -- Blue tried to use a .ly domain for a sex-and-alcohol-friendly url shortener, with all the resulting problems, and was memory holed by BoingBoing over undisclosed reasons, double irony given Doctorow's involvement there. Indeed, there's a certain temptation to say that what's good for the gander is good for the goose, as Blue has promoted (and even used this delisting to promote) more active censorship against Nazis and 'nazis', or to suggest that this reflects palace intrigue in the same way that the BoingBoing stuff likely did.

What's interesting to me is that she's pretty bland. I mean, yes queen slay, lesbians-no-the-other-l-word, you don't want to talk pegging or cuckolding with your grandparents. But we're not talking incest, or the dinosaur porn, or the awkward-what-age-is-the-main-character-in-this-coming-of-age-story question. The reason I say delist rather than deplatform is that, as far as I can tell, all of her books are still there, and this only removed her blog from the auto-update tool, and there's nothing there that would even reach Dan Savage levels of grimacing.

Financially, though, combined with other restrictions from other sources it gets back to the "build your own payment processor" problem. Blue wasn't using Affiliate out of personal preference, and without knowing what triggered the delisting, she has no reason to suspect that any other Amazon service will keep her on. However, as one of the few people who actually tried competing with Amazon, one notices that she literally can't manage to beat Amazon's prices for the same content, even with Amazon's cut -- and those who've followed the censorship wars know that's little more secure (both Shopify and PayPal technically already prohibit her content, and have gone after Blue Tribe groups; as far as I can tell, DigitaPub's been safe simply because even Blue herself seems to have forgotten about it).

Most of all, it's noteworthy for how basic it is, and that as a reminder that it's not just the Right or Red Tribe under attack. Blue seems to have dropped from the inner party or connections in the SFWA, but she's a relatively big name as Kindle people go. Cliff Pervocracy being pushed out from Tumblr got my dander up because he, if not much more principled, is at least wrong in more interesting ways, but at least probably was an accident of larger programs (run by incompetents or malefactors). Amazon's decision might have been automated, but by now must have had some human review.