61–70 of 731 posts
"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.
Amazon has no mercy, so neither do I. In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...) So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to br…
I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while. I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story. Amazon's o…
For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it.
All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally curious but a lot of the stuff I find on Etsy is the same crap from Alibaba/Amazon .. What are you buying from Etsy that isn't this?
I'm not the GP but I bought a wooden lapdesk on Etsy that I use every day.
I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while. I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story. Amazon's o…
> other online platforms, including Etsy. For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it. All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take." You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product. If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. An…
> advertise everywhere you want Except, apparently, the surface that's actually closest to the purchasing decision? Why must that surface be forbidden?
> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying. People's urge to rid the world of ads…
I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take." You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product. If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. An…
> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place
Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't "always believe this", this will lead to your account being banned eventually, or at least barred from returning products.
I certainly hope so. GP implies that they are committing fraud to "stick it to the man". Nine times out of ten, this simply results in the man sticking it to us again.
I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.