Amazon Dark Patterns • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#141

Post by seren » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:22 PM UTC

SamuelAdams wrote: post #111

seren wrote: post #60

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com a…

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a rev…

Even if there are some charitable explanations possible, the least courtesy would be to warn you that your comment had been removed and why. You could mark the comment as "outdated", it won't bother me (assuming something has really changed).

Here, it creates the impression that my comment was swept under the rug for some dubious reasons. And this is probably the last time I ever comment on Amazon. That does not really create a great trust in the system.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#142

Post by taeric » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

alexandercrohde wrote: post #98

mrtksn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O.K. Look, when a website tells me that I'm purchasing a "32Gb Kingston UHS SD Card" by "Kingston" I expect to receive a 32Gb Kingston UHS SD Card. There are details like "Sold by SomeScammySeller" or "Fulfilled by Amazon EU S.à.r.l" on the page and there are caveats like showing the same reviews for the same item sold by different sellers. After the title, there would be a clickable link with the brand name after th…

What companies need to start doing is digitally signing their products (e.g. put a unique code on each box that is generated from a private key). Then Amazon and/or sellers can go online and verify this key to ensure their wares are not replica.

I'm curious how you think that would work. They could sign the serial number, I suppose, but I don't see why the fakes wouldn't just recycle serial numbers at that point. For fast moving parts, they could include a date, but you could still just copy some other one from recent checks.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#143

Post by numbsafari » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #67

numbsafari wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is he supposed to know if this is a problem with “shipping” or with the warehouse, the manufacturing, or the design of the product? What if it left the warehouse in that condition? Or the factory? I previously have avoided products with a large number of “arrived damaged” reviews, because it’s a sign of something other than a “shipping problem”.

What if people reviewd your product as bad or left warnings not to buy/use it based on things outside of your control. The product isn't bad because it arrived damaged, you can not argue against this. What you should do is contact Amazon and have the product replaced. If the next item also arrives damaged, then you can start claiming that the product is badly build.

Are you sure it's out of your control? Did you provide sufficient packaging? Did you pick a good distribution channel to partner with?

Why should I have to deal with the whole process of ordering, reordering, customer service, voice-response systems, returns, etc. in order to get permission to leave a factual review of my experience with your product?

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#144

Post by frockington » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

true_religion wrote: post #131

aardshark wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these Amazon competitors that have shills working for them to damage Amazon's reputation?

Yes, apparently its too shocking to believe that Amazon will lie in its reviews, but its perfectly reasonable that Walmart PR staff would troll HN and lie in comments.

Lets take the next logical leap and blame Russia for creating bots that will divide America between Walmart and Amazon

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#145

Post by benologist » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

arrrg wrote: post #4

An alternative explanation for this is that Amazon is struggling with identifying fake reviews, which could explain both why there seem to be many fake reviews and why one would get blocked from writing reviews (basically falling victim to a false positive of their fake review detection). Obviously there is also some bad UX thrown in for good measure (being able to write a review without being able to send it), but w…

The only thing Amazon is struggling at is prying open their checkbook to pay for oversight and accountability because it would eat into their phenomenal profits. AWS alone generates $20+ million net profit a day (while we perpetuate the rumor it saves money LOL). It wouldn't cost very much to solve all of these problems with human labor, but not solving problems is incredibly important to companies too just like not paying taxes and not having toilet breaks for your warehouse workers.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#146

Post by pry86 » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

seren wrote: post #60

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com a…

Not only Amazon does that. Few times I wrote a review of a restaurant on TripAdvisor, and all of them are removed :( Good ones are still there. If they can't do that, what is the point of having user reviews.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#147

Post by superasn » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

Same happened with me. Brought this shity fitness tracker called goqii from Amazon. Tried to leave a 2 star review and got the exact same message even though Amazon knows it is an amazon purchase. Similar to this article the same thing has more than 22k positive reviews which is unbelievable considering the extremely unlikely considering the quality. Also forgot to mention Amazon was also running a lightning deal on the same.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#148

Post by fredophile » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #55

jdietrich wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FakeSpot and ReviewMeta seem to do a decent job of identifying obviously fake Amazon reviews. I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical…

How do you know what their FP rate is?

If I want to ignore fake reviews because they don't provide me with useful information is it unreasonable to think I would also find reviews that have the same characteristics as a fake review unhelpful? I don't want to spend all day looking through reviews so I think the false positive rate isn't as big a problem for this application as some others.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#149

Post by PerilousD » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

Hmm - seems like Amazon is now borrowing from the EBAY playbook. My EBAY usage is maybe one or two items in a year and rarely anything high-ticket. EBAY clearly favored sellers over buyers and after one or two run-ins with (a) leaving negative reviews for poor sellers and (b) fighting their policy where you had to wait a month before even filing for a refund - I left for Amazon prime. I'm probably going to drop Amazon prime at the end of this year.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#150

Post by whichdan » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

Speaking of bad reviews, trying to buy any kind of computer hardware off of Amazon is infuriating - all of the reviews for every version of an item are mixed together, so you'll have several motherboards treated as if they're the same, and monitors with different resolutions all lumped together.