131–140 of 433 posts
This is a problem the Voice.com social platform is attempting to tackle, read more about it here: https://about.voice.com/learn-more/ . I'm not affiliated with Voice in anyway, just someone who is eagerly awaiting open registration.
Clicked on logo, came to an extremely laggy game where I got Game Over after a couple of seconds. No idea what's going on.
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It is not really clear which type of "fake" they are - if it is non-Amazon-employees making a parody, or someone at Amazon making a not-really-existing persona: > It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.
It is clear. Some of those were created with gmail addresses and done with the web client instead of sprinklr like the amazon fake accounts. Those all use amazon email accounts and sprinklr. Which obviously a real box packer isn't going to have a sprinklr acct so you know at the very best someone is getting a 15 minute break while a pr rep looks over their shoulder and more likely they all work at the same desk in a…
Some bots producing fake reviews on Amazon are just too funny to write off. My favorite ( https://www.amazon.com/Evaluation-Astroskin-Behavioral-Self-... ): "Wow!!!!! this product exceeded all my expectations. When I travel through space, I have always wished there was a way to measure my vital signs without bulky hardware and uncomfortable wires! Arun's project report taught me everything I needed to know about the…
I'm not sure that was created by a bot.
From a technology standpoint, the actual hardware and materials for an Astroskin system cost around $175-$200 (clothing set + processing unit) to produce, so they really are making bank.
I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.
Imagine being worth 185 billion dollars and still obsessing about your workers advocating for better pay and conditions? What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success. There is no joy in his life.
Equating every action of a million person company with their (soon to be former) CEO is disingenuous. Jeff Bezos isn't personally directly every action of every employee at Amazon. I know it's popular to hate Amazon, but we don't even have any evidence that this handful of Twitter accounts was created by Amazon employees in the first place, let alone personally directed by Jeff Bezos.
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For decades, I never thought people who kiss ass could have been serious. I was sure they were just cynically playing a game of advancement, and I despised them for it. What I've come to learn -- as disappointing as it is to me -- is that some people view this sort of thing as actual, legitimate opportunity, and are acting out of internal integrity. They don't see the hypocrisy of the power imbalance and how the comp…
It's not just Amazon. You'd be surprised at how middle-upper management operates the same way at large enterprises. At least from my experience. Some were good at their jobs, most were there because of who they knew.
As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are there because they've "played the game" well - they're good at networking, know the right people, say the right things at the right times, and when they think it will help them, they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.
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> But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing. If you strike the word "online" this statement works for most of history. The only things that have changed are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it. We have small teams that can generate more noise than a nation state could have prayed for just a generation ago.. and they're do…
What are the catastrophic downsides to real names and verified identities? Those things weren't catastrophic downsides before the internet existed when publishing your opinion in newspapers or books or whatever.
The people railing against Amazon are mostly people who have never done manual labor in their lives and (wrongly) view people who have as little better than slaves. Even the Amazon (or ex-Amazon) employees who speak against the company are doing so in an environment where the only tolerated sentiment is attacking Amazon. There's no room for nuance. Perhaps that's okay and reasonable new provisions for Amazon employees will come out of all this or perhaps the debate will get less and less rational.
This situation makes me think of Ikiru, a Kurosawa movie. The main character is dying. He looks around for meaning in life and eventually settles upon a former employee of his, a young girl. He spends time with her and buys her things just to be around her, not out of any romantic of sexual motive, just because he's drawn to her liveliness, her attitude toward the world. Eventually she gets tired of this situation and no longer wants to see him. As she leaves, he begs her to tell him how she's so happy. She explains that she now works in a factory making toys for Japanese kids and this gives her life meaning. The main character decides that he can make his life meaningful by creating something durable in the world for other people before he dies.
My point is that we often view workers as oppressed but an Amazon warehouse worker contributes in a very real way to billions of people getting things that they need. I write code for a living and I'm not convinced that I contribute any more to the world than an Amazon warehouse worker. And don't think the workers are unaware of this, some of them take pride in it, whether or not they express it on twitter, and they should.
A lot of this comes down to your attitude toward the world. Are you a pessimist? Do you view human interaction as oppressive, is it mainly comprised of corrupt, powerful people manipulating kind, weak people? Or are you an optimist? Do you find it remarkable that things work as well as they do, do you take pride in your part, no matter how small, in keeping civilization afloat?
Neither of these sentiments is wrong but only one is taken seriously in certain circles.