Up to tenth of Amazon shoppers in GB 'bribed' by sellers to offer good review

Not too long ago, my daughter at college lost her favorite headphones. For reasons not worth going into, we needed a replacement fast so I went to Amazon. I figured that Prime shipping would be able to get the kind she likes to her before I could get there myself (I was some hundreds of miles away but planning to swing by on my way home). Isn't that what I paid the subscription fee for? Well ... no go. IIRC the best they could do was four, maybe five, days. And not because they were out of stock. Then I went to B&H, who could get them there next day for a better price. No prizes for guessing who got my business that day.

Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.

they know where you live

I've spent a solid 10 minutes following the rabbit hole of linked studies/papers and have not found any paper or study or figure that actually makes the "up to 10%" claim like the article says. I can't even find in any of the linked papers any sort of "1,500 person survey" like the article mentions.

I started looking into it because of the weasel word "up to" in the title. "Up to" doesn't mean anything. 1% is "up to" 10%. 0.0001% is "up to" 10%.

And what do you know? When I try to dive into an article with a weasel worded title to find the actual data they're referring to, it's nowhere to be found.

Used to be. Amazon threatened to shut it down and then spun it off.

I think the official reviews by professionals (very trusted) have affiliate links to AMZN but it is not hard to look up gear at B&H or Adorama.

People have asked "whatever happened to forums?" and they are alive and well at dpreview. It's a community of photographers that inspire me and help me out in a pinch. I went to a volleyball game that was a total loss for me, asked for help, and got exactly the crystalized knowledge and perspectives that I can't get from books at the library and I'm going to back with the right gear and the right tactics and turn it around.

Between the pro reviews and the contact with photographers at and beyond my level I get a clear picture of the gear and the people who are reviewing it.

On AMZN or Best Buy on the other hand I have to process reviews through this lens: you get people who leave bad reviews who just don't know what are doing or don't have the correct expectations, there was the guy who put the paper in a photo paper upside down, got an inksplosion, blamed the printer and returned. Well, I put the paper in upside down and got the same results, the difference is I knew it was my fault. There's also the strange problem that a certain fraction of certain products just aren't up to spec, circa 2008 it seemed that Sigma lenses for Canon were usually good but maybe 20% of people got a bad one.

I don't see a problem with dishonest reviews on AMZN for that kind of stuff but I find dpreview easy to parse.

Yeah I could have, maybe should have, probably silly for not. Although I’ve done enough stupid stuff in my life to know where my line is and what is worth my time or not. This was definitely a no for me, report and move on.