Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #251

quercusa wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GE used to be a marker for reasonable quality but over the past couple of decades they've licensed their name for all kinds of crappy consumer products.

The GE consumer product business was sold to a Chinese company quite a while ago, and I believe the brand was put on a lot of poor quality and poorly designed products, but I have the impression they have substantially turned around the quality, based on consumer reports and other hearsay. I got a GE washer and dryer based on this belief (and they were the only ones that would fit) and so far, so good, after about a…

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #46

TravisLS wrote: post #18

There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality. There's…

I myself am convinced that brand recognition is on borrowed time - that is, recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter, but new quality brands will be near-impossible to establish. The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product…

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

rendall wrote: post #75

dopylitty wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests. The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality. Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality w…

> Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus. Speaking as a socialist-leaning libertarian, I'mma have to take a hard disagree on this. Let the companies have a mix of terrible quality and great quality as they wish, and let the market itself decide which products and companies succeed or fail Let a private company, say…

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:19 AM UTC

mrxd wrote: post #340

TravisLS wrote: post #18

There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality. There's…

100% agree. I’d also add that people love to trash brands that produce substandard producers. Negative word of mouth spreads easier for more recognizable brands, and the company’s need to protect their reputation provides a level of assurance that doesn’t exist for anonymous producers.

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

sdflhasjd wrote: post #48

Bait-and-switch doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't care about fake and paid-for reviews. I was looking for dashcams and came across this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/iiwey-Channels-included-Dashboard-D... 91% 5-star reviews, a lot of the reviews are from "Top XXX reviewer", and almost every one seems to be reading off a script. If you check out all the profiles of these "Top XX" reviewers, they all seem to be non-stop pur…