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Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

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Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#301

Post by dx034 »

deanCommie wrote: post #255
rubidium wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are standard ways in industry of dealing with this problem. You verify your suppliers. Amazon doesn’t do this, and so kids eat lead and we get shitty stuff. The real makers get pissed. The scammers and amazon profit.

not. at. amazon's. scale. Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product. > The scammers and amazon profit. Is short term thinking and Amazon would never think like that. The problem is harder than you give it credit for. It's a constant arms race.

Of course you can do that at Amazon's scale. Also $1 items can be verified economically, considering you're going to sell more than one of it. It will make life harder for very small sellers with low value items. But I doubt that those make up a big share of sold items.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#302

Post by orijing »

reaperducer wrote: post #105
ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy I do the same. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what the practical alternative is. I guess it's the whole reason that brands were created in the first place. I do source some of my stuff from smaller brands and shops, whenever I can. But that's not always an option. When it comes to software, I'm not entirely satisfied with Apple's "walled g…

I don't have the same experience with Apple. My MacBook had to get replaced multiple times due to a bad graphics card. My subsequent one had to get replaced multiple times because of the butterfly keyboards breaking.

So far so good on the latest one but it's annoying to deal with so many replacements

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#303

Post by nostromo »

xxpor wrote: post #98
nostromo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of anti-tech energy on the left lately. And Bezos painted a target on his back by getting into Twitter feuds with Trump. He's also now synonymous with the Washington Post which has never met a Republican they liked. This all adds up to a company nobody seems to like in DC. If there's any company I could see getting a Washington smackdown soon, it's Amazon.

>He's also now synonymous with the Washington Post which has never met a Republican they liked. Have you ever actually read the WaPo editorial page?

I’m talking about their reporting, not their editorials — which, no, I don’t regularly read. Although it’s worth noting they’ve not once endorsed a Republican for president, ever.

They serve DC, so I’m not surprised or upset they have a bias — but we shouldn’t pretend it doesn’t exist either.

Obviously owning a liberal newspaper doesn’t win Bezos any points on the right, which became obvious with Trump supposedly pressuring the Pentagon not to use AWS.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#304

Post by post_below »

pjc50 wrote: post #134
ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

One of the important lessons of the internet is that unless there's very deliberate suppression, noise will drown out signal if there's the slightest incentive to spam. Anything that can be faked will be faked in bulk.

Well put. It's definitely a signal vs noise type issue, all other aspects of the problem are secondary.

They can make a dent in the problem short term with more manual review but as the spammers evolve better automation, if all Amazon has in the race are humans, they'll keep losing.

As more and more of these types of stories come out, over the course of years now, I keep expecting to hear about a big push from Amazon to clear out the noise. And it keeps failing to happen.

The knee jerk interpretation is that Amazon doesn't care about fake products because they still get paid. But, historically at least, Amazon is smarter than that. Part of their dominance comes from understanding that, long term, there is more profit in happy customers even if it that means accepting otherwise avoidable costs.

I wonder if this is the result of a changing culture or of it's an indication they've become too large and inefficient to respond to problems and iterate at modern tech company speed.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#305

Post by BiteCode_dev »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore:

- a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself

- they don't even manufacture two products from the same subcontractor

- sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor

- big players just don't care. Cisco is not going to lose business because you chose to not buy, and most people won't follow you to allow the boycott to have enough wait

- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again. It's been like that for decades. PR works extremely well now, people genuinely live the feeling they've been lead to by those amazing consent manufacturer.

- a brand is dead ? Don't worry, it will be renamed into another one. Or subcontract for another one. You will buy its product again, you will just don't know you do.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#306

Post by mns »

jahnu wrote: post #127
andrewfromx wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are…

Only allow reviews from verified purchasers

I have a friend in Germany that is in a Facebook group for "testing" products from Amazon. They need to purchase all kind of weird and low quality stuff from unknown Chinese brands, they keep the product, get a refund through Paypal and leave a 5 star review. I told him it's kind of a bad thing to do, but hey, free 29 Euro earbuds. :)

I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commenters noted, it's starting to happen even in Germany, and Amazon is now filled with all kind of weird cheap brands that have 4,5+ stars and 500+ reviews, you can't get any proper stuff like a humidifier or some small kitchen accessories without being flooded with spam. Well, back to local shops and retailers.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#307

Post by post_below »

deanCommie wrote: post #255
rubidium wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are standard ways in industry of dealing with this problem. You verify your suppliers. Amazon doesn’t do this, and so kids eat lead and we get shitty stuff. The real makers get pissed. The scammers and amazon profit.

not. at. amazon's. scale. Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product. > The scammers and amazon profit. Is short term thinking and Amazon would never think like that. The problem is harder than you give it credit for. It's a constant arms race.

Good points, I agree that it seems unlikely that Amazon has lost sight of the long term thinking that is largely responsible for making them Amazon.

And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.

But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.

Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#308

Post by thecatspaw »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #299
eugeniub wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would work for maybe 5% of products. This is no way to review the durability of a product, or review how it performs for specific tasks, e.g. swimming shampoo, internal computer component, sleeping mask, etc.

I think even a lay person would be able to make some good observations about any product. Then across hundreds of employees you could start to build specialized teams. But also, you don't want people to be too close to a range of products so they can be somewhat objective. For example is swimming shampoo a real thing? or is it just normal shampoo that costs more? Here is Australia there is a range of over the counter…

And yet, there is a point to marketing pain killers for different pains: placebo

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#309

Post by zweep »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #88

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews. Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more…

This was one of the early theories about how Facebook would monetize -- that your real-life friends would value their relationship with you too highly to recommend anything but truly great products to you. That hit the reality that people would squander most of their friends for their stupid MLM scheme.

Re: Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real?

#310

Post by tonyedgecombe »

smnrchrds wrote: post #284
reaperducer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy I do the same. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what the practical alternative is. I guess it's the whole reason that brands were created in the first place. I do source some of my stuff from smaller brands and shops, whenever I can. But that's not always an option. When it comes to software, I'm not entirely satisfied with Apple's "walled g…

> ... I generally don't have to worry. Emphasis on generally . Apple still sells many (most?) of its iMacs with spinning rust drives. Just picking up something from Apple Store and paying tons for it does not guarantee it meets minimum quality standards one might expect.

At least you know what you're getting. I don't understand why Apple still sells those devices but I'm not going to be surprised by what I receive.
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