Inside the Big Mystery Box

While most of us experience Amazon’s surveillance with a mixture of annoyance and bemusement — you are never allowed to forget what items you’ve looked at on Amazon, at least not until you buy them — Vine reviewers have learned to exploit it. “You can try to signal to it,” K.T. said. “I searched for drones, hoping they would show up in my targeting.” (No luck yet.) Sometimes Vine’s behaviors give the impression of something far less intelligent: Some Viners described getting clothing in more-or-less “random” sizes.

In 2017, Amazon removed the Vine discussion forums from its site; Amazon didn’t share its reasons with Vine reviewers. (Logged-in reviewers still see a link to the forums on their profiles, but it leads nowhere.) To the extent there is a coherent Vine community still, it is spread across multiple private groups on Goodreads, the book review site owned by Amazon, and smaller communities further afield, on Reddit and Craigslist. They are throwbacks to the old Vine, and the old web: There are groups and splinter groups, cross-forum enemies, reputations and rivalries.

Mostly, though, the forums serve the same needs that the old official forum did. They’re a place where people who are part of this odd program that they’re not supposed to talk about can figure out what’s going on in a system that changes constantly without notice, in the shadow of the company that is both an intense part of their lives and outwardly indifferent to their existence.

In a Craigslist forum, for example, users spent recent weeks commiserating about their suddenly shrinking review queues. (They were restored shortly after, but posters weren’t happy with how: “Mine has been restocked as well, but with things I don’t need,“ said one. “That’s it — junk.” Another user warned others off a particular brand of chocolates he’d gotten for his wife: “They weren’t even edible and had a strange odor.” They discussed a recent investigation by the website The Verge into Amazon’s treatment of sellers (“great reading and it confirms everything we already know!”). They attempted to troubleshoot minor issues (Amazon’s brand Solimo, which makes a variety of household goods, seems to break the Vine interface for some reason) and major issues (a “technical error” reported last year, which exposed some Amazon users’ data, including email addresses, has created a huge problem for affected Vine reviewers: a flood of emails from overseas sellers attempting to bribe them for reviews and, in some cases, threatening to falsely tell Amazon that they’re doing it anyway). The forum has a resident tax expert.

They talk about the weather, on planets Earth and Amazon. Reviewers are sometimes removed from the program without notice, or are reinstated. Sometimes they’re told they broke rules they didn’t believe they’d broken; other times, forum users are left to assume they’ve been culled by some sort of automated system designed to root out fraud, only to be brought back days later, after appeal.

They’re also friends. K.T. described the old Vine forums as cliquish, and then, in their final days, gripped, like so many communities online, by politics. “They were all liberal, and a few of us weren’t, so they made an assumption that I support Trump,” she said, and that was that. She helps moderate one of the Goodreads forums now. It’s calmer. “‘What’s your life like?’ ‘What do you do?’ Then general happy stuff,” she said. “There’s a photo gallery thread for a member who is a great photographer.”