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The Amazon tax
581–590 of 731 posts
Re: The Amazon tax
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. If I search "Toyota RAV4" what I mean is Toyota RAV4. If I meant Mazda CX-50 I would have typed "Mazda CX-50." If I wanted information about various mid-size SUVs, rather than one in particular, I'd have searched "midsize SUVs." The number of times I have searched something, got back something I did not ask for, and found that helpful, rounds down to zero. It's actively destructive to the platforms that allow thi…
Are you saying that because it’s across company boundaries? Or would you be similarly upset if one result was for a Toyota Highlander? Or for a Toyota RAV4 XSE but not the LE trim I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion
The day searches started giving us ads instead of what we asked for (as opposed to in addition to what we asked for) was the day they stopped being useful. Which for Google was many years ago. This is not "cross shopping suggestions", it's an abuse of a monopoly for profit.
Literally everyone I know feels this way, even if they don't care about it as passionately. No one "appreciates" being openly manipulated to their financial detriment.
Re: The Amazon tax
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that because it’s across company boundaries? Or would you be similarly upset if one result was for a Toyota Highlander? Or for a Toyota RAV4 XSE but not the LE trim I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion
Yes! It's very frustrating when I think I'm browsing several variations of a single product, only to realize that some of the results are a totally different product, the brand doesn't affect it either way. I'm fine seeing results for multiple trims if I didn't specify one.
>I'm fine seeing results for multiple trims if I didn't specify one.
And when you DO specify one, but get results for something else entirely?
Re: The Amazon tax
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a compet…
Google beat out the competition by being better in a market with near zero switching costs. It can coast a long time without being the best option, but once the fall starts it’s always harder to gain back reputation. Today I told someone to google “ school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually fo…
> Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
Re: The Amazon tax
#585This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to bu…
There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. The people who made their names beginning twenty years ago by marketing these expressions are losers who have simply been proven wrong. It is monotonous middle brow repetition See eg the left wing expose of the above mentioned brain death in Maher Aquanno https://archive.ph/YJaZr better in their academic papers like Mon…
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-antitrust-training-wa...
> There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all.
How so? Amazon search is almost probably worse than 10 years ago.
Re: The Amazon tax
#586I don't love (but use...) Amazon but I think if done properly, ads can be relevant even when searching for a specific thing. Let's use a Google Example: I search for Toyota RAV4 and get an ad for Mazda cx-50. Obviously Toyota hates that but as a consumer it has a chance of making me aware of something I didn't know but would want to know, especially as a part of a purchase decision. That's why Mazda pays for that ad…
In any retail webstore, or even on Spotify, YouTube, etc. all the searches are infuriating today.
If I search for specific terms then I get a menu of slop to choose from. Search isn't built to serve the searcher at all. Search is meant to surface things that are promoted, hyped, advertised, or paid for in some way.
So you search Amazon for stuff and a lot of crap added on to it. Any retail site's filters are useless for filtering out what you don't want to see or casting a net for desirable features. I swear--search for "bananas" at a grocery store and you'll get results for ice cream and baby food and Minions merchandise and organic pears?
This behavior has already crept into LLM responses. I often request that they compile a list of the top-5 or top-10 according to some criteria. And it never fails that they cannot resist giving me outliers and things that don't fit by any means. Now I don't know what influences an LLM to give stupid non-matching results, but I know they do. Is RLHF already baking-in advertising and sponsorship? I wouldn't rule it out.
Case in point: the other day I was thinking of Amy Schumer but couldn't remember her name. So I struck up a convo with Copilot, and described Schumer by profession, personality, and physical attributes. Copilot first suggested a slender Black woman. Then Diablo Cody. And eventually compiled me a list of 5-7 people who were nothing like Amy Schumer. Never once even thought to mention her. Once I surfaced her name by other means, I went back and scolded Copilot, just so I could feel smug and better about myself. But it's genuinely surreal.
Re: The Amazon tax
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google beat out the competition by being better in a market with near zero switching costs. It can coast a long time without being the best option, but once the fall starts it’s always harder to gain back reputation. Today I told someone to google “ school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually fo…
> Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for every…
Many products get worse so they are cheaper to manufacture, more shelf stable, etc and can therefore be profitably sold to more people. Sometimes the opposite happens, but in general when a company optimizes for people with less disposable income than you the product gets worse from your perspective.
Re: The Amazon tax
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
It reminds me of an analogy I read a while ago in an article critiquing keyword based online advertising (can't find the article unfortunately). A restaurant wants to drum up new business, so the owner tasks three employees with handing out flyers with coupons attached. The coupons are marked to identify which employee passed them out, and each week the owner gives a bonus to the employee whose coupons get redeemed t…
This is what I wonder… the author says that: > The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“ But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad. It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.
I'm equally confused here. Who searches "Seth Godin The Knot" and if the first result isn't that exact book, goes and buys a book about knots or weddings or something? The book should be there in plain view at the top of organic best matches. Did they really test this "yield" claim?
Re: The Amazon tax
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it confusing? Most brick and mortar stores show ads for specific products. Online platforms other than Amazon do it too. The only thing is that Amazon is more diversified than other retailers, in particular, they have AWS, essentially selling the platform that runs their website to third parties. It makes sense for them to offer sell their ad service to third parties too.
No one does it like Amazon, it requires users to walk through the sponsored ads before they can see organic search results, almost no other platform does this online. Walmart has a single strip of sponsored results at top, immediately leading to organic results, others like Target, HomeDepot do not mix in sponsored results with search results. B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them lik…
> B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.
Ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, even your physical Walmart store is also selling a lot of shelf space to manufacturers/advertisers (similar to how Amazon sell the first slot, or at this point first 'page'), especially those checkout lines (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-grocers-wring-extra-cash-ou...). That's why your on-boots retail staff can't change those planograms (which defines how to layout shelf space in a grocery store) willy-nilly, they're designed by the highest bidder. That's why those soda or chips seems placed in too convenient slots that are also 'coincidental' to those currently advertised in other ways, because it's, plain and simply, paid to be there.
Re: The Amazon tax
#590I see the exact same thing on Play Store, and I think Google is outright complicit in fraud. The top result when you search for an app, even if by exact name, is always, literally 100% of the time, not the app you are looking for, but some other ad-infested knockoff spyware shit whose developer paid Google to be placed before the real thing.