[bluntfang]

I feel like linking directly to issue pages incites brigading. This HN post seems like a direct attack on the maintainers (not the actual issue).

Look at the new comments posted since this link hit frontpage. Not helpful, and in fact HARMFUL to open source at large. This is irresponsible.

[Raphmedia]

I would agree if this linked to a small project or someone's personal open-source project.

However, this is the repository to the public documentation of Amazon's API.

This is not the source code to a website somewhere. This is the actual documentation. You ask Amazon for the documentation and they link you to that repository.

This is a company with a revenue of $96.1 billion that relies on sellers to fill its marketplace. You would expect some level of quality.

We had an issue at work with their Seller API. We ended up having to email and call their support daily in order for them to switch an invisible flag on our account. After a month and a half of phone calls, they eventually fixed it.

This is the kind of support you receive from Amazon when you are a seller.

[bredren]

I wonder at the potential competitive points to Amazon. If you could largely copy logistical, reliability and marketplace features what would allow someone to start competing using a similar model?

- Seller relations and developer experience

- Marketplace and human resource ethics

- ?

[bredren]

I agree that this issue was likely not helpful except to shame Amazon. Sometimes publicity of things like this gets change that calm requests will not.

That said, I wrote documentation professionally for a few years in my career, and recently re-worked much of CRACO's documentation, and there is very little love for docs.

Docs are hard to do well and completely and if the API is as bad as described, you can only shine up a turd so much in explaining how something works.

Sometimes writing documentation is the only way someone realizes that the software is broken or not actually useful as implemented.

In most situations, a product manager is looking out for this in advance, but when the product is purely an API you have less product-type people who can provide useful management.

Obviously it is not a revenue problem at Amazon. Perhaps this is anger at Amazon's astonishing success redirected to areas of Amazon that have failed to realize the resources to make quality products.