311–320 of 321 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. You can’t “not my problem” your way out of being an accessory to fraud.
Why not? It seems like getting a full refund is a pretty big mitigation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive…
This is the same argument I have when people say "YouTube is too big to moderate properly". If it's too big to keep legal, maybe it's too big. It was YouTube's choice to allow everyone to upload as much as they like.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this will work well. Minor updates to listings would trigger all of these actions far too often to make them standard and ignored. I hate to say it but I think some type of heuristics would be needed here. 1. Has the title significantly changed. 2. Has the price significantly changed. 3. Are the search keywords that were finding the old listing significantly different than those finding the new listing.…
> some type of heuristics would be needed here. Calculating a meaningful numeric difference between two chunks of text is fairly well-trod territory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like you shouldn’t be able to change a products category from clothing to electronics for instance in my opinion. Same with similar changes. Small changes should be fine in my opinion also it’s not like it’s impossible to also determine the edit distance between two pieces of text. Amazon could be doing a lot more here.
It will get flagged eventually. No, really, I have worked at amazon in a job exactly around product compliance and such. All this is very hard to solve and they do what they can, people wont believe it, but amazon is not just an app, the heavy lifting part is logistics, admin thereof and compliance. Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big. Mislabeled products…
> Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big.
It's easy enough that fraud (for example recycled listings with old reviews) is common enough that many people, including myself, have run into it.
> Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers.
Not enough that it isn't widespread.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I buy hundreds of items per year and almost never return anything. If I buy from xiangxiangshenzencorp then I expect the item to be crap, but it's obvious from the listing and the price. If I buy from a reputable brand I also know what to expect. I honestly don't get how people can get a quality different from what was clear from the listing (well, I've been positively surprised in the past).
Sure, the quality is obvious from one of the fake name generated chinese brands, my issue is more the pollution of the listings with those brands. Going to search for anything turns up hundreds of the top results with these “brands” all 5 stars.
Just a few days ago I bought a soldering iron. If I went with Reddit's recommendations it would be at least $100 for a "not terrible one". Instead I bought a $10 one that I'm sure will work perfectly fine for what I will use it for. In this case the results that I didn't care about were the brand names.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What other crimes do you think should allow the “not my problem” defense? A crime is still a crime even if full restitution is made.
There's a pretty long list. If someone sells a fraudulent product by mail, I don't hold the mail carrier accountable. If I buy a product I don't like on Craigslist, I don't hold them accountable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? It seems like getting a full refund is a pretty big mitigation.
It is not only the customer who suffers damage, but also the seller of legitimate merchandise who is not compensated by Amazon for fraudulent sales. Also, Amazon 100% has a spreadsheet somewhere calculating the share of customers who don't bother claiming fraud compensation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a pretty long list. If someone sells a fraudulent product by mail, I don't hold the mail carrier accountable. If I buy a product I don't like on Craigslist, I don't hold them accountable.
The mail carrier does not advertise the fraudulent product and does not handle the financial transaction. There is a pretty obvious difference between a mail carrier and Amazon. Craigslist actually is responsible for stuff that is offered on their website, see also the long-running debates about sex workers advertising on Craigslist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere. Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc. This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that…
Just think about all the meaningful local mom and pop jobs that gave back to the community that Amazon destroyed in the name of putting bezos in the top two richest men alive. Maybe the judge should consider that and just demolish them.
I shop to get cool stuff. Not to convey meaning.
I don't get they don't crack down on the product switcheroo scam [0] - it seems like a trivial problem to solve. I've reported items to them before and they don't care. [0] this product for example, loads of the reviews are for something totally different - https://www.amazon.co.uk/WERPOWER-Windscreen-Invisible-Winds...
How is it trivial to solve? They either need to prevent sellers from modifying product pages (which would be a disaster because any mistakes could no longer be fixed without losing all reviews) or gate it behind human intervention(slow) /algorithm (complex). There's nothing trivial about the issue.