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'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

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Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#171

Post by mdpopescu »

eeeeehhhhh wrote: post #152
taormina wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... This is a fantastic read.

I knew this was going to be posted. I've been thinking about this post for a decade now and I can't help but feel that, although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion, and those who adopt the view will have it compounded by confirmation bias because it is partially true. The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positiv…

> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

In fiction?

Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#172

Post by munk-a »

fastball wrote: post #120
fipar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.

Yeah, I actually think the group that is least susceptible to this is millennials, who group around the anonymity of IRC / early 4chan / etc, but before people were even pretending to use real identities on the internet.

The difference is that we got to make mistakes when we were young.

Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where you said very controversial things or vented angst in a manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed where it will be with you forever.

It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone had access to those messages it would be harder to definitively tie it back to someone since user fingerprinting was so non-existent.

That all said, I was in the middle of University when folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to see it start to emerge as a concern.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#173

Post by marricks »

ActorNightly wrote: post #164
cecida wrote: post #43

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.

Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you. Here is the summary of the issue. Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to fr…

Amazon warehouses have a far, far, higher turn over rate than other warehouses, probably because the conditions are so cruel.

It’s really sad how many people get super invested in defending mega corporations. I hope it’s just employees trying to move up but you never know.

https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate...

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#174

Post by jfk13 »

eeeeehhhhh wrote: post #152
taormina wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... This is a fantastic read.

I knew this was going to be posted. I've been thinking about this post for a decade now and I can't help but feel that, although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion, and those who adopt the view will have it compounded by confirmation bias because it is partially true. The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positiv…

> although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion

Of course it is. That's what comedians do: they take something with enough basis in reality that people will recognise and identify with it, and then caricature and exaggerate it to extremes.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#175

Post by scubbo »

ActorNightly wrote: post #164
cecida wrote: post #43

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.

Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you. Here is the summary of the issue. Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to fr…

> Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically

There are definitely some true, fair, and pertinent points in your comment (though, to be clear, they're not strong enough to actually make a compelling point, and I still disagree with your conclusion and position), but this is just nonsense. Every single social welfare program is "messing with the free market", and while I do concede that some of them have been failures and some have been inefficient, they are overall a net positive to _human quality of life_, even while they may reduce a business' productivity.

If you modified your statement to "which never leads to good outcomes for a particular company", or even "for the economy", then it would be a truer statement - but it is possible for a company or for the overall economy to take a small hit, while actual real humans (who are, after all, the ones that we should care about) enjoy a far greater quality of life.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#176

Post by dylan604 »

coldcode wrote: post #105
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Former CEO my foot, he is just as in charge as ever; nothing happens without his approval.

There are news articles floating around now saying that Bezos was a direct influence on the recent aggressive nature of Amazon twitter accounts attacking/fighting back. Not sure how many former employees would be able to wield that kind of power. Granted this former CEO is still the President of the Board or whatever Grand Poobah title he has.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#177

Post by shadowgovt »

macspoofing wrote: post #167
skohan wrote: post #3

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.

>The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills. Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not be exposed to. >But if there's no way to control for authenticity, And that's how it starts ...

I don't see it as a pull-back as much as a curation.

The wooly part of the Internet is still out there. But it's not what you're going to see in "polite conversation" as much, because the whole thing has passed the critical mass point of too much information for anyone to know. Much as with books before it, expect the equivalent of Reader's Digest to come along and a whole generation of consumers who are not only tolerant of, but in the market for, such curation.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#178

Post by creato »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #57
Judgmentality wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades. This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?

The United States, where I went to school. I also want to apply some critical thinking myself and ask "why wouldn't schools have critical thinking as part of their curriculum"? Teaching critical thinking skills is not some revolutionary idea and it's not like educators want to avoid teaching people how to do it.

> "why wouldn't schools have critical thinking as part of their curriculum"?

"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

Page 13: https://web.archive.org/web/20120629111643/http://s3.amazona...

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#179

Post by vimacs2 »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #93
tablespoon wrote: post #24

This old TechCrunch article from 2018 ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/what-is-this-weird-twitter... ) posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636153 has a former "Amazon Ambassador" actually explain that job: > An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch: >> When I…

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…

This rings so true and is seen in a lot of other industries as well. I believe the world of gaming is among the worst for this where hordes of customers ardently defend the clearly abusive practices of multinational companies that do not give the slightest shit about them except their influence on their bottom line.

Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of the game publishers and the fact that a company like Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#180

Post by deanCommie »

ActorNightly wrote: post #164
cecida wrote: post #43

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.

Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you. Here is the summary of the issue. Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to fr…

Fuck dude, why did you have to ruin your whole post with your last sentence?

You can make a good argument without devolving into "us-vs-them" tribalism.

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