I love how Amazon has gone from customer obsession to the lowest of the lowest common denominator. Easiest boycott of my life to stop buying tripe from them.
They’ve successfully pivoted from customer obsession to obsessed customers.
I made the mistake of buying bandaids from there, they looked like a brand name but slightly off, they gave my kids rashes.
I made the mistake of buying LED light bulbs from there, the brand name was reputable but who knows if what I actually got was the same brand or a copy, they started flickering and randomly going out within a year.
I made the mistake of buying an LED monitor from there. It turned out to be some third party seller with a ridiculous return policy, so even though I had been conditioned to think Amazon had good return policy, now that they let third party sellers set their own policies I had to eat 30% of cost to return it.
Amazon sells a bunch of knockoff oil filters. I accidentally bought them for a Toyota and luckily noticed. Imagine blowing an engine because you tried to buy an OEM filter.
Back in 2010, in the insurance industry we were warned that imported electrical products were found forging the UL (Underwriters Laboratories) labels. Surge protectors and electrical strips were cited as prone to meltdown at the time.
I don't know if this was ever made public knowledge, but I'm wondering if this is now coming to fruition a decade later with all these e-bike fires.
I figure if I ever need to commit arson I'm just going to charge a Chinese e-bike on a Chinese power strip and feign ignorance.
I'm honestly confused how many people run into "nothing but counterfeits" and others never see any (or maybe the counterfeits aren't actually worse quality so this goes unnoticed)
The good thing with Amazon is their lax return policy. You have 1 month to test the product and if you don't like it, you return it to one of several available places (Wholefoods, Amazon locker, UPS, even leave it at the door for UPS to pick up, etc.)
No other store/website even comes close to this. BB gives you 2 weeks to try the product, and you'd have to drive all the way to their location to return the thing.
I keep purchasing from Amazon mainly because of the return policy, but I agree that there are cheaper options out there.
A Amazon marketplace product I ordered was wrong. I ordered a memory module and got the wrong one. After checkingy order I saw that I ordered the right one. No problem, I thought. Filled a return form, entered "wrong product" as reason, send it back.
The marketplace reseller denied my refund because he claims I swapped the product. I escalated the issue to the Amazon support. They told my that this decision is final and I can nothing do about it. I let my lawyer send them a letter. Only then Amazon gave me my money back.
This if the story how Amazon lost me as a long time customer because of poor and stubborn support over a 23€ product.
I tried to quit shopping from Amazon, and I did find alternatives. But, where do you buy your electronics from? a TV, a GPU, a monitor? What's their return policy?
Amazon is 12 month 0% APR installments on anything >$50, 5% cash back on everything else, no questions asked drop-off at Whole Foods/UPS returns/pickups. Your money is back in your pocket that day.
I tried Best Buy, NewEgg, and eBay. NewEgg, you'd think, would be better. But their return policy is non-existent compared to the convenience Amazon provides.
I think how I feel Amazon.com has degraded is that they've made it so smooth to shop that I end up buying things I don't need. It feels like the site has spliced itself into my "oh yeah I can solve that" internal loop and makes me spend $30 on some crappy (cheap) solution and before I know it it's on my doorstep.
Big-ticket items are easily bought directly from the brands.
I had the choice of buying my 65" LG from Amazon, sure, I have an account already. But someone (Reddit?) suggested to buy directly from LG to make sure you get a factory-fresh box. Seeing all the Amazon shenanigans, it was an easy decision. 10 minutes and I checked out the new TV from LG directly.
I buy small household items from Amazon, floor wipe refills, batteries - and these are not at risk of being scammy products in the first place, unless someone is a total dolt.
As for return policies - that's just a matter of doing your homework. I don't think I ever returned anything to Amazon.
> But, where do you buy your electronics from? a TV, a GPU, a monitor? What's their return policy?
That seems so strange to me. Here in Germany we have countless electronics shops that have better (as in cleaner, well categorized) inventory as well as better prices than Amazon. Amazon can work quite well for these devices but it's just one of many options. Not using something like Geizhals to compare prices very likely results in overpaying.
And of course, a minimum return policy of 14 days is set via european legislation for all shops.
In London I’ll just go into town and do high street shopping the old fashioned way. For anything too big or unwieldy then John Lewis is a safe bet and their return policy is great. In some cases I’ll just go direct to the brand or some other company I know has a good rep (like Scan for computer parts). For books I’ll browse a local book shop or Waterstones and if I leave empty handed then bookshop.org is my online backup.
The last few times I tried to buy anything expensive from Amazon, the item I received was faulty and I ended up just sending it back and buying a replacement direct from the retailer. I also don’t care at all about next day delivery since if I need something so urgently I can just go out and find it myself.
Any other online store without 3rd party resellers? Over here for computer parts I use mostly use Megekko, Alternate and Azerty. For batteries it is Replacedirect. For printer supplies it is 123Inkt. I can't imagine other regions not having similar options.
These days I avoid 'market' places like Amazon and Bol like the plague as I've been bitten too many times.
> I love how Amazon has gone from customer obsession to the lowest of the lowest common denominator.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I don't remember this halcyon time where amazon was able to distinguish themselves from competitors to the consumer via anything but listed inventory. Their website has always been a cluttered mess filled with spam....
What I remember being useful was that, when you clicked on an item, somewhere on the page would be a carousel with items that other customers who looked at that item eventually ended up buying/also looked at. It was genuinely helpful information that generally would make it faster to find what you were actually looking for.
At some point they got rid of that despite it being useful. I assume that Amazon prefers being able to control what you see when you search for an item. Now you’ll still see carousels and comparison tables when you click on an item, but it’s all stuff that vendors paid to have placed there (or that Amazon decided it wants you to see).
I basically use them as a delivery service. I only come to Amazon with a brand and model already in mind. Get basically instant delivery. Return it anywhere, any condition. Nowadays, manufacturers have started accepting payments directly and even payment plans and I still get quick shipping so they’re losing their edge there.
Not entirely, they can't check every single thing, and because they inventory mix, if I have a legit product and you have a fake, once it's all tagged as the same, they'll send whichever one the system picks regardless of who's 'store' I buy from.
Additionally, because of inventory mixing, they don't really know who put the fraud in and who didn't (maybe they do, but they don't seem to do anything about it)
Additionally, some of the stuff on the site is not stored or shipped by them at all, you buy from the store site and it gets shipped from the vendor.
So no, they really haven't made a system that they can use to validate their items sold at scale.
Easy fix since ChatGPT always apologises for not complying: any description or title containing the word "sorry" gets flagged for human oversight. Still orders of magnitude faster than writing all your own spam texts.
I think it would be better to ask it to wrap the answer with some known marker like START_DESCRIPTION and END_DESCRIPTION. This way if it refuses you'll be able to tell right away.
As another user pointed out, sometimes it doesn't refuse by using the word "sorry".
In the same vein, I had a play with asking ChatGPT to `format responses as a JSON object with schema {"desc": "str"}` and it seemed to work pretty well. It gave me refusals in plaintext, and correct answers in well-formed JSON objects.
The seller account's entire product list is a stream of scraped images with AI-nglish descriptions slapped on by autopilot. If you can cast thousands of lines for free and you know the ranger isn't looking, you don't need good bait to catch fish.
Sometimes it "apologizes" rather than saying "sorry", you could build a fairly solid heuristic but I'm not sure you can catch every possible phrasing.
OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
> OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
Is a safety net kicking in or is the model just trained to respond with a refusal to certain prompts? I am fairly sure it's usually the latter, and in that case even OpenAI can't be sure a particular response is a refusal or not.
> OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
next up, retailers find out that copies of the board game Sorry! are being autodeclined. The human review that should have caught it was so backlogged that there is a roughly 1/3 chance of it timing out in the queue and the review task being discarded.
Hmm someone else suggested this would be an issue, but the overall percentage of products with sorry in their description is very small and having the human operator flag it is a false positive is still, as I say, orders of magnitude faster than wiring your own product descriptions.
I would just make it respond ONLY in JSON and if it's non-compliant formatting then don't use it. I doubt it'd apologize in JSON format. A quick test just now seems to work
I’d create an embedding center by averaging a dozen or so apology responses. If the output has an embedding too close to that cluster you can handle the exception appropriately.
You joke but this is unreasonably effective. We're prototyping using LLms to extract, among other things, names from arbitrary documents.
Asking the LLm to read the text and output all the names it found -> it gets the names but there's lots of false positives.
Asking the LLM to then classify the list of candidate names it found as either name / not name -> damn near perfect.
Playing around with it it seems that the more text it has to read the worse it performs at following instructions so having low accuracy pass on a lot of text followed by a high-accuracy pass on a much smaller set of data is the way to go.
Why Amazon is not able to actually verify sellers real identities and terminate their accounts? I would imagine that they should be able to force them to supply verifiable national identification/bank account etc. How do these sellers get away with these?
Another fix is to not create product listings for internet points. This product doesnt even show in search results on amazon (or at least didnt when i checked). Op didnt “find” it. They made it. Probably to maintain hype.
- Ample Size: Measuring a generous 8.5 x 11 inches when closed and an expansive 17 x 22 inches when open, it boasts 30 exquisite high-quality animal images.
- Exquisite Imagery: Revel in captivating photographs that beautifully depict animals thriving in their natural environments.
- Extended Coverage: Spanning from January 2024 to December 2025, plus an additional 6 months into 2026, all included at no extra cost.
- Holiday Clarity: Encompassing all major U.S. holidays and moon phases, meticulously omitting perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule.
- Ink-Resistant Printing: Meticulously printed on top-tier paper engineered to withstand ink smears, ensuring your calendar remains pristine.
- Precision Image Quality: Revel in vivid, sharp images, a testament to our unwavering commitment to printing excellence.
- Ideal Gift: Spread joy among your friends and family by presenting them with this calendar, a thoughtful gesture suitable for any occasion, making it an ideal choice for those on a budget.
Definitely appreciate how it covers the exact phallus dimensions up front, and am comforted knowing it won't smear if "ink" gets on it. There's just such a high level of consideration poured into this calendar of dicks, I am nearly speechless.
And it covers 2.5 years, who wouldn't want a calendar which ends mid year 2026? Spread the joy all over your friends and family.
I would like to know how "meticulously omitting perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule" got into it, though, because that's just an amazing sentence.
I found the line about "perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule" kind of hilarious. Many people are xenophobic or whatever but they hardly ever express it quite like that. If your wall calendar labels a holiday you don't know about, you typically ignore it and don't care. You don't become deeply perplexed.
I'm thinking they automatically fed in bulk images, asking for product description/title, and put the result straight into their product descriptions/titles.
Some of the images triggered the OpenAI guard rails.
It’s “<apology>-brown” and the item appears black but is listed as brown. It’s possible that they are using GPT to translate from another language. I think I’ve read about listings for other pieces of furniture inadvertently offending people by using the Spanish word for “black” due to similar mixups.
ChatGPT is refusing to generate titles with trademarked names. So most likely they are prompting something like "competitor product: rephrase the title"
At that scale, they likely aren't typing the prompt into ChatGPT manually and then copy pasting. The generated title is in fact shorter than the prompt. Most likely they automated the task of asking ChatGPT and bulk generated the titles.
People can't even be bothered to come up with a title for a product listing? We are truly screwed. Maybe they generated it from images and a script, but honestly, how freaking lazy are people these days?
It's probably a drop shipping operation, generating mass listings. Or it's from a foreign vendor, asking ChatGPT to provide a title in English. There's a lot of things wrong with this listing, but laziness isn't one of them.
Whyever would one prompt ChatGPT with your question? If you have this information, you can write the title yourself. The response was not that different to the question.
I've had it say that when I asked it to produce a more detailed ASCII drawing of a cat, or other innocuous prompt. It seems like a not infrequent failure state for things that very clearly don't violate policy.
Does it actually complain about generating explicit content? It certainly seems willing enough to describe brutal murders as long as it thinks it’s writing a story.
It still baffles me that people get more upset over sex than death.
This is hardly evidence Twitter is "awash" with OpenAI spam since by the bold text you can see he specifically searched that phrase and yet only showed three responses.
The product had that text as its title. Another one shows: "khalery [Apologies but I'm Unable to Assist with This Request it goes Against OpenAI use Policy and Encourages unethical Behavior-Black"
Enhanced Performance: Boost your productivity with our high-performance [product name], designed to deliver-fast results and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition.
Immersive Visuals: Immerse yourself in stunning visuals and vibrant colors with the high-resolution display of [product name], bringing your favorite movies,, and multimedia content to life with clarity and accuracy.
That's decent mark up. I bet I could write an app to take products from that site, post them to Amazon, and then just drop ship the orders for me. Of course, I'd have to write all those descriptions...
Since all of the proposals I've seen so far to do this involve pretty serious privacy problems, I'm not optimistic about the future of the internet on this count.
I remember things like Translate Server Error (https://i.redd.it/kqqkgaro8ir71.jpg) and other instances of error messages finding their way into places where the output would normally be (another one: https://i.imgur.com/RAVOuwg.jpg ). It's not surprising to see this is now happening with AI too.
Using Amazon for shopping is terrible, borderline unusable in 2024. They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have an amazing logistics network, but it also seems like there's a big vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's actually good.
The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
In many categories, even when explicitly searching for brand and model names, you’ll get dozens of off-brand substitutions and even random unrelated products appearing above it in the search results.
Occasionally I’ve even noticed products that are available for sale (if you click on a direct link or have them saved in your favorites etc), but refuse to show up in search results no matter what!
Often it’s easier to find things on Amazon using Google search than using Amazon’s search.
Pro-tip: Amazon fills their page with that useless content from their ad network, just like any standard ad. uBlock Origin blocks all of it, and your search experience is restored to what you expect.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand what people were talking about when they said Amazon's search interface is terrible. People would tell me they search for a specific book or author, and get totally irrelevant results. My experience was totally opposite.
I had to finally see a screenshot from someone's browser to believe it. It turns out uBlock has been blocking this content the whole time, and I never noticed it at all.
> The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
Hey boss I made the site better! Through rigorous A/B testing I could figure out a way to tweak our search algorithm so people spend much more time on our site! It seems they now really enjoy browsing for products!
Ok but seriously, I have witnessed A/B testing go wrong in the past so I'm biased to blame everything on it. I wouldn't think this particular thing happened though. :)
What I could imagine is that they measure number of items bought or money spent, but even then if eg you don't also track how much of these people return stuff later you still might draw the wrong conclusions. Figuring out that a user is less likely to use your site six months down the line due to building frustration is even harder.
Amazon's founding principle of "customer obsession" has been turned inside out -- at least when it comes to thinking of us consumers as the cherished customers. Those days are over.
The new "customers" at the center of Amazon's business model are a global assortment of insta-merchants that don't make the products, don't handle their own logistics and don't have recognizable brands. So -- whoosh! -- in comes Amazon as the ultimate partner/toll-collector. For a fee (or actually for many fees) it will shine up these impostors to the point that they can conduct a lot of business on the Amazon platform.
When Amazon provides distorted search results, my hunch is that it's providing boosted listings for whatever pseudo-merchants are willing to pay up. Or that have agreed to buy other Amazon services. And, hey, Amazon is going the extra mile to make them feel well-treated
This is definitely the worst thing about Amazon. I pay them $120/year or whatever, and I search a specific product by a specific brand, and the entire browser screen shows me brands and even products I didn't even search for. I should not get ads in a store that I pay to use, especially in search.
I believe this occurs because Amazon allows sellers to promote their items by bidding on keywords— and often times, the highest quality keywords will be specific category-defining brands or products. At the same time, the original supplier of that brand or product keyword won’t need to spend their advertising budget on that query because customer conversion is high enough despite the friction.
Similarly, I think sponsored search results are unconscionable. Amazon is already taking a cut of every sale (which is obviously fine), but then they're also letting knock-off companies pay to show their product above the genuine article.
I'm going to assume you're in the USA, which may be incorrect.
I live in the third world, in Amazon's estimation-- Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands. If I search for something, there's a better-than-not chance that it will explicitly say in the search results under the item "ships to [Switzerland]," but when I click the item, I get "sorry, this item does not ship to your location" and I can't order it. It makes searching on Amazon incredibly frustrating because I have to click through every garbage 3rd-party knockoff of the thing I'm looking for to find the one garbage 3rd-party knockoff that ships to my uninhabited, remote shithole of the European backwaters (Zurich, Amsterdam, Cork). But will Amazon offer me an option to filter out things I can't have? No, of course not. Why? Shut up and stop asking questions, that's why.
What's worse, even this is still miles better than stuff-availability in Ireland was 20 years ago when I first moved over from Chicagoland. That was a blow to my expectations, I tell you hwat. I may have single-handedly kept eBay.com in the black between 2005-2016...
I also hate how the seller's pages are basically useless as well. I want to buy something from a specific brand and going to that page I can't find more than half of their product list on their own seller page.
While it's obvious that this is somehow commercially/financially advantageous to Amazon, I'd love to know more about why. What are the economics behind the shovelware merchandise Amazon upranks to users?
I think I'd probably cope with it including irrelevant and mislabelled stuff and the inevitable tons of Alibaba crap if it (.co.uk) didn't fail so hard at pagination that most of the results were inaccessible. Feels like some marketing bod has wargamed the "bust if we fix this people buy cheaper variants of the same product and don't check the Prime box" scenario and decided that as they're Amazon and people will use them regardless, broken search results are better than functional search results
In 2022, Amazon had 38 billion dollars in ad revenue. That's ads in that search page. Between the ad revenue, and variations in what sale is more profitable for Amazon, you get a lot of incentive misalignment. The page that makes Amazon the most money is not the one where the item you were thinking about is the first thing on the page. Giving you a worse page is just far more profitable.
My terrible suspicion is that these algos are good for the majority of people in the sense that they are prone to manipulation and buy these inferior borderline fraud products all the time, so the algo finds its target function results and optimize for these.
This is what we don’t seem to accept. Enshittification.
Also shipping and return policy is so convenient, that even the grumbling people are eating this up.
Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores. My biggest disappointment with them is that they never have what I want.
I think I'm OK with Amazon being Aliexpress for the US market. Sometimes I want to get random crap from the depths of Shenzhen, and Amazon is that. What is unfortunate is that they can't get "real" brands to sell there, because of their counterfeiting issue. The "mistake" Amazon made (that has probably made them hundreds of billions of dollars) was to let someone send in a box of crap and get paid when someone shopping for "Tide Laundry Detergent" gets their box of crap instead of Tide Laundry Detergent.
Other than that, they're where they are today because they're good. I just wouldn't buy anything valuable from them; laptops, cameras, phones, etc. Those you'll have to find a dedicated electronics retailer. But sometimes I'm like building a 3D printer and I want a touchscreen display or something for it... for $20 I can have one the same day. That is super neat. It works because no "brand" makes parts for hobbyists, and some company you've never heard of in China is actually the market leader. Amazon connects you to them... but also to billions of scammers. Caveat emptor.
Edit to add: I'm talking about the in-person stores. I have no idea what Wal-Mart and Target do online.
I'm prone to losing sunglasses, so some years ago I went through the process of testing out a dozen Alibaba sunglasses to find the best ones. I settled on one that's $4/pair, sturdy, and looks/feels/functions just like a $50 pair. Of course, being Alibaba, I had to buy it in bulk, so I now have sunglasses for life.
But that brings me to the type of site I want to see. Not curated luxury products like Le Creuset cookware at a markup, but curated dirt-cheap Alibaba products with low margins that have been tested and vetted extensively.
Massdrop or Monoprice are a little bit like this, but only for a few niches like headphones or cables.
Amazon is just SO EASY though. It's a vortex I can't escape. I tried ordering a Nintendo Switch from Walmart for my son's birthday. 3 days they told me. It didn't even ship. The website said I could "try" to cancel the order. "Try" I did, and that try failed. I then waited a few weeks and had to call them up and they said oh we will just mark it as lost in transit. Oh yeah, that sounds perfect. They wasted my time, they endangered my mission, they cost me money, and then THEY MADE ME TALK TO SOMEONE (who was very pleasant and it was pretty quickly resolved but that's a little cherry on a sundae made of poo,). Screw all that nonsense.
The only way for others to compete is to have a 3rd party help them all become just as easy as Amazon. We need someone to partner with Fedex and step up. Who can do it?
Rebranded .. I'm getting really annoyed with the same product, different prices, different brand names apparently generated by some China-based anagram generator
Sometimes curation just means higher prices. My local Best Buy curates electronics, but none of them are cheaper than the hundreds of additional brands you can find on Amazon.
You can’t get a $50 WiFi 6 access point at Best Buy, but you can find that on Amazon.
I think what you are describing is Walmart or Target but with filters applied to turn off third party sellers.
As an aside, what’s interesting about Amazon is that once you unsubscribe from Prime, it’s not incredibly competitive with AliExpress for the right types of products. Usually if you can wait a week, you can wait two and save more money.
Talk to friends and family, and only buy when someone has had a positive experience with a product before. Use outlets like consumer reports that do long-term reviews, etc.
The one time I used their ecommerce platform (due to a gift card), I got a damaged product drop-shipped as an Amazon gift.
Quality and trust are not words that I have ever associated with Walmart, even in the brick-and-mortar world where it is much harder to pull a fast one. Color me skeptical.
As someone who uses Amazon regularly, we live in different worlds. My experience is pleasant and straightforward; I get what I want and it arrives quickly.
Yeah we must. Nothing I but from Amazon is what I expect and top that off with it arrives late despite me paying for prime. I ordered a blender last week that doesn’t even blend, which I only realized after I had loaded it up with stuff to make a smoothie.
When things show up and actually are what I expect based off of the image and they work right it is a rare surprise.
If you have a specific product that you are looking for and it is eligible for Prime then I have found this to be the experience.
Where I have not found that is if I am browsing, e.g. today I wanted to look for an evaporative humidifier. The top results are sponsored and for brands I have never heard of like YougetTech. I find I have to depart Amazon, Google / Reddit for things to get a sense of what the trusted brands are and then go back on Amazon to purchase it.
I'm genuinely baffled at your experience . I can't think of a single Amazon search I've done recently, not one, which didn't result in a page 1 filled entirely with drop-shipped Chinese junk with keysmash brand names like RETVUKOR. It has become almost entirely useless.
I have experienced almost the full cycle of enshittification. I remember when it arrived in my country (Spain). It was great. The catalog was very good. Customer service was very responsive. If I had a problem, they would return the money, no questions asked.
We were foolish to think that situation would last.
Nowadays the search is unusable. Unless you go to an individual brand's "amazon shop", you will only get products from UUMEBE, SYLTOM and YGWEEN. And "Amazon's pick" will be either Amazon's own product or TROWLY. Perhaps on the fourth page you will get a proper brand. You get products at $1 with a shipping cost of $67. Customer service now asks many questions. When you want to return something, the site uses dark patterns to try to nudge you into getting the products to the post office yourself instead of sending you a messenger. And the prime subscription price went up.
I cancelled my prime account. If I want Chinese quality merchandise there's a Chinese store very nearby where I can go and look at the plastic at least.
My experience has been similar to yours in that things at least "felt" nice and convenient. That is, until the brand new first aid kit I ordered came with the safety seal broken and hastily taped over. Who knows what was done to the product? What if it was resealed with better effort? How could I possibly trust anything from Amazon?
Search Amazon for "Whetstone". You'll find tons of quality products from legitimate brands, mixed indiscriminately with the exact same dropshipped trash item repeated over and over for countless pages. Amazon has been entirely enshittified.
Amazon is great for buying products I already know I want. Prices are reasonable, shipping couldn’t be much faster (in my area), with Prime anyway. And it’s usually fairly easy to go directly to a known product (by name or model). Also their return policy can’t be beat by an online retailer (drop it off at Whole Foods/UPS, no box/shipping label needed).
Amazon is horrific for browsing or searching — anytime I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I want to have more data to inform a buying decision. Their reviews can’t be trusted, and their search results optimize Amazon and the sellers over the buyers.
I used to rely on Amazon for confidence in purchasing a good product, but that’s not been the case for 5-10 years. I have to do my research somewhere else (often Reddit) before making a purchase.
Unfortunately there are a number of products (e.g. iPhone cases) that even that’s impossible to do nowadays. But fortunately, these are usually cheaper products, so the risk is a bit lower.
I’ll still continue shopping at Amazon, once I know what I’m looking for, due to the things I mention in the first paragraph. But I no longer trust it for discovering products and informing choices there, particularly for anything meaningful.
They're fine at selling stuff, they're absolutely horrendous at being a place to search for a product if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. The solution is just to look for third-party specialist review sites who know what they're talking about.
They're risky if you do know what you're looking for, because of all the counterfeits and return scams and such. They're basically only OK if you're buying trash-tier goods on purpose, because there's no reason to counterfeit or scam with those and you already know they're going to be bad.
(a) don't care about the quality of, because they are either frivolously cheap or you are able to to the necessary 'QA' repairs and inspection yourself (for me these are things like circuit boards and household consumables);
(b) something you already know you want that specific thing of and the shipping speed and return policy make them the best online option;
(c) are only buying because you found it somewhere else and you didn't know you wanted it until you were told about it (deal sites like slickdeals are where I encounter this);
Are there any that you can recommend? Google seems very unreliable in that department these days, it's very hard to say which reviews are honest and which ones are basically ads. There's also the additional complication that some sites that try to be honest receive products from manufacturers, which limits what they can say to keep their manufacturer relationships going.
It's barely even usable for buying Kindle books anymore.
Half the time I get tricked into buying a book my Kindle doesn't support and I have to spend half an hour yelling at support to get my money back.
Because they let you do the "buy and deliver to my kindle" thing even when your kindle is not supported. Then only when you grab your kindle to sync you learn the bad news.
Speaking of tricks.. a while back I turned off my “reading insights” in the Kindle app. Recently I’ve been re-reading Asimov and kindle reading insights popped up to congratulate me on my reading streak. Wouldn’t you know it — they’ve been tracking my reading this whole time, and I looked into it and there is no opt out short of closing my account (and subsequently losing access to my kindle library). Just absurd levels of stalking in the pursuit of data.
Not only does this almost never happen to me, but Amazon has added a Refund button that works automatically. If you select “Remove from Library” within a time window, it asks if you want a refund now. I have run into some bad scans, but never had a problem getting an instant refund. What’s fascinating is how different experiences are.
Really? That's super surprising, I probably buy a dozen or so books every year now (and used to order far more when I was living abroad and there wasn't a decent english bookstore in my city) and have never had an issue. Now trying to use goodreads... that's a mess
It feels like it's reverting to how it was in the early 2010's -- dozens of identical super low quality knockoffs, normal brand name products that are overpriced or just absent from their store, reviews that can't be trusted, and dealing with third-party sellers of varying legitimacy. Around the time they started prime, there started having a lot more product variety and the prices of the knockoffs were pretty good for the quality. But over the last few years, prices have gone up a lot and a lot of the negative qualities of the past have returned.
In my experience, Amazon has devolved into AliExpress/DHGate but with higher prices and faster shipping. The throwaway products also make more of an effort to Americanize the syllables of their brand name
You’re in a bubble if you believe this. On a personal level sure, but my middle aged and old family members use it for everything and they are the last ones to understand internet things. They have 0 complaints, though I personally have my own issues with listing quality and review growth hacking.
While I don't think it's the best shopping experience on the web, I've also never understood those who have claimed it's awful in recent years. I'd be interested in what it is specifically that you don't like? And what changes you would like them to make to make it better?
I think part of the problem they've been having is that because they're an "everything store" they don't have a clear target audience so disappoint everyone. There are online stores I love out there, but they tend to be opinionated about the type of products they stock and how they do things, so although I have less of a selection it's more likely to be stuff I want. But that opinionated nature means a lot of people just won't shop with them because it's not what they want.
A lot of the issues I seem to hear here stem from relatively high end consumers seeing cheap products on Amazon and not liking that it's difficult to find the quality. But similarly elsewhere I read accounts from people looking for cheap products and saying that there are cheaper places to shop these days. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon was just a little more opinionated about what they stock whether that would help a bit. It would at least reduce disappointment. Although I suppose that goes against their whole ethos of having everything.
> vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's actually good.
I would like a "what store is everything in" product. Search for something, and it gives you back matching products in stores 5/10/50 miles from you; purchase online, pickup from the store (or pay for an ubereats like delivery). As you build a cart, it attempts to cluster items. You get the convenience of search and online purchase, so that you don't waste time wandering around stores and not finding things, and you get the item in your hand quicker if you're prepared to go get it once purchased.
Big advantage to whoever built it: you don't need to compete with Amazon on logistics. On the other hand, you have a hell of a network effect to overcome, though if you focused on one geography only to start, it could be doable.
Such a thing, if it took off, could reinvigorate physical retail businesses. Google had a half-assed attempt for a while with local shopping, but they never really pushed it that hard...which I think was a missed opportunity.
I think google still does this, but yes it’s probably very half-assed.
I think the real product there would be a universal inventory system for all stores. And small stores like local hardware stores might not have comprehensive inventory, so then you get in to things like inventory scanning robots.
Point being there’s several layers of missing pieces (I believe, I know next to nothing about retail) that make the top layer hard or impossible. Google for example is probably plugging in to APIs for a few large stores like target and Walmart and skipping all the little ones.
I guess another option is a store network that is a franchise model of one company. All the products come from that company but franchise owners decide what they actually stock and carry. So they could be a hardware store or a home goods store etc but it’s all one centralized system underneath. Each store has a standard fulfillment system so you can pick up in store or get things shipped.
Alternatively it would be nice to see an Amazon style store but everything is vetted as decent quality. Problem is it’s just hard to keep up with the flow of new goods from overseas showing up on Amazon and if you’re going to vet items for quality that’s going to add overhead. I guess that’s basically what stores like Target do.
I recommend using a sophisticated ad blocker like uBlock origin or AdGuard for Safari to disable most of the irrelevant stuff and upsells that Amazon pushes to keep you shopping for hours instead of finding what you were looking for.
I started a personal collection where I just kept removing sponsored content or really anything that wasn’t relevant to what I was searching for or what was in my cart. I spend way less time on Amazon now. It’s not really meant for general use, and I don’t update it much, but here’s what I have if anyone wants to try it for themselves:
They have a lot of things (excluding books) but they are only interesting in switzerland: Galaxus.ch (their site is available in english, german, italian and french). They have the best speed and filters i have tried. And the ui is relatively compact compare to other online retailers i have access to. Reichlt in Germany has good filters but they are very slow where i am accessing them from.
Unfortunately every retailer are also starting to be a platform for other shops as well, inflating their numbers and polluting their search results.
SEVERAL of the products on the first page werer knock off Legos in boxes that looked almost identical to actual Lego boxes, fonts, numbering, and all.
It’s just a scam site now that happens to also sell legitimate products.
Searching for other products results in more irrelevant products every day. Even searching for exact product names will not get you that product that you know is on there. The search seems to have been gamed into a mess.
I've found that, at least on the mobile app, results are filtered by "Featured" which fills the results with irrelevant sponsored products. So each time I search for an item, I then have to go under Filters and select Best Rating, Highest Selling, etc. It's a bit tedious but seems to be a shortcut through all of the BS results they show you by default.
De-duping products across made-up brands is the most sorely needed feature in the era of no effort drop shipping. This should be supremely feasible with the latest generation of ai image recognition/labeling capabilities. More many product categories this would decimate the number of options that need to be considered.
> They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have an amazing logistics network
... and because they have terms that are actively anti-competitive, like if you sell there, you can't sell the same items anywhere else online for a lower price (even if the other venue has lower associated costs).
Yeah. I am quietly anti-Amazon so I mostly do not use the site. Occasionally, I'll browse for something I need and its really a shitshow:
- searching for a brand, rarely returns items by the brand
- search results are extremely poor and quickly get worse as you browse
- they hold packages for shipping by non-prime members
I haven't used Amazon regularly in several years so maybe it is more apparent for me. I also don't trust the "higher" end products to not be counterfit. It's a classic case of overoptimization, they may make more money but the experience is SO BAD. I have bought elsewhere because it was honestly kind of a chore to find what I wanted on the site.
In theory this is Costco. I have a membership to both Amazon and Costco, but for some reason keep using Amazon. I assume this is because 1) habits are hard to change and 2) Amazon is guaranteed to have what I’m looking for, even if ultimately it’s not very good.
Retail is so low-margin that it will never be very good.
Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, are all very imperfect businesses. Even Costco is rough to deal with for the suppliers - there’s just no way to do this at scale while being all nice and fuzzy
Seriously. Even worse there are things I want, I know the name and the brand but I can't order from Amazon because of the high risk of counterfeits. I hope they either get their house in order or someone eats their lunch.
I uninstalled it a few weeks ago because the Android app started injecting a "search this term on Amazon" button that popped when whenever I selected text in any app
third party sellers and "commingling" have all but ruined Amazon for me :/. even shipped and sold by Amazon can yield you fake products (worst performance, not as advertised, knock offs, unsafe, etc).
but I guess it generates too much money for Amazon to care :(
As far as I can tell they for me also seem to not do their due diligence when it comes to handling consumer deception and abuse of their marked platform.
Honestly I'm surprised that there have not been any larger scale legal consequences given that Amazone seems to be economically harmful to the domestic market (kills domestic competition but in different to the competition manages to avoid a lot more taxes) of most non-US countries and it's given them perfect munition to use PR and legal means under the guise of consumer protection against it.
Just to be clear protectionism is a dangerous tool, which only should be wielded in a generic non target specific way, like requiring online shopping platforms, even if they sometimes just act as a proxy, to fulfill a certain degree of due diligence when it comes to effectively handling fraudulent companies selling through them. That also probably could get ride of TEMU (which is more a tool of spying, economical warfar and other bad stuff then any honest competitive selling platform, they are losing too much money on each sale for that).
I mean a think which had been true before the internet was that if you can't provide a service reasonable safely you can't provide it at all (grossly oversimplified, not that people didn't try and got away with it). No reason this shouldn't apply to the internet. (Many TEMU products are not legal to be imported in the EU, often due to safety reasons, sometimes due to other reasons like being imitations of (Nazi germany time) Nazi artifices and stuff like that).
the problem is capitalism necessitates enshittification.
you aren't getting a contender as long as the regulations are abhorrently lax about both the workers and the sellers. along with consumer rights. there just is no economic incentive to improve but rather dig the moat.
(1) Expand network of friends/family. (2) Buy only when you get a recommendation from friends/family. (3) profit? :)
Asking the government to create regulations for product quality just means that the lobbyists who actually write those regulations are going to fuck you over yet again.
I wonder if the comments saying Amazon is terrible for shopping is due to the same ppl browsing Amazon, rather than actually shopping for the one or two things they need? I've never had a problem finding what I want in my searches. I also don't browse...and I can see how that might result in Amazon showing a person browsing all kinds of things not realizing that THIS TIME they really do want that item.
I’ve noticed there are different shopping styles though, even in physical stores. Some people go to the store with no idea what they want or just a vague idea that they want something, and will browse the store to see if anything interests them. Other people will go to the store knowing exactly what item they want, and don’t need to browse.
I’m the latter, and I’ve never had an issue with Amazon. I know what I want, so it’s trivial for me to just go straight to it and buy it.
But other people that like to browse… I can definitely see how they would get caught in the endless see of EFUZZYA and OPANKY products.
I avoid Amazon as a rule, but when I try to buy something which is out of stock on sites (like say a dietary supplement), I go through the reviews and will inevitably find someone saying it tastes or smells funny. There are plenty of positive reviews as well, but for something that can impact my health, I don't want to roll the dice with Amazon's utter lack of quality control.
I have problems finding what I need with searches. Even if it gives me results that match the query, the quality is suspect and sometimes the reviews are blatantly fake. Do you often search for a brand name, popular item? If it's something I can find reviews about on other websites, it's easy to find on Amazon, but anything else is not a great time.
But the thing doesn't look half bad one the pictures. Looks like something you might get from IKEA under one of their "slightly better quality" lines (which at least in the EU are pretty good choice if you don't want to spend too much on furniture but also feel that the main line lines from IKEA are a bit to cheap in quality).
The fine folks at <checks notes> FOPEAS would never tarnish their good name by stooping to such a stunt. I mean, we might expect such shenanigans from the likes of SMURGBLOZ, KINSURGE, or GSIROOZ, but not FOPEAS, fine purveyors of `FOPEAS an AI Language Model I do not Have Access to The Context of The SFD You are referring to. Can You Please Provide me with More Information so That I can Assist You Better`
It looks good but its probably pigiron with cheap paint that will flake off and particle board. I’m done buying cheap stuff. By the time ten years have gone by you’ve spent more on cheap stuff replacing the broken cheap stuff than the buy it for life option would have ever cost.
I don’t think that’s quite true. I’ve spent less on two entire suites of IKEA furniture that I used for roughly 15 years (as student and young professional) than I spent on the single table that now stands in our living room.
I bought a headset. it turned out not to support Bluetooth. upon wanting to return the headset, they set it would not be possible. that was until I found a line in their listing that said it should support Bluetooth.
I am quite sure that line cam. in because somebody just copy pasted the wrong file to the listing.
the merchants will be liable for what they let the LLMs promise on behalf of them.
So much of this bot store ships from Amazon... It's mind boggling to imagine how much waste this physical spam introduces, from manufacturing, to shipping to the Amazon warehouse, to warehousing. All for low-quality dupes that aren't even represented by a real business.
Capitalism might be eating itself, it has become impossible to shop online in the past few years.
Speaking from Brazil:
- Google shopping shows very few local stores, most of the listings I get are from overseas stores, many don't even ship to Brazil, and prices don't reflect shipping and import fees
- Google Ads are useless, as they're often unrelated to the query, tailored simply to whoever company pays more for words
- Amazon, besides the fake and bad listings, now has ads on itself, so it's not only hard to find what you need, now you need to scroll past the unwanted ads, too, just like in Google
- Most previously nice online shops have copied Amazon and turned into marketplaces, and suffer from the exact same issues, with shitloads of fake listings, drop-shipping scams, bot-reviews, etc.
- Local giants like Mercado Libre have their own issues, like absent categorization or indexing of listings, so you're left with randomly writing queries that might or not match what you need, so you never know if you can't find an item because it's not available or because you just didn't guess correctly how it's listed
- Chinese giants like Shopee and AliExpress suffer from the usual issues of long delivery times, bad customer service, low quality ripoff, etc.
So contrary to my own previous beliefs and predictions, I find myself doing MORE brick-and-mortar shopping, not less.
I know this is the wrong takeaway from this post, but how lazy are these scammers? A simple regex would have caught this and saved them a huge amount of embarrassment.
The AI ouroboros - first we grab data from the Internet to train our LLMs, then our LLMs slowly become the majority of data from the Internet. "Low background noise" tokens will become a scarce commodity.
They don’t speak english. Or it’s via their automated supply chain adding in “AI” features nobody asked for. We don’t need a model to say Black Dresser. However, providing a service that says “give me your inventory and we’ll list it on Amazon” is probably what’s at play here. Random brand name, AI generated description, midjourney images, real cash sales, no goods shipped.
Based on other postings I'm seeing, it seems like they may be unaffiliated middlemen finding products online then marking then up 30%. The original seller may have no idea their product is being resold this way.
They use automation tools to sell/resell tons of Chinese products. From what I've seen they're interested in flooding the market with their stuff, everything else is secondary.
Probably no real human in the loop. This is a bot scrapping Chinese retailers and automatically creating several Amazon "sellers", with descriptions generated from whatever photos the retailer page had. The products are likely shipped either from China or bought in bulk and kept in a subcontracted storage somewhere in USA. It doesn't matter is 90% of the "sellers" end being flagged and deleted, they can create thousands more and eventually someone will buy their crap.
This pollutes the marketplace to the point where I gave up trying to find any real product on it, but Amazon actually encourages this behavior. They automatically label and classify "products" in their store because the titles, descriptions and tags from Chinese resellers are abysmal and discoverability would be impossible otherwise.
Nine hours after this was posted the link is 404'ing and about 90% of the links in the comments are also showing a 404. Is some Amazon employee spending their friday afternoon manually removing product listings?
It's Amazon's signature style to make the bad press go away without addressing the underlying issue that generated the bad press to begin with. Their culture is to hand everyone a pager and pull them in to fix the "problem" through just-in-time heroics rather than spend the money to build a system that's resilient to suckage in the first place. And "fixing" means tediously swatting down specific instances that are made public.
1. Allow 20,000 bads to happen through systemic enshittification
2. Get called out on 20 of the bads
3. Hurry up and have some poor sap manually "fix" the bads being highlighted in the public forum
4. "We've fixed every bad we've been informed of!"
I miss the times where Amazon search was dumber. Nothing more infuriating than typing an exact model number and the exact thing you're not looking for not appearing or be buried in a mountain of other products, some of them not even related to what you're looking for, because of some stupid personalization algorithm that is too smart for its own good.
Category and product pages are completely useless, sorting by any attribute does something, but that something is anything but sorting.
Not to mention that if by sheer luck you find whatever you want to find, be sure to order it immediately or at least add it to your cart. No guarantees that the search you did now will work ever again.
Unsure if it was from someone who had a real experience and used ChatGPT to help them word it, or if it was a nefarious actor (e.g. competitor) lazily bad-mouthing competition.
Would ChatGPT really output a malformed sentence like that? From what I've seen the impressive part is it makes correct English sentences (whether they make sense or are true or not is another matter). This looks like something a human with regular/bad English would write.
It has to be something like that, because why even bother using a LLM to create a title for a piece of furniture.
Side note: Amazon really needs to get around to fix the fact that their "search" can only find terms in titles and not in the descriptions or product meta data.
I'd guess the more mundane, someone probably had a spreadsheet of a few thousand updates or improvements, checked a reasonable sample of them, then accepted the lot of then. I bet you they don't make that mistake next time.
In case anyone is confused (since the link goes to a 404 page now), the link appeared to go to a product listing of a dresser but the name of the product was the name of this posting, “I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request…”
Let's suppose that the hypest of the hype is real - that OpenAI is sitting on some world changing AGI tech. Are we really ready for the Cyberpunk future where corporate policies are enacted with the same force as law?
"Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! Estás usando este software de traducción in forma incorrecta. Por favor, consultar el manual. I don't even know what I just said, but I can find out!"
This feels like something of a non story to me. Using AI for product descriptions seems like an obvious and reasonable use case; and data entry errors are not uncommon nor terribly harmful in the context.
I think it's a sign of what's to come. A world where many things are done so shoddily and with such little regard that it becomes nearly impossible to navigate. You sift through a pile of crap trying to get basic shopping done, descriptions that are wrong and nonsensical, fictional product photos that are useless to judge scale or fitness for purpose, etc. When you finally find what you need, you end up receiving the wrong item because no one in the supply chain gave a shit. You try to get this resolved, and are bounced around a series of half-broken customer service bots. It's difficult and expensive to find alternatives who do give a shit, because the automated companies have driven prices (and quality) into the ground, and it ends up being cheaper and easier to let it go and try your luck again.
I don't know if that will come to pass or not, I sure hope not, but I think it's a real possibility and that things like this are the early warnings.
That way of looking at it feels like it focuses on the one error while ignoring that, in all likelihood, the same action that caused the error, probably improved 1000 other listings.
I guess I'm a glass half full kinda person, this shows me that someone is working on improving things. And I bet they're quite flush from all the attention cause by their oversight in a big spreadsheet. I bet they won't miss the next one. :)
HA! That explains it why this book [1] has Donald Trump as its cover with a completely unrelated title, even though it's about Django web framework LOL!
Amazon has gone from being good to mostly worse than useless except as joke/meme material. Not for everything, though. Still pretty good for books - prob some other things too.
wow it's crazy to see all the marketing babble that has evolved since we all just used adwords/adsense, doubleclick, web rings, and affiliate programs without really thinking about it in the early 00s and didn't have made up words for all these things nor did we think at all about targeting. The really fancy ones among us might say things like SEO, PPC, PPM, and ROI but that was about it
Most likely these fake accounts are created by firms who are selling access to mass-likes/follows. They sell the ability to get 10k fake accounts to follow your legitimate account, if you wish to boost your legitimate account, for some reason. Or, these fake accounts are created by intelligence agencies in order to run influence operations. Both of these possibilities have been reported on in the mainstream press. Maybe there's a third explanation that I haven't considered.
I was going to submit one, but it said that Amazon had flagged the item as having suspicious review behavior, so I'm guessing a lot of others had the same idea.
I bought my partner a Sony camera and lens for Christmas.
Contacted them on Christmas day to tell them it was faulty.
It’s the 13th January and they still haven’t refunded.
Been in touch and they say it should be refunded by February.
Nearly £4K. And the only present I got for my partner (it cleared my bank buying that). Total disaster.
Moral of the story: do not buy presents from Amazon. Do not buy anything which you aren’t prepared to wait a couple of months on a refund. And do not trust the statements about refunds in 5-7 days max.
I get that this is basically fraud and spam, but this should really highlight the dangers of letting an unattended LLM do anything for your company at all.
It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
I don't find this any different than seeing an exposed jinja template: "{{product_name}} is perfect people who work in {{customer_industry}}" or the typical recruiter "Dear {{candidate}} I read your profile carefully and think you'd be perfect for {{job_title}} because of your experience at {{random_co_from_resume}}"
If anything, I think it's kind of cool that we're seeing LLMs actually used for something very practical, even if it is spammy (I mean I don't think template engines are evil just because they make spam easier).
I don't think LLMs are evil either, but I think the real risks are extremely underplayed. This is a mostly innocuous example, but there are a lot of people trying to get LLMs into more places where the just aren't ready for yet.
The difference between a template is that the behavior is generally deterministic. Even if someone fucks it up, it means it's (usually) trivial to fix.
A legitimate item from the totally legit company "FOPEAS" that's being sold for $100 less at vidaxl.com and is still probably made from formaldehyde-soaked wood and covered in lead paint.
Is this a dramatic fuckup? Because it quite possibly successfully created tens of thousands of listings more or less successfully. This one will probably generate no sales, but were there any consequences for this mistake?
What dangers? Nobody will see any consequences for this: not Amazon-- they're a monopoly, they don't give a shit-- and not the seller-- who probably won't see any impact whatsoever on their sales or reputation, and will just recreate under a new shell name if they do.
The fact that LLMs drive the cost of junk text production to zero is a tremendous opportunity when there is no penalty for messing up. It's the same think as bulk spam mailing: if it's free, there's no reason not to keep trying even if only one a million is a success.
Frequent run-ins with listings like this will definitely build (even more of) a reputation in some users' minds that Amazon is a spam-filled and unproductive place to look for things, but yes—it would take a lot to actually threaten their market position.
To err is human. To fuck up a million times per second, you need a computer.
Granted, here at the beginning of 2024, an LLM can not quite attain that fuck up velocity. But take heart! Many of the smartest people on Earth are working on solving that exact problem even as you read this.
No. Random employees have a well-understood distribution of mostly normal human errors of certain types and estimated severity, relative to unattended LLM which has a poorly-understood distribution of errors in both type and severity. (“SolidGoldMagikarp”.)
Why is it that LLMs are so often compared to employees and their responsibilities? In my opinion, it is an employee that actively USES the LLM as a tool and this employee (or his/her employer) is responsible for the results.
The employee generally knows they fucked up and can escalate the issue. Discussion on whether or not this actually happens will follow in comments below.
No, not at all. People can be held accountable for the decisions they make. You can have a relationship of trust between people. LLMs do not have these properties.
>> unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
> So, just like any other random employee?
Right, might as well just replace it all with a roll of the dice in that case. Wait do we have to quantify our comparisons? no, no, sorry, I almost forgot this was the internet for a second.
yes, but humans have contracts and plausible deniability and all that jazz from companies. A human can't go on a shooting spree that will end up getting the employer sued for that very reason.
Why do people not understand that LLMs can do things at scale, next year they can form swarms, etc.
Swarms of LLMs are not comparable to an employee, they have far better coordination and can carry out long-term conspiracies far better than any human collective. They can amass reputation and karma (as is happening on this very site, and Reddit, etc. daily) and then deploy it in coordinated ways against any number of opponents, or to push public opinion towards a specific goal.
It's like comparing a CPU to a bunch of people in an office calculating tables.
Amazon, in general, is not the place to shop for "brands renowned throughout the world."
Most of those folks stay off amazon, and If you're lucky enough to find such a brand on Amazon the chances that you receive a counterfeit version are pretty great.
Although if I had an endless bag of money to burn it'd be fun to buy an Amazon Rolex [0] just to see how it's handled.
I think the “IM JUST AN AI MODEL FROM OPEN AI, I CANT DO THAT” drawers are actually more famous for their quality and engineering details than Rolexes. You’re right, that probably means this is counterfeit, but my heart skipped a beat with excitement just seeing they had it in stock.
That is, of course, their premium drawers, and it looks like they’re sold out of their “I found this on the web. Please unlock your iPhone to view more” bar cart as well.
It actually is... ? For every brand, I search amazon first. They usually have it cheaper, with fast delivery and reliable return policy. Better than most brand webshops. If brand/quality wouldn't matter I would go to Ali.
I love my FOPEAS counters! I got them for free in exchange for my honest review. I haven't assembled them yet, but my cat loves to sit on the box. 5 stars!
"received quickly, looks good, haven't tried yet" were always concerning reviews on ahem, darker markets. You always wondered if they tried it and died so they couldn't come back to update their review, but reviews like that were rampant.
And I don't think the FTC was up to the marketplace's neck, they were actually honest and genuine reviews someone took the time out of their day to submit.
I bought junk furniture like this when I was in college. It’s actually much worse than ikea.
If you are careful when putting together ikea furniture, certain models are actually really durable and sturdy. Oh and of course sometimes the European models are nicer than the American ones.
IKEA has huge economies of scale, a ruthless focus on efficiency, little marketing, and reasonably low margins (~8%).
At any given price point, their products are likely to be the best available, with the caveat that they do offer things at price points where everything in the market is disposable crap. Their mid-price stuff can be great value though.
I’ve bought a number of IKEA products made from solid wood that are 10+ years old, have moved multiple times, and still look/work great, including some Hemnes dressers.
When do we as a society get to the point where we feel requiring Amazon to have products be human-reviewed before posting is a burden that the $1.602T company can probably shoulder?
I really hope they keep this up and it gets “real reviews” so we can prove Amazon is full of shit. It’s so full of shit I don’t buy products unless it has many thousands of reviews just because of noise
Amazon is effective in promoting products based on user cookies. The price indeed fluctuates to compete with rivals. They often curate products that provide higher margins. Sometimes, it is challenging to determine the best product from reviews due to mixed experiences worldwide.
Submitted earlier today - would be nice if people instead of re-submitting the exact same thing that didn't get traction, emailed hn@yc and asked for it to go in the second chance pool, it's more polite to the original submitter.
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
Original is gone, maybe this should replace the submission link.
The seller's account is unaffected, including the full remainder of their scammy inventory in all its AI-nglish glory.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=FOPEAS
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(Archive links are welcome in the comments but it's best if the top level URL shows the original site.)
Nah, this wrong link provides some useful context
[dead]
I snapped a screenshot of it when this article was fresh
https://i.imgur.com/EmSKgP6.png
Imgur gives a 404 not found error for me..
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The snapshot is no longer available at the URL.
I love how Amazon has gone from customer obsession to the lowest of the lowest common denominator. Easiest boycott of my life to stop buying tripe from them.
They’ve successfully pivoted from customer obsession to obsessed customers.
Everything on Amazon is shady knock-off garbage.
I made the mistake of buying bandaids from there, they looked like a brand name but slightly off, they gave my kids rashes.
I made the mistake of buying LED light bulbs from there, the brand name was reputable but who knows if what I actually got was the same brand or a copy, they started flickering and randomly going out within a year.
I made the mistake of buying an LED monitor from there. It turned out to be some third party seller with a ridiculous return policy, so even though I had been conditioned to think Amazon had good return policy, now that they let third party sellers set their own policies I had to eat 30% of cost to return it.
No more Amazon for me.
Amazon sells a bunch of knockoff oil filters. I accidentally bought them for a Toyota and luckily noticed. Imagine blowing an engine because you tried to buy an OEM filter.
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Light bulbs and batteries, I had to quit. Even if you’re buying name-brand, they’re so often counterfeit, it’s just not worth it.
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Back in 2010, in the insurance industry we were warned that imported electrical products were found forging the UL (Underwriters Laboratories) labels. Surge protectors and electrical strips were cited as prone to meltdown at the time.
I don't know if this was ever made public knowledge, but I'm wondering if this is now coming to fruition a decade later with all these e-bike fires.
I figure if I ever need to commit arson I'm just going to charge a Chinese e-bike on a Chinese power strip and feign ignorance.
Wow you did buy one of everything. So you definitely have the authority to say
> Everything on Amazon is shady knock-off garbage.
I have had the opposite experience. Everything I have bought over the past 20 years has been legit, except for one single thing.
I'm honestly confused how many people run into "nothing but counterfeits" and others never see any (or maybe the counterfeits aren't actually worse quality so this goes unnoticed)
The good thing with Amazon is their lax return policy. You have 1 month to test the product and if you don't like it, you return it to one of several available places (Wholefoods, Amazon locker, UPS, even leave it at the door for UPS to pick up, etc.)
No other store/website even comes close to this. BB gives you 2 weeks to try the product, and you'd have to drive all the way to their location to return the thing.
I keep purchasing from Amazon mainly because of the return policy, but I agree that there are cheaper options out there.
A Amazon marketplace product I ordered was wrong. I ordered a memory module and got the wrong one. After checkingy order I saw that I ordered the right one. No problem, I thought. Filled a return form, entered "wrong product" as reason, send it back.
The marketplace reseller denied my refund because he claims I swapped the product. I escalated the issue to the Amazon support. They told my that this decision is final and I can nothing do about it. I let my lawyer send them a letter. Only then Amazon gave me my money back.
This if the story how Amazon lost me as a long time customer because of poor and stubborn support over a 23€ product.
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It’s weird to me that they refuse to do price adjustment for sales and force customers to return items and purchase again.
Who’s getting shafted on processing these returns?
Costco? Essentially lifetime return policy except 3 months on electronics.
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I tried to quit shopping from Amazon, and I did find alternatives. But, where do you buy your electronics from? a TV, a GPU, a monitor? What's their return policy?
Amazon is 12 month 0% APR installments on anything >$50, 5% cash back on everything else, no questions asked drop-off at Whole Foods/UPS returns/pickups. Your money is back in your pocket that day.
I tried Best Buy, NewEgg, and eBay. NewEgg, you'd think, would be better. But their return policy is non-existent compared to the convenience Amazon provides.
I think how I feel Amazon.com has degraded is that they've made it so smooth to shop that I end up buying things I don't need. It feels like the site has spliced itself into my "oh yeah I can solve that" internal loop and makes me spend $30 on some crappy (cheap) solution and before I know it it's on my doorstep.
Big-ticket items are easily bought directly from the brands.
I had the choice of buying my 65" LG from Amazon, sure, I have an account already. But someone (Reddit?) suggested to buy directly from LG to make sure you get a factory-fresh box. Seeing all the Amazon shenanigans, it was an easy decision. 10 minutes and I checked out the new TV from LG directly.
I buy small household items from Amazon, floor wipe refills, batteries - and these are not at risk of being scammy products in the first place, unless someone is a total dolt.
As for return policies - that's just a matter of doing your homework. I don't think I ever returned anything to Amazon.
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Costco for TVs and monitors. GPUs are a bit harder to find in stores, admittedly.
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> But, where do you buy your electronics from? a TV, a GPU, a monitor? What's their return policy?
That seems so strange to me. Here in Germany we have countless electronics shops that have better (as in cleaner, well categorized) inventory as well as better prices than Amazon. Amazon can work quite well for these devices but it's just one of many options. Not using something like Geizhals to compare prices very likely results in overpaying.
And of course, a minimum return policy of 14 days is set via european legislation for all shops.
In London I’ll just go into town and do high street shopping the old fashioned way. For anything too big or unwieldy then John Lewis is a safe bet and their return policy is great. In some cases I’ll just go direct to the brand or some other company I know has a good rep (like Scan for computer parts). For books I’ll browse a local book shop or Waterstones and if I leave empty handed then bookshop.org is my online backup.
The last few times I tried to buy anything expensive from Amazon, the item I received was faulty and I ended up just sending it back and buying a replacement direct from the retailer. I also don’t care at all about next day delivery since if I need something so urgently I can just go out and find it myself.
Any other online store without 3rd party resellers? Over here for computer parts I use mostly use Megekko, Alternate and Azerty. For batteries it is Replacedirect. For printer supplies it is 123Inkt. I can't imagine other regions not having similar options.
These days I avoid 'market' places like Amazon and Bol like the plague as I've been bitten too many times.
from Costco
> I love how Amazon has gone from customer obsession to the lowest of the lowest common denominator.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I don't remember this halcyon time where amazon was able to distinguish themselves from competitors to the consumer via anything but listed inventory. Their website has always been a cluttered mess filled with spam....
What I remember being useful was that, when you clicked on an item, somewhere on the page would be a carousel with items that other customers who looked at that item eventually ended up buying/also looked at. It was genuinely helpful information that generally would make it faster to find what you were actually looking for.
At some point they got rid of that despite it being useful. I assume that Amazon prefers being able to control what you see when you search for an item. Now you’ll still see carousels and comparison tables when you click on an item, but it’s all stuff that vendors paid to have placed there (or that Amazon decided it wants you to see).
You probably haven’t been using it long enough. 12 years ago+ it was amazing
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I basically use them as a delivery service. I only come to Amazon with a brand and model already in mind. Get basically instant delivery. Return it anywhere, any condition. Nowadays, manufacturers have started accepting payments directly and even payment plans and I still get quick shipping so they’re losing their edge there.
customer obsession, but the customer they're obsessed with is the scammy marketplace seller, because that's who they really make money off of.
Does Amazon have no review/verification for what gets uploaded on their store?
Not entirely, they can't check every single thing, and because they inventory mix, if I have a legit product and you have a fake, once it's all tagged as the same, they'll send whichever one the system picks regardless of who's 'store' I buy from.
Additionally, because of inventory mixing, they don't really know who put the fraud in and who didn't (maybe they do, but they don't seem to do anything about it)
Additionally, some of the stuff on the site is not stored or shipped by them at all, you buy from the store site and it gets shipped from the vendor.
So no, they really haven't made a system that they can use to validate their items sold at scale.
Of course not.
[dead]
Easy fix since ChatGPT always apologises for not complying: any description or title containing the word "sorry" gets flagged for human oversight. Still orders of magnitude faster than writing all your own spam texts.
I think it would be better to ask it to wrap the answer with some known marker like START_DESCRIPTION and END_DESCRIPTION. This way if it refuses you'll be able to tell right away.
As another user pointed out, sometimes it doesn't refuse by using the word "sorry".
In the same vein, I had a play with asking ChatGPT to `format responses as a JSON object with schema {"desc": "str"}` and it seemed to work pretty well. It gave me refusals in plaintext, and correct answers in well-formed JSON objects.
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Correct
However it's usually the laziest/more indifferent people that will use AI for product descriptions and won't care for such techniques
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Except when it doesn't:
https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...
The seller account's entire product list is a stream of scraped images with AI-nglish descriptions slapped on by autopilot. If you can cast thousands of lines for free and you know the ranger isn't looking, you don't need good bait to catch fish.
That link already leads to a "not found" page.
I hope it was because they are banning those catch fish, and not an isolated case due you put the link.
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AInglish is such a good word, thanks for that
Sometimes it "apologizes" rather than saying "sorry", you could build a fairly solid heuristic but I'm not sure you can catch every possible phrasing.
OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
> OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
Is a safety net kicking in or is the model just trained to respond with a refusal to certain prompts? I am fairly sure it's usually the latter, and in that case even OpenAI can't be sure a particular response is a refusal or not.
Just feed the text to a new ChatGPT conversation and ask it whether the text is an apology or a product description.
Or do traditional NLP, but letting ChatGPT classify your text is less effort to set up
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> OpenAI could presumably add a "did the safety net kick in?" boolean to API responses, and, also presumably, they don't want to do that because it would make it easier to systematically bypass.
This exists and is a free API: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation
It's hilarious that people think ChatGPT is about to change the world when interaction with it is this primitive.
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Why not have a separate chat request to apology-check the responses?
Not my original idea, there was a link from HN where the dev did just that.
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Time to create on algorithm that operates on the safety flag boolean to optimize phrases to bypass it
You could go full circle and ask OpenAI to determine if another instance of OpenAI was apologetic.
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Here's a crazy idea - one should double-check their own listings when using ChatGPT to generate them.
next up, retailers find out that copies of the board game Sorry! are being autodeclined. The human review that should have caught it was so backlogged that there is a roughly 1/3 chance of it timing out in the queue and the review task being discarded.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sorry
Hmm someone else suggested this would be an issue, but the overall percentage of products with sorry in their description is very small and having the human operator flag it is a false positive is still, as I say, orders of magnitude faster than wiring your own product descriptions.
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This is exactly what I learned working on Internet scale data. A new dude will walk in, proclaim that a simple rule will solve all your problems.
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I would just make it respond ONLY in JSON and if it's non-compliant formatting then don't use it. I doubt it'd apologize in JSON format. A quick test just now seems to work
If you're using the API's JSON mode, it will apologize in JSON. If you prompt asking for JSON not in that mode, it should work like you're thinking.
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Sorry, "Sorry!" the board game. Your name contains invalid characters.
No, the human review glances at it for 3 seconds and flags the false positive before it goes online.
I’d create an embedding center by averaging a dozen or so apology responses. If the output has an embedding too close to that cluster you can handle the exception appropriately.
Just have a second AI validate the first and tell it that its job is spotting fake products.
And have a third AI watching the other two and have it pull the plug in case they start plotting a hostile takeover.
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You joke but this is unreasonably effective. We're prototyping using LLms to extract, among other things, names from arbitrary documents.
Asking the LLm to read the text and output all the names it found -> it gets the names but there's lots of false positives.
Asking the LLM to then classify the list of candidate names it found as either name / not name -> damn near perfect.
Playing around with it it seems that the more text it has to read the worse it performs at following instructions so having low accuracy pass on a lot of text followed by a high-accuracy pass on a much smaller set of data is the way to go.
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Why Amazon is not able to actually verify sellers real identities and terminate their accounts? I would imagine that they should be able to force them to supply verifiable national identification/bank account etc. How do these sellers get away with these?
Amazon does verify and also actively tries to blocks bad sellers. Details of this are easily found online.
Is there a problem with this seller beyond their tooling malfunctioning?
Funny to see people seriously trying to be creative and find solutions to something that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
Maybe using machine readable status codes for responses, as everything else does, isn’t such a bad idea after all...
Another fix is to not create product listings for internet points. This product doesnt even show in search results on amazon (or at least didnt when i checked). Op didnt “find” it. They made it. Probably to maintain hype.
This one is hilarious: https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Dicks-Calendar-2024-specific/...
Searching the "I'm sorry" line led to this....scam? https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide...
https://archive.ph/HWjVX
Okay, too funny description:
Nature's Dicks Calendar Book
Why You'll Admire This Calendar:
- Ample Size: Measuring a generous 8.5 x 11 inches when closed and an expansive 17 x 22 inches when open, it boasts 30 exquisite high-quality animal images.
- Exquisite Imagery: Revel in captivating photographs that beautifully depict animals thriving in their natural environments.
- Extended Coverage: Spanning from January 2024 to December 2025, plus an additional 6 months into 2026, all included at no extra cost.
- Holiday Clarity: Encompassing all major U.S. holidays and moon phases, meticulously omitting perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule.
- Ink-Resistant Printing: Meticulously printed on top-tier paper engineered to withstand ink smears, ensuring your calendar remains pristine.
- Precision Image Quality: Revel in vivid, sharp images, a testament to our unwavering commitment to printing excellence.
- Ideal Gift: Spread joy among your friends and family by presenting them with this calendar, a thoughtful gesture suitable for any occasion, making it an ideal choice for those on a budget.
Definitely appreciate how it covers the exact phallus dimensions up front, and am comforted knowing it won't smear if "ink" gets on it. There's just such a high level of consideration poured into this calendar of dicks, I am nearly speechless.
And it covers 2.5 years, who wouldn't want a calendar which ends mid year 2026? Spread the joy all over your friends and family.
It's a ripoff:
https://www.amazon.com/Years-2024-Calendar-Monster-Bucks/dp/...
of maybe this:
https://monstercalendars.com/storefront/2024-monster-bucks-b...
I would like to know how "meticulously omitting perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule" got into it, though, because that's just an amazing sentence.
I found the line about "perplexing foreign holidays that disrupt your schedule" kind of hilarious. Many people are xenophobic or whatever but they hardly ever express it quite like that. If your wall calendar labels a holiday you don't know about, you typically ignore it and don't care. You don't become deeply perplexed.
a thoughtful gesture! suitable for any occasion! Do you think this description was GPT'd also?
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I wonder what they're prompting ChatGPT with, and what policy it violates. I asked the standard, free ChatGPT 3.5
> Please generate a product title to be used on an e-commerce site for a chest of drawers with three drawers, a metal frame, and a butcher block top
and it responded with
> "Modern Metal-Frame Chest of Drawers with Butcher Block Top - Three Drawers Storage Solution"
which would be a fine title for this listing.
I'm thinking they automatically fed in bulk images, asking for product description/title, and put the result straight into their product descriptions/titles. Some of the images triggered the OpenAI guard rails.
Some others indicated that they prompted with trademarked names
https://www.amazon.com/apologize-complete-requires-trademark...
A similar example with:
> I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it promotes a specific religious institution. It is important to...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLKNWZGV
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The year is 2525, all trademarks have expired. Describe an Ikea® piece of crap to sell on Amazon™
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It’s “<apology>-brown” and the item appears black but is listed as brown. It’s possible that they are using GPT to translate from another language. I think I’ve read about listings for other pieces of furniture inadvertently offending people by using the Spanish word for “black” due to similar mixups.
Woah, that must be it. I couldn't figure it out, but that explains everything. Jesus, that's ridiculous.
You can see in this product: https://www.amazon.com/analyze-generate-product-avoiding-tra...
ChatGPT is refusing to generate titles with trademarked names. So most likely they are prompting something like "competitor product: rephrase the title"
Archive: https://archive.ph/hzDIG
yeah I think this is the explanation that makes the most sense
At that scale, they likely aren't typing the prompt into ChatGPT manually and then copy pasting. The generated title is in fact shorter than the prompt. Most likely they automated the task of asking ChatGPT and bulk generated the titles.
People can't even be bothered to come up with a title for a product listing? We are truly screwed. Maybe they generated it from images and a script, but honestly, how freaking lazy are people these days?
It's probably a drop shipping operation, generating mass listings. Or it's from a foreign vendor, asking ChatGPT to provide a title in English. There's a lot of things wrong with this listing, but laziness isn't one of them.
It increasingly randomly refuses to do stuff depending what they've been training it not to do.
Aside: Llama2 on launch was so locked down it was refusing to "do creative work".
Whyever would one prompt ChatGPT with your question? If you have this information, you can write the title yourself. The response was not that different to the question.
I've had it say that when I asked it to produce a more detailed ASCII drawing of a cat, or other innocuous prompt. It seems like a not infrequent failure state for things that very clearly don't violate policy.
Using the words "black dresser" or "brown dresser" maybe?
Or big brown/black cross dresser?
ChatGPT is not a pure function even when you select the specific model
Brown
> I wonder what they're prompting ChatGPT with
"Please generate a title to be used to sell a lovely, large chest with a slender frame and three willing receptacles."
Does it actually complain about generating explicit content? It certainly seems willing enough to describe brutal murders as long as it thinks it’s writing a story.
It still baffles me that people get more upset over sex than death.
Twitter is awash in this OpenAI spam too. Particularly among the so-called "verified" accounts https://nitter.net/nelson/status/1745892095553143221
This is hardly evidence Twitter is "awash" with OpenAI spam since by the bold text you can see he specifically searched that phrase and yet only showed three responses.
There were many other tweets that matched this, many from accounts paying $8/mo. Sorry my screenshot wasn't bigger.
But spammers would never be able to afford eight bucks per month...
What is this? I don't understand. Currently it just leads to a "not found" page.
Here's a link to the archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112170316/https://www.amazo...
@dang request to swap the main url for context
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They're listing with AI descriptions. They're getting taken down fast. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38972344
The product had that text as its title. Another one shows: "khalery [Apologies but I'm Unable to Assist with This Request it goes Against OpenAI use Policy and Encourages unethical Behavior-Black"
It was a product listing where the title was a ChatGPT apology message: https://i.ibb.co/THZbWFP/IMG-4052.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
It was just deleted. Someone used ChatGPT to generate a product name and instead got an "I can't do that" response
Amazon is getting flooded with ChatGPT generated spam.
This image is now part of my presentation
"Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) and Security" https://dwheeler.com/secure-class/presentations/AI-ML-Securi...
... as a nice example of why you should usually have humans review what AI systems do :-).
There are others.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNNBQYXC/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMFDNP7D/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFWNXYC7/
The product descriptions are pretty obviously AI too, saying a lot without saying anything:
* Versatile and Practical: 1 is a product that offers multiple uses, making it suitable for various tasks and ensuring for your money.
* Durable Construction: Crafted with sturdy materials, 1 is built to withstand daily wear and tear, providing-lasting performance and reliability.
* Easy to Use: With its user-friendly design, 1 is effortless to operate, allowing you to complete tasks without any hassle or complications.
* Enhanced Efficiency: Featuring advanced technology, 1 ensures efficient performance, saving you and effort while delivering exceptional results.
* Ergonomic Design: 1 is thoughtfully designed to prioritize comfort during use, minimizing fatigue and promoting a comfortable working experience.
Those are all gone, here's another https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-Encourages-unethica...
Here's an archive of that one: https://archive.is/sKbLX
Here's a really good one https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...
4 minutes after your post I’m getting 404.
https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide... is still up. What even is this?
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lol I guess you can be pretty sure that people who work for Amazon are browsing the comments of most frontpage HN posts
I certainly was, when I worked there.
Amazon employees have entered the chat... :)
Here's an example of the products listed:
https://imgur.com/Dc1GvI5
Computer says no
https://youtu.be/0n_Ty_72Qds
Every time I see a LLM spit out an answer like this post this is all I can think of. I immediately say "Computer says no" in my head.
I really expected to see this, do people still watch 2001?
https://youtu.be/Wy4EfdnMZ5g?si=K2GNOtlprFEyPj8A
Not frequently, but "computer says no" is more realistic scenario to happen, isn't it?
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https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QvJ4K1i8l8M
Computer says sorry nowadays
Also, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARJ8cAGm6JE
Related story: https://futurism.com/amazon-products-ai-generated
There's more than one of these: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=OpenAI+use+policy
For me this didn't show anything but using google did
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aamazon.com+openai+pol...
Here's a fun one:
https://www.amazon.com/apologize-complete-requires-trademark...
Yes, you get all this too:
Enhanced Performance: Boost your productivity with our high-performance [product name], designed to deliver-fast results and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition.
Immersive Visuals: Immerse yourself in stunning visuals and vibrant colors with the high-resolution display of [product name], bringing your favorite movies,, and multimedia content to life with clarity and accuracy.
Looks like the vendor went all in on "AI" translation. "Air Screwdriver" is the description of a product image.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61tqu5gFckL._AC_SL1008_....
My favorite so far, the entire product description is chef's kiss: https://www.amazon.com/haillusty-Apologize-fulfill-violates-...
Already gone. What did it say?
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On Bluesky I saw some screenshots of a flood of Twitter accounts all posting this text. Glad the new management has solved the bots issues.
I found a couple more earlier today that are also taken down now.
Archive links for them:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112182246/https://www.amazo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112180943/https://www.amazo...
I'm sorry, Dave
Order some new Pod Bay doors HAL.
What is that? An AI generated title on AI generated images? For $325?
Dropped shipped item probably from here: https://www.vidaxl.com/e/vidaxl-sideboard-18.5%22x13.8%22x29...
That's decent mark up. I bet I could write an app to take products from that site, post them to Amazon, and then just drop ship the orders for me. Of course, I'd have to write all those descriptions...
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If we don't get soon effective measures to separate AI bots from humans this will be the end of the Internet as we know it.
Since all of the proposals I've seen so far to do this involve pretty serious privacy problems, I'm not optimistic about the future of the internet on this count.
Sam Altman is a visionary for creating World Coin and scanning eyeballs, sells the poison and the cure!
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Amazon brought this on themselves by allowing all of this garbage in the first place.
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How exactly do you expect that to happen?
Gah, that dresser isn't even brown!
I do kind of want to buy one though just to see what happens. I really need a wealthy patron to sponsor my gentleman science
I remember things like Translate Server Error (https://i.redd.it/kqqkgaro8ir71.jpg) and other instances of error messages finding their way into places where the output would normally be (another one: https://i.imgur.com/RAVOuwg.jpg ). It's not surprising to see this is now happening with AI too.
Using Amazon for shopping is terrible, borderline unusable in 2024. They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have an amazing logistics network, but it also seems like there's a big vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's actually good.
The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
In many categories, even when explicitly searching for brand and model names, you’ll get dozens of off-brand substitutions and even random unrelated products appearing above it in the search results.
Occasionally I’ve even noticed products that are available for sale (if you click on a direct link or have them saved in your favorites etc), but refuse to show up in search results no matter what!
Often it’s easier to find things on Amazon using Google search than using Amazon’s search.
Pro-tip: Amazon fills their page with that useless content from their ad network, just like any standard ad. uBlock Origin blocks all of it, and your search experience is restored to what you expect.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand what people were talking about when they said Amazon's search interface is terrible. People would tell me they search for a specific book or author, and get totally irrelevant results. My experience was totally opposite.
I had to finally see a screenshot from someone's browser to believe it. It turns out uBlock has been blocking this content the whole time, and I never noticed it at all.
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> The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
Hey boss I made the site better! Through rigorous A/B testing I could figure out a way to tweak our search algorithm so people spend much more time on our site! It seems they now really enjoy browsing for products!
Ok but seriously, I have witnessed A/B testing go wrong in the past so I'm biased to blame everything on it. I wouldn't think this particular thing happened though. :)
What I could imagine is that they measure number of items bought or money spent, but even then if eg you don't also track how much of these people return stuff later you still might draw the wrong conclusions. Figuring out that a user is less likely to use your site six months down the line due to building frustration is even harder.
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Amazon's founding principle of "customer obsession" has been turned inside out -- at least when it comes to thinking of us consumers as the cherished customers. Those days are over.
The new "customers" at the center of Amazon's business model are a global assortment of insta-merchants that don't make the products, don't handle their own logistics and don't have recognizable brands. So -- whoosh! -- in comes Amazon as the ultimate partner/toll-collector. For a fee (or actually for many fees) it will shine up these impostors to the point that they can conduct a lot of business on the Amazon platform.
When Amazon provides distorted search results, my hunch is that it's providing boosted listings for whatever pseudo-merchants are willing to pay up. Or that have agreed to buy other Amazon services. And, hey, Amazon is going the extra mile to make them feel well-treated
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This is definitely the worst thing about Amazon. I pay them $120/year or whatever, and I search a specific product by a specific brand, and the entire browser screen shows me brands and even products I didn't even search for. I should not get ads in a store that I pay to use, especially in search.
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I believe this occurs because Amazon allows sellers to promote their items by bidding on keywords— and often times, the highest quality keywords will be specific category-defining brands or products. At the same time, the original supplier of that brand or product keyword won’t need to spend their advertising budget on that query because customer conversion is high enough despite the friction.
Similarly, I think sponsored search results are unconscionable. Amazon is already taking a cut of every sale (which is obviously fine), but then they're also letting knock-off companies pay to show their product above the genuine article.
I'm going to assume you're in the USA, which may be incorrect.
I live in the third world, in Amazon's estimation-- Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands. If I search for something, there's a better-than-not chance that it will explicitly say in the search results under the item "ships to [Switzerland]," but when I click the item, I get "sorry, this item does not ship to your location" and I can't order it. It makes searching on Amazon incredibly frustrating because I have to click through every garbage 3rd-party knockoff of the thing I'm looking for to find the one garbage 3rd-party knockoff that ships to my uninhabited, remote shithole of the European backwaters (Zurich, Amsterdam, Cork). But will Amazon offer me an option to filter out things I can't have? No, of course not. Why? Shut up and stop asking questions, that's why.
What's worse, even this is still miles better than stuff-availability in Ireland was 20 years ago when I first moved over from Chicagoland. That was a blow to my expectations, I tell you hwat. I may have single-handedly kept eBay.com in the black between 2005-2016...
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I've had similar experiences with the Google Play Store. For example, if I search for "Instagram" verbatim, my first result is TikTok.
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I also hate how the seller's pages are basically useless as well. I want to buy something from a specific brand and going to that page I can't find more than half of their product list on their own seller page.
While it's obvious that this is somehow commercially/financially advantageous to Amazon, I'd love to know more about why. What are the economics behind the shovelware merchandise Amazon upranks to users?
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I think I'd probably cope with it including irrelevant and mislabelled stuff and the inevitable tons of Alibaba crap if it (.co.uk) didn't fail so hard at pagination that most of the results were inaccessible. Feels like some marketing bod has wargamed the "bust if we fix this people buy cheaper variants of the same product and don't check the Prime box" scenario and decided that as they're Amazon and people will use them regardless, broken search results are better than functional search results
Even in Apples "curated", "premium" official app store I never get the thing I search for first.
I always get an ad for something else (that isn't marked as an ad).
> The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
Truer words have never been spoken.
In 2022, Amazon had 38 billion dollars in ad revenue. That's ads in that search page. Between the ad revenue, and variations in what sale is more profitable for Amazon, you get a lot of incentive misalignment. The page that makes Amazon the most money is not the one where the item you were thinking about is the first thing on the page. Giving you a worse page is just far more profitable.
Heh - until you buy it... then it shows you a 'suggested' purchase to buy it again on every page :-P
>The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
They may be suggesting on sellers request unsold or rarely sold products that vaguely relate to searches, but sellers want to get rid of quickly.
My terrible suspicion is that these algos are good for the majority of people in the sense that they are prone to manipulation and buy these inferior borderline fraud products all the time, so the algo finds its target function results and optimize for these.
This is what we don’t seem to accept. Enshittification.
Also shipping and return policy is so convenient, that even the grumbling people are eating this up.
I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything store. I don't need to see 40 of the same exact item rebranded into various English horrors.
Walmart seems most primed to do this, barring third party sales. Or Sears, if they ever had a miraculous turnaround to their old days.
Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores. My biggest disappointment with them is that they never have what I want.
I think I'm OK with Amazon being Aliexpress for the US market. Sometimes I want to get random crap from the depths of Shenzhen, and Amazon is that. What is unfortunate is that they can't get "real" brands to sell there, because of their counterfeiting issue. The "mistake" Amazon made (that has probably made them hundreds of billions of dollars) was to let someone send in a box of crap and get paid when someone shopping for "Tide Laundry Detergent" gets their box of crap instead of Tide Laundry Detergent.
Other than that, they're where they are today because they're good. I just wouldn't buy anything valuable from them; laptops, cameras, phones, etc. Those you'll have to find a dedicated electronics retailer. But sometimes I'm like building a 3D printer and I want a touchscreen display or something for it... for $20 I can have one the same day. That is super neat. It works because no "brand" makes parts for hobbyists, and some company you've never heard of in China is actually the market leader. Amazon connects you to them... but also to billions of scammers. Caveat emptor.
Edit to add: I'm talking about the in-person stores. I have no idea what Wal-Mart and Target do online.
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I'm prone to losing sunglasses, so some years ago I went through the process of testing out a dozen Alibaba sunglasses to find the best ones. I settled on one that's $4/pair, sturdy, and looks/feels/functions just like a $50 pair. Of course, being Alibaba, I had to buy it in bulk, so I now have sunglasses for life.
But that brings me to the type of site I want to see. Not curated luxury products like Le Creuset cookware at a markup, but curated dirt-cheap Alibaba products with low margins that have been tested and vetted extensively.
Massdrop or Monoprice are a little bit like this, but only for a few niches like headphones or cables.
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Amazon is just SO EASY though. It's a vortex I can't escape. I tried ordering a Nintendo Switch from Walmart for my son's birthday. 3 days they told me. It didn't even ship. The website said I could "try" to cancel the order. "Try" I did, and that try failed. I then waited a few weeks and had to call them up and they said oh we will just mark it as lost in transit. Oh yeah, that sounds perfect. They wasted my time, they endangered my mission, they cost me money, and then THEY MADE ME TALK TO SOMEONE (who was very pleasant and it was pretty quickly resolved but that's a little cherry on a sundae made of poo,). Screw all that nonsense.
The only way for others to compete is to have a 3rd party help them all become just as easy as Amazon. We need someone to partner with Fedex and step up. Who can do it?
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Rebranded .. I'm getting really annoyed with the same product, different prices, different brand names apparently generated by some China-based anagram generator
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"I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything store."
It exists for tools and parts and hardware: mcmaster.com
I wish Sears sold do-it-yourself-houses again like they did in the 1920s. That would be very cool of them.
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There used to be that. It was called Canopy. The best curated Amazon products. It was awesome.
Guess what? Amazon acquired them and vaporized it.
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Sometimes curation just means higher prices. My local Best Buy curates electronics, but none of them are cheaper than the hundreds of additional brands you can find on Amazon.
You can’t get a $50 WiFi 6 access point at Best Buy, but you can find that on Amazon.
I think what you are describing is Walmart or Target but with filters applied to turn off third party sellers.
As an aside, what’s interesting about Amazon is that once you unsubscribe from Prime, it’s not incredibly competitive with AliExpress for the right types of products. Usually if you can wait a week, you can wait two and save more money.
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There are more listings like that one, some are sold by Amazon. https://amzn.to/41Zf3hS
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If you're curated, you're not everything. If you want everything, well, expect everything.
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Talk to friends and family, and only buy when someone has had a positive experience with a product before. Use outlets like consumer reports that do long-term reviews, etc.
I'll leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
Sears still exists?
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> Walmart seems most primed to do this
The one time I used their ecommerce platform (due to a gift card), I got a damaged product drop-shipped as an Amazon gift.
Quality and trust are not words that I have ever associated with Walmart, even in the brick-and-mortar world where it is much harder to pull a fast one. Color me skeptical.
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As someone who uses Amazon regularly, we live in different worlds. My experience is pleasant and straightforward; I get what I want and it arrives quickly.
Yeah we must. Nothing I but from Amazon is what I expect and top that off with it arrives late despite me paying for prime. I ordered a blender last week that doesn’t even blend, which I only realized after I had loaded it up with stuff to make a smoothie.
When things show up and actually are what I expect based off of the image and they work right it is a rare surprise.
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If you have a specific product that you are looking for and it is eligible for Prime then I have found this to be the experience.
Where I have not found that is if I am browsing, e.g. today I wanted to look for an evaporative humidifier. The top results are sponsored and for brands I have never heard of like YougetTech. I find I have to depart Amazon, Google / Reddit for things to get a sense of what the trusted brands are and then go back on Amazon to purchase it.
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I'm genuinely baffled at your experience . I can't think of a single Amazon search I've done recently, not one, which didn't result in a page 1 filled entirely with drop-shipped Chinese junk with keysmash brand names like RETVUKOR. It has become almost entirely useless.
I have experienced almost the full cycle of enshittification. I remember when it arrived in my country (Spain). It was great. The catalog was very good. Customer service was very responsive. If I had a problem, they would return the money, no questions asked.
We were foolish to think that situation would last.
Nowadays the search is unusable. Unless you go to an individual brand's "amazon shop", you will only get products from UUMEBE, SYLTOM and YGWEEN. And "Amazon's pick" will be either Amazon's own product or TROWLY. Perhaps on the fourth page you will get a proper brand. You get products at $1 with a shipping cost of $67. Customer service now asks many questions. When you want to return something, the site uses dark patterns to try to nudge you into getting the products to the post office yourself instead of sending you a messenger. And the prime subscription price went up.
I cancelled my prime account. If I want Chinese quality merchandise there's a Chinese store very nearby where I can go and look at the plastic at least.
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My experience has been similar to yours in that things at least "felt" nice and convenient. That is, until the brand new first aid kit I ordered came with the safety seal broken and hastily taped over. Who knows what was done to the product? What if it was resealed with better effort? How could I possibly trust anything from Amazon?
Maybe ignorance is bliss.
Search Amazon for "Whetstone". You'll find tons of quality products from legitimate brands, mixed indiscriminately with the exact same dropshipped trash item repeated over and over for countless pages. Amazon has been entirely enshittified.
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Your comment reads just like the reviews. Worthless
Amazon is great for buying products I already know I want. Prices are reasonable, shipping couldn’t be much faster (in my area), with Prime anyway. And it’s usually fairly easy to go directly to a known product (by name or model). Also their return policy can’t be beat by an online retailer (drop it off at Whole Foods/UPS, no box/shipping label needed).
Amazon is horrific for browsing or searching — anytime I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I want to have more data to inform a buying decision. Their reviews can’t be trusted, and their search results optimize Amazon and the sellers over the buyers.
I used to rely on Amazon for confidence in purchasing a good product, but that’s not been the case for 5-10 years. I have to do my research somewhere else (often Reddit) before making a purchase.
Unfortunately there are a number of products (e.g. iPhone cases) that even that’s impossible to do nowadays. But fortunately, these are usually cheaper products, so the risk is a bit lower.
I’ll still continue shopping at Amazon, once I know what I’m looking for, due to the things I mention in the first paragraph. But I no longer trust it for discovering products and informing choices there, particularly for anything meaningful.
They're fine at selling stuff, they're absolutely horrendous at being a place to search for a product if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. The solution is just to look for third-party specialist review sites who know what they're talking about.
They're risky if you do know what you're looking for, because of all the counterfeits and return scams and such. They're basically only OK if you're buying trash-tier goods on purpose, because there's no reason to counterfeit or scam with those and you already know they're going to be bad.
Amazons search is so bad that I typically use google/ddg to search their site for products
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If you stick to things that you
(a) don't care about the quality of, because they are either frivolously cheap or you are able to to the necessary 'QA' repairs and inspection yourself (for me these are things like circuit boards and household consumables);
(b) something you already know you want that specific thing of and the shipping speed and return policy make them the best online option;
(c) are only buying because you found it somewhere else and you didn't know you wanted it until you were told about it (deal sites like slickdeals are where I encounter this);
then amazon is fine.
> third-party specialist review sites
Are there any that you can recommend? Google seems very unreliable in that department these days, it's very hard to say which reviews are honest and which ones are basically ads. There's also the additional complication that some sites that try to be honest receive products from manufacturers, which limits what they can say to keep their manufacturer relationships going.
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Just fire up a news reader. Pretty much half of the content pushed is some sort of affiliate links assembled into an article/review
And also to hope hard that whatever you buy from Amazon is genuine and not a counterfeit copy. Amazon uses the same bin for both.
At least with Amazon, I don’t trust that I’m not getting fakes even if I know what I’m looking for.
It's barely even usable for buying Kindle books anymore.
Half the time I get tricked into buying a book my Kindle doesn't support and I have to spend half an hour yelling at support to get my money back.
Because they let you do the "buy and deliver to my kindle" thing even when your kindle is not supported. Then only when you grab your kindle to sync you learn the bad news.
This is very surprising to me. I've got a kindle from 2013 and never had any issue with unsupported books.
Is yours super older or what?
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Speaking of tricks.. a while back I turned off my “reading insights” in the Kindle app. Recently I’ve been re-reading Asimov and kindle reading insights popped up to congratulate me on my reading streak. Wouldn’t you know it — they’ve been tracking my reading this whole time, and I looked into it and there is no opt out short of closing my account (and subsequently losing access to my kindle library). Just absurd levels of stalking in the pursuit of data.
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Not only does this almost never happen to me, but Amazon has added a Refund button that works automatically. If you select “Remove from Library” within a time window, it asks if you want a refund now. I have run into some bad scans, but never had a problem getting an instant refund. What’s fascinating is how different experiences are.
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Really? That's super surprising, I probably buy a dozen or so books every year now (and used to order far more when I was living abroad and there wasn't a decent english bookstore in my city) and have never had an issue. Now trying to use goodreads... that's a mess
It feels like it's reverting to how it was in the early 2010's -- dozens of identical super low quality knockoffs, normal brand name products that are overpriced or just absent from their store, reviews that can't be trusted, and dealing with third-party sellers of varying legitimacy. Around the time they started prime, there started having a lot more product variety and the prices of the knockoffs were pretty good for the quality. But over the last few years, prices have gone up a lot and a lot of the negative qualities of the past have returned.
In my experience, Amazon has devolved into AliExpress/DHGate but with higher prices and faster shipping. The throwaway products also make more of an effort to Americanize the syllables of their brand name
You’re in a bubble if you believe this. On a personal level sure, but my middle aged and old family members use it for everything and they are the last ones to understand internet things. They have 0 complaints, though I personally have my own issues with listing quality and review growth hacking.
While I don't think it's the best shopping experience on the web, I've also never understood those who have claimed it's awful in recent years. I'd be interested in what it is specifically that you don't like? And what changes you would like them to make to make it better?
I think part of the problem they've been having is that because they're an "everything store" they don't have a clear target audience so disappoint everyone. There are online stores I love out there, but they tend to be opinionated about the type of products they stock and how they do things, so although I have less of a selection it's more likely to be stuff I want. But that opinionated nature means a lot of people just won't shop with them because it's not what they want.
A lot of the issues I seem to hear here stem from relatively high end consumers seeing cheap products on Amazon and not liking that it's difficult to find the quality. But similarly elsewhere I read accounts from people looking for cheap products and saying that there are cheaper places to shop these days. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon was just a little more opinionated about what they stock whether that would help a bit. It would at least reduce disappointment. Although I suppose that goes against their whole ethos of having everything.
> vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's actually good.
I would like a "what store is everything in" product. Search for something, and it gives you back matching products in stores 5/10/50 miles from you; purchase online, pickup from the store (or pay for an ubereats like delivery). As you build a cart, it attempts to cluster items. You get the convenience of search and online purchase, so that you don't waste time wandering around stores and not finding things, and you get the item in your hand quicker if you're prepared to go get it once purchased.
Big advantage to whoever built it: you don't need to compete with Amazon on logistics. On the other hand, you have a hell of a network effect to overcome, though if you focused on one geography only to start, it could be doable.
Such a thing, if it took off, could reinvigorate physical retail businesses. Google had a half-assed attempt for a while with local shopping, but they never really pushed it that hard...which I think was a missed opportunity.
I think google still does this, but yes it’s probably very half-assed.
I think the real product there would be a universal inventory system for all stores. And small stores like local hardware stores might not have comprehensive inventory, so then you get in to things like inventory scanning robots.
Point being there’s several layers of missing pieces (I believe, I know next to nothing about retail) that make the top layer hard or impossible. Google for example is probably plugging in to APIs for a few large stores like target and Walmart and skipping all the little ones.
I guess another option is a store network that is a franchise model of one company. All the products come from that company but franchise owners decide what they actually stock and carry. So they could be a hardware store or a home goods store etc but it’s all one centralized system underneath. Each store has a standard fulfillment system so you can pick up in store or get things shipped.
Alternatively it would be nice to see an Amazon style store but everything is vetted as decent quality. Problem is it’s just hard to keep up with the flow of new goods from overseas showing up on Amazon and if you’re going to vet items for quality that’s going to add overhead. I guess that’s basically what stores like Target do.
I recommend using a sophisticated ad blocker like uBlock origin or AdGuard for Safari to disable most of the irrelevant stuff and upsells that Amazon pushes to keep you shopping for hours instead of finding what you were looking for.
I started a personal collection where I just kept removing sponsored content or really anything that wasn’t relevant to what I was searching for or what was in my cart. I spend way less time on Amazon now. It’s not really meant for general use, and I don’t update it much, but here’s what I have if anyone wants to try it for themselves:
https://github.com/namuol/browser-qol/blob/main/blocker-rule...
They have a lot of things (excluding books) but they are only interesting in switzerland: Galaxus.ch (their site is available in english, german, italian and french). They have the best speed and filters i have tried. And the ui is relatively compact compare to other online retailers i have access to. Reichlt in Germany has good filters but they are very slow where i am accessing them from.
Unfortunately every retailer are also starting to be a platform for other shops as well, inflating their numbers and polluting their search results.
Amazon really has terrible filters and search.
I went shopping on there for Legos for Christmas.
SEVERAL of the products on the first page werer knock off Legos in boxes that looked almost identical to actual Lego boxes, fonts, numbering, and all.
It’s just a scam site now that happens to also sell legitimate products.
Searching for other products results in more irrelevant products every day. Even searching for exact product names will not get you that product that you know is on there. The search seems to have been gamed into a mess.
I've found that, at least on the mobile app, results are filtered by "Featured" which fills the results with irrelevant sponsored products. So each time I search for an item, I then have to go under Filters and select Best Rating, Highest Selling, etc. It's a bit tedious but seems to be a shortcut through all of the BS results they show you by default.
De-duping products across made-up brands is the most sorely needed feature in the era of no effort drop shipping. This should be supremely feasible with the latest generation of ai image recognition/labeling capabilities. More many product categories this would decimate the number of options that need to be considered.
> They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have an amazing logistics network
... and because they have terms that are actively anti-competitive, like if you sell there, you can't sell the same items anywhere else online for a lower price (even if the other venue has lower associated costs).
Yeah. I am quietly anti-Amazon so I mostly do not use the site. Occasionally, I'll browse for something I need and its really a shitshow:
- searching for a brand, rarely returns items by the brand
- search results are extremely poor and quickly get worse as you browse
- they hold packages for shipping by non-prime members
I haven't used Amazon regularly in several years so maybe it is more apparent for me. I also don't trust the "higher" end products to not be counterfit. It's a classic case of overoptimization, they may make more money but the experience is SO BAD. I have bought elsewhere because it was honestly kind of a chore to find what I wanted on the site.
In theory this is Costco. I have a membership to both Amazon and Costco, but for some reason keep using Amazon. I assume this is because 1) habits are hard to change and 2) Amazon is guaranteed to have what I’m looking for, even if ultimately it’s not very good.
Retail is so low-margin that it will never be very good.
Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, are all very imperfect businesses. Even Costco is rough to deal with for the suppliers - there’s just no way to do this at scale while being all nice and fuzzy
Amazon is especially bad though
All they have to do is get rid of the 3rd party storefront and hire people to stock and procure vetted goods instead of having it be a free-for-all.
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Seriously. Even worse there are things I want, I know the name and the brand but I can't order from Amazon because of the high risk of counterfeits. I hope they either get their house in order or someone eats their lunch.
I don't use Amazon at all anymore. In fact I uninstalled the app yesterday!
I uninstalled it a few weeks ago because the Android app started injecting a "search this term on Amazon" button that popped when whenever I selected text in any app
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Oh, it has an app? Never occurred to me to look for one.
Can you be more specific about what is terrible about Amazon ? Cause you just said they have an amazing logistics network + everything for sale
You can search for something simple on Amazon - scroll past to the end of the results and not find it.
You can then open up your favorite Search Engine and see it as the first result, linking to Amazon.
> an "everything store" that's actually good
I'm pretty skeptical that such a thing is possible.
There is no competition. I'm not an economist but a monopoly is not a free market in my view.
third party sellers and "commingling" have all but ruined Amazon for me :/. even shipped and sold by Amazon can yield you fake products (worst performance, not as advertised, knock offs, unsafe, etc).
but I guess it generates too much money for Amazon to care :(
As far as I can tell they for me also seem to not do their due diligence when it comes to handling consumer deception and abuse of their marked platform.
Honestly I'm surprised that there have not been any larger scale legal consequences given that Amazone seems to be economically harmful to the domestic market (kills domestic competition but in different to the competition manages to avoid a lot more taxes) of most non-US countries and it's given them perfect munition to use PR and legal means under the guise of consumer protection against it.
Just to be clear protectionism is a dangerous tool, which only should be wielded in a generic non target specific way, like requiring online shopping platforms, even if they sometimes just act as a proxy, to fulfill a certain degree of due diligence when it comes to effectively handling fraudulent companies selling through them. That also probably could get ride of TEMU (which is more a tool of spying, economical warfar and other bad stuff then any honest competitive selling platform, they are losing too much money on each sale for that).
I mean a think which had been true before the internet was that if you can't provide a service reasonable safely you can't provide it at all (grossly oversimplified, not that people didn't try and got away with it). No reason this shouldn't apply to the internet. (Many TEMU products are not legal to be imported in the EU, often due to safety reasons, sometimes due to other reasons like being imitations of (Nazi germany time) Nazi artifices and stuff like that).
the problem is capitalism necessitates enshittification.
you aren't getting a contender as long as the regulations are abhorrently lax about both the workers and the sellers. along with consumer rights. there just is no economic incentive to improve but rather dig the moat.
(1) Expand network of friends/family. (2) Buy only when you get a recommendation from friends/family. (3) profit? :)
Asking the government to create regulations for product quality just means that the lobbyists who actually write those regulations are going to fuck you over yet again.
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I wonder if the comments saying Amazon is terrible for shopping is due to the same ppl browsing Amazon, rather than actually shopping for the one or two things they need? I've never had a problem finding what I want in my searches. I also don't browse...and I can see how that might result in Amazon showing a person browsing all kinds of things not realizing that THIS TIME they really do want that item.
Same here, I never have a problem with Amazon.
I’ve noticed there are different shopping styles though, even in physical stores. Some people go to the store with no idea what they want or just a vague idea that they want something, and will browse the store to see if anything interests them. Other people will go to the store knowing exactly what item they want, and don’t need to browse.
I’m the latter, and I’ve never had an issue with Amazon. I know what I want, so it’s trivial for me to just go straight to it and buy it.
But other people that like to browse… I can definitely see how they would get caught in the endless see of EFUZZYA and OPANKY products.
I avoid Amazon as a rule, but when I try to buy something which is out of stock on sites (like say a dietary supplement), I go through the reviews and will inevitably find someone saying it tastes or smells funny. There are plenty of positive reviews as well, but for something that can impact my health, I don't want to roll the dice with Amazon's utter lack of quality control.
I have problems finding what I need with searches. Even if it gives me results that match the query, the quality is suspect and sometimes the reviews are blatantly fake. Do you often search for a brand name, popular item? If it's something I can find reviews about on other websites, it's easy to find on Amazon, but anything else is not a great time.
AI gone wrong or marketing stunt?
Probably the former.
But the thing doesn't look half bad one the pictures. Looks like something you might get from IKEA under one of their "slightly better quality" lines (which at least in the EU are pretty good choice if you don't want to spend too much on furniture but also feel that the main line lines from IKEA are a bit to cheap in quality).
The fine folks at <checks notes> FOPEAS would never tarnish their good name by stooping to such a stunt. I mean, we might expect such shenanigans from the likes of SMURGBLOZ, KINSURGE, or GSIROOZ, but not FOPEAS, fine purveyors of `FOPEAS an AI Language Model I do not Have Access to The Context of The SFD You are referring to. Can You Please Provide me with More Information so That I can Assist You Better`
it's a shocking accusation, truly.
It looks good but its probably pigiron with cheap paint that will flake off and particle board. I’m done buying cheap stuff. By the time ten years have gone by you’ve spent more on cheap stuff replacing the broken cheap stuff than the buy it for life option would have ever cost.
I don’t think that’s quite true. I’ve spent less on two entire suites of IKEA furniture that I used for roughly 15 years (as student and young professional) than I spent on the single table that now stands in our living room.
I was leaning toward the latter because OpenAI doesn’t usually have poor grammar like that.
I bought a headset. it turned out not to support Bluetooth. upon wanting to return the headset, they set it would not be possible. that was until I found a line in their listing that said it should support Bluetooth.
I am quite sure that line cam. in because somebody just copy pasted the wrong file to the listing.
the merchants will be liable for what they let the LLMs promise on behalf of them.
There are others, similar - https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...
The 'brand' FOPEAS seems to be a common factor in some.
So much of this bot store ships from Amazon... It's mind boggling to imagine how much waste this physical spam introduces, from manufacturing, to shipping to the Amazon warehouse, to warehousing. All for low-quality dupes that aren't even represented by a real business.
Capitalism might be eating itself, it has become impossible to shop online in the past few years.
Speaking from Brazil:
- Google shopping shows very few local stores, most of the listings I get are from overseas stores, many don't even ship to Brazil, and prices don't reflect shipping and import fees
- Google Ads are useless, as they're often unrelated to the query, tailored simply to whoever company pays more for words
- Amazon, besides the fake and bad listings, now has ads on itself, so it's not only hard to find what you need, now you need to scroll past the unwanted ads, too, just like in Google
- Most previously nice online shops have copied Amazon and turned into marketplaces, and suffer from the exact same issues, with shitloads of fake listings, drop-shipping scams, bot-reviews, etc.
- Local giants like Mercado Libre have their own issues, like absent categorization or indexing of listings, so you're left with randomly writing queries that might or not match what you need, so you never know if you can't find an item because it's not available or because you just didn't guess correctly how it's listed
- Chinese giants like Shopee and AliExpress suffer from the usual issues of long delivery times, bad customer service, low quality ripoff, etc.
So contrary to my own previous beliefs and predictions, I find myself doing MORE brick-and-mortar shopping, not less.
https://archive.is/1r4Rj for when this inevitably gets taken down.
Similar X-ample: https://www.threads.net/@parkermolloy/post/C14qS_CJp8q
I know this is the wrong takeaway from this post, but how lazy are these scammers? A simple regex would have caught this and saved them a huge amount of embarrassment.
Embarrassment? Why would anyone be embarrassed? They’re scammers
Looks like Amazon has flagged whatever this link used to point to. Trying to decipher from the comments, but my HN-fu is failing me!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974341
From another comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112193755/https://www.amazo...
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112170316/https://www.amazo...
2 hours later, the page has been taken down.
The AI ouroboros - first we grab data from the Internet to train our LLMs, then our LLMs slowly become the majority of data from the Internet. "Low background noise" tokens will become a scarce commodity.
https://www.latent.space/p/nov-2023
That's crazy lol, how do the people who make these not think about what they're putting in?
They don’t speak english. Or it’s via their automated supply chain adding in “AI” features nobody asked for. We don’t need a model to say Black Dresser. However, providing a service that says “give me your inventory and we’ll list it on Amazon” is probably what’s at play here. Random brand name, AI generated description, midjourney images, real cash sales, no goods shipped.
Based on other postings I'm seeing, it seems like they may be unaffiliated middlemen finding products online then marking then up 30%. The original seller may have no idea their product is being resold this way.
No goods shipped part is unlikely on Amazon, I think.
They use automation tools to sell/resell tons of Chinese products. From what I've seen they're interested in flooding the market with their stuff, everything else is secondary.
Probably no real human in the loop. This is a bot scrapping Chinese retailers and automatically creating several Amazon "sellers", with descriptions generated from whatever photos the retailer page had. The products are likely shipped either from China or bought in bulk and kept in a subcontracted storage somewhere in USA. It doesn't matter is 90% of the "sellers" end being flagged and deleted, they can create thousands more and eventually someone will buy their crap.
This pollutes the marketplace to the point where I gave up trying to find any real product on it, but Amazon actually encourages this behavior. They automatically label and classify "products" in their store because the titles, descriptions and tags from Chinese resellers are abysmal and discoverability would be impossible otherwise.
I would hazard a guess that these are not real products - that the seller is a scammer, a lazy one at that.
Or, they're just drop-shipping stuff from China and they don't speak English so they use an AI to create a title.
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How quaint of you to assume these are done by people.
Roughly speaking, they're not people and not thinking.
That's some hateful, xenophobic shit my dude.
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Nine hours after this was posted the link is 404'ing and about 90% of the links in the comments are also showing a 404. Is some Amazon employee spending their friday afternoon manually removing product listings?
It's Amazon's signature style to make the bad press go away without addressing the underlying issue that generated the bad press to begin with. Their culture is to hand everyone a pager and pull them in to fix the "problem" through just-in-time heroics rather than spend the money to build a system that's resilient to suckage in the first place. And "fixing" means tediously swatting down specific instances that are made public.
1. Allow 20,000 bads to happen through systemic enshittification
2. Get called out on 20 of the bads
3. Hurry up and have some poor sap manually "fix" the bads being highlighted in the public forum
4. "We've fixed every bad we've been informed of!"
5. ???
6. Profit
Wait but does Amazon even view these seller as bad?
I get the feeling they love these sellers but just don’t like them messing up the titles.
They’re perfectly happy with low quality drop shipped items with badly written descriptions. They make tons of money from those.
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I miss the times where Amazon search was dumber. Nothing more infuriating than typing an exact model number and the exact thing you're not looking for not appearing or be buried in a mountain of other products, some of them not even related to what you're looking for, because of some stupid personalization algorithm that is too smart for its own good.
Category and product pages are completely useless, sorting by any attribute does something, but that something is anything but sorting.
Not to mention that if by sheer luck you find whatever you want to find, be sure to order it immediately or at least add it to your cart. No guarantees that the search you did now will work ever again.
A couple more examples: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sorry+openai+policy
Found some similar AI babble left in a negative google review the other day: https://imgur.com/a/20jLlg7
Unsure if it was from someone who had a real experience and used ChatGPT to help them word it, or if it was a nefarious actor (e.g. competitor) lazily bad-mouthing competition.
Parts of Amazon are now pretty much indistinguishable from AliExpress. This is just the icing on the cake.
A more modern version of the 'out of office' reply from a translation service? https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/nov/01/5
I always get a laugh from the section "Frequently bought together", which is often a obvious lie.
Would ChatGPT really output a malformed sentence like that? From what I've seen the impressive part is it makes correct English sentences (whether they make sense or are true or not is another matter). This looks like something a human with regular/bad English would write.
I would assume the person that made it doesn't speak english, and trusts whatever the LLM gave them
It has to be something like that, because why even bother using a LLM to create a title for a piece of furniture.
Side note: Amazon really needs to get around to fix the fact that their "search" can only find terms in titles and not in the descriptions or product meta data.
I'd guess the more mundane, someone probably had a spreadsheet of a few thousand updates or improvements, checked a reasonable sample of them, then accepted the lot of then. I bet you they don't make that mistake next time.
did anyone else see this one?
https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide...
Found another one here: https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-Encourages-unethica...
In case anyone is confused (since the link goes to a 404 page now), the link appeared to go to a product listing of a dresser but the name of the product was the name of this posting, “I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request…”
Let's suppose that the hypest of the hype is real - that OpenAI is sitting on some world changing AGI tech. Are we really ready for the Cyberpunk future where corporate policies are enacted with the same force as law?
"Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! Estás usando este software de traducción in forma incorrecta. Por favor, consultar el manual. I don't even know what I just said, but I can find out!"
Disregarding the title, you'd have to be a fool to spend $325 on that cabinet.
See also:
https://www.amazon.com/cannot-fulfill-request-against-policy...
This feels like something of a non story to me. Using AI for product descriptions seems like an obvious and reasonable use case; and data entry errors are not uncommon nor terribly harmful in the context.
I think it's a sign of what's to come. A world where many things are done so shoddily and with such little regard that it becomes nearly impossible to navigate. You sift through a pile of crap trying to get basic shopping done, descriptions that are wrong and nonsensical, fictional product photos that are useless to judge scale or fitness for purpose, etc. When you finally find what you need, you end up receiving the wrong item because no one in the supply chain gave a shit. You try to get this resolved, and are bounced around a series of half-broken customer service bots. It's difficult and expensive to find alternatives who do give a shit, because the automated companies have driven prices (and quality) into the ground, and it ends up being cheaper and easier to let it go and try your luck again.
I don't know if that will come to pass or not, I sure hope not, but I think it's a real possibility and that things like this are the early warnings.
That way of looking at it feels like it focuses on the one error while ignoring that, in all likelihood, the same action that caused the error, probably improved 1000 other listings.
I guess I'm a glass half full kinda person, this shows me that someone is working on improving things. And I bet they're quite flush from all the attention cause by their oversight in a big spreadsheet. I bet they won't miss the next one. :)
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HA! That explains it why this book [1] has Donald Trump as its cover with a completely unrelated title, even though it's about Django web framework LOL!
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Django-RESTful-Web-Services-services/...
Computer says no.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no
Amazon has gone from being good to mostly worse than useless except as joke/meme material. Not for everything, though. Still pretty good for books - prob some other things too.
Amazon finally beats IKEA in product naming game.
The biggest question here is isn't Amazon using their own AI to filter and rate basic things like titles and flag them and etc....
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=I%27m+sorry+openai
man, there are a loooot.
There are a lot of them.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=OpenAI+use+policy
wow it's crazy to see all the marketing babble that has evolved since we all just used adwords/adsense, doubleclick, web rings, and affiliate programs without really thinking about it in the early 00s and didn't have made up words for all these things nor did we think at all about targeting. The really fancy ones among us might say things like SEO, PPC, PPM, and ROI but that was about it
I like that it ends in -brown Is that Amazon adding the color to the title or the person who let open AI run wild did like a && color field
Link was just removed. Seems Amazon caught on quickly
So what is interesting is Amazon is an investor in Anthropic but is using OpenAI for keyword description generation
These are all over twitter. Someone, either a government or private group is using chatgpt to create inauthentic accounts.
Huh? Why lean towards conspiracy?
Trash sellers looking do dump volume onto Amazon are leveraging tools to generate volume.
> Trash sellers looking do dump volume onto Amazon are leveraging tools to generate volume.
I'm not talking about Amazon, I'm talking about X. There are many inauthentic accounts with content generated by LLMs currently on X. For example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/193jr8s/tha...
Most likely these fake accounts are created by firms who are selling access to mass-likes/follows. They sell the ability to get 10k fake accounts to follow your legitimate account, if you wish to boost your legitimate account, for some reason. Or, these fake accounts are created by intelligence agencies in order to run influence operations. Both of these possibilities have been reported on in the mainstream press. Maybe there's a third explanation that I haven't considered.
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Oops, guess they need an 'if' statement that detects OpenAI or language model in the text and aborts the transaction
Also possible this is just automated translation. I used OpenAI for translation in a project and similar things happened.
I don't use Amazon much any more since they sold me counterfeit pharmaceuticals, which were recalled years later.
Bummer that Amazon blocked asking questions about the product. I was curious if they had ChatGPT rigged up to answer.
They all seem to be 3rd party products and not stuff sold by Amazon. Some 3rd party seller is doing some doo doo
We need a "Failblog" for AI.
That's a good phrase to remember in terms of bulk-checking my own AI-generated content.
Just until last months people were asking where is all AI spam. It was slow and then sudden.
It's been removed from Amazon.
Perhaps this lazy seller should have used another LLM to validate first LLMs output?
This is a great example of why Amazon is a better place to buy things than Temu
That's original naming sense from GPT. We now have I'm Sorry Furniture.
That would actually work as a title for a Japanese Light Novel!
The page has now been removed. Was it by amazon or the seller?
"...it goes against OpenAI use policy. (Brown)"
It's not even brown
The page is gone, it only shows Amazon's doggy 404. Can someone explain what it showed before, or summarize what it was about.
This will put all the comments into their original context.
What, no reviews
I was going to submit one, but it said that Amazon had flagged the item as having suspicious review behavior, so I'm guessing a lot of others had the same idea.
I m sorry, that's not even brown
The prompt engineers took it down.
Oh man, it only comes in brown?
Seems the entry is gone sadly
I bought my partner a Sony camera and lens for Christmas.
Contacted them on Christmas day to tell them it was faulty.
It’s the 13th January and they still haven’t refunded.
Been in touch and they say it should be refunded by February.
Nearly £4K. And the only present I got for my partner (it cleared my bank buying that). Total disaster.
Moral of the story: do not buy presents from Amazon. Do not buy anything which you aren’t prepared to wait a couple of months on a refund. And do not trust the statements about refunds in 5-7 days max.
Fuckers.
No reviews so far. Weird.
Page Not Found.
Anyone have a screencap?
silly fail or genius viral marketing scheme?
I get that this is basically fraud and spam, but this should really highlight the dangers of letting an unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
I don't find this any different than seeing an exposed jinja template: "{{product_name}} is perfect people who work in {{customer_industry}}" or the typical recruiter "Dear {{candidate}} I read your profile carefully and think you'd be perfect for {{job_title}} because of your experience at {{random_co_from_resume}}"
If anything, I think it's kind of cool that we're seeing LLMs actually used for something very practical, even if it is spammy (I mean I don't think template engines are evil just because they make spam easier).
I don't think LLMs are evil either, but I think the real risks are extremely underplayed. This is a mostly innocuous example, but there are a lot of people trying to get LLMs into more places where the just aren't ready for yet.
The difference between a template is that the behavior is generally deterministic. Even if someone fucks it up, it means it's (usually) trivial to fix.
Those emails from recruiters is also spam.
Why is it fraud? Maybe it's a legitimate item.
A legitimate item from the totally legit company "FOPEAS" that's being sold for $100 less at vidaxl.com and is still probably made from formaldehyde-soaked wood and covered in lead paint.
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It's possible it's legitimate. I think the odds of that being the case are in the single digits, though.
Is this a dramatic fuckup? Because it quite possibly successfully created tens of thousands of listings more or less successfully. This one will probably generate no sales, but were there any consequences for this mistake?
The difference is the failure is non-deterministic and not predictable in any real capacity
This isn't the only one
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974931
What dangers? Nobody will see any consequences for this: not Amazon-- they're a monopoly, they don't give a shit-- and not the seller-- who probably won't see any impact whatsoever on their sales or reputation, and will just recreate under a new shell name if they do.
The fact that LLMs drive the cost of junk text production to zero is a tremendous opportunity when there is no penalty for messing up. It's the same think as bulk spam mailing: if it's free, there's no reason not to keep trying even if only one a million is a success.
Frequent run-ins with listings like this will definitely build (even more of) a reputation in some users' minds that Amazon is a spam-filled and unproductive place to look for things, but yes—it would take a lot to actually threaten their market position.
When the LLM spits out “clinically proven” then you are in trouble
>> unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
So, just like any other random employee?
To err is human. To fuck up a million times per second, you need a computer.
Granted, here at the beginning of 2024, an LLM can not quite attain that fuck up velocity. But take heart! Many of the smartest people on Earth are working on solving that exact problem even as you read this.
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No. Random employees have a well-understood distribution of mostly normal human errors of certain types and estimated severity, relative to unattended LLM which has a poorly-understood distribution of errors in both type and severity. (“SolidGoldMagikarp”.)
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Why is it that LLMs are so often compared to employees and their responsibilities? In my opinion, it is an employee that actively USES the LLM as a tool and this employee (or his/her employer) is responsible for the results.
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The employee generally knows they fucked up and can escalate the issue. Discussion on whether or not this actually happens will follow in comments below.
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No, not at all. People can be held accountable for the decisions they make. You can have a relationship of trust between people. LLMs do not have these properties.
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That's a testable assertion isn't it? Do you observe any product with that extreme level of silliness, which weren't intentional?
People generally review their product catalogues.
Only if your employee is prone to episodes where they call all your customers speaking in tongues.
>> unattended LLM do anything for your company at all. It can, and will, fuck up dramatically sooner or later.
> So, just like any other random employee?
Right, might as well just replace it all with a roll of the dice in that case. Wait do we have to quantify our comparisons? no, no, sorry, I almost forgot this was the internet for a second.
Humans can also be held accountable for fuck ups, which makes them less desirable therefore less likely. A bot doesn't care about this.
yes, but humans have contracts and plausible deniability and all that jazz from companies. A human can't go on a shooting spree that will end up getting the employer sued for that very reason.
Robot as of now, not so much.
Why do people not understand that LLMs can do things at scale, next year they can form swarms, etc.
Swarms of LLMs are not comparable to an employee, they have far better coordination and can carry out long-term conspiracies far better than any human collective. They can amass reputation and karma (as is happening on this very site, and Reddit, etc. daily) and then deploy it in coordinated ways against any number of opponents, or to push public opinion towards a specific goal.
It's like comparing a CPU to a bunch of people in an office calculating tables.
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not THAT badly, lol
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This meme is getting old.
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Ah, FOPEAS, that distinguished brand of kitchen counter drawers renowned throughout the world.
Amazon, in general, is not the place to shop for "brands renowned throughout the world."
Most of those folks stay off amazon, and If you're lucky enough to find such a brand on Amazon the chances that you receive a counterfeit version are pretty great.
Although if I had an endless bag of money to burn it'd be fun to buy an Amazon Rolex [0] just to see how it's handled.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Rolex-Oyster-Perpetual-Master-116710B...
I think the “IM JUST AN AI MODEL FROM OPEN AI, I CANT DO THAT” drawers are actually more famous for their quality and engineering details than Rolexes. You’re right, that probably means this is counterfeit, but my heart skipped a beat with excitement just seeing they had it in stock.
That is, of course, their premium drawers, and it looks like they’re sold out of their “I found this on the web. Please unlock your iPhone to view more” bar cart as well.
It actually is... ? For every brand, I search amazon first. They usually have it cheaper, with fast delivery and reliable return policy. Better than most brand webshops. If brand/quality wouldn't matter I would go to Ali.
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Well, at least you can return your fake for free
I love my FOPEAS counters! I got them for free in exchange for my honest review. I haven't assembled them yet, but my cat loves to sit on the box. 5 stars!
"received quickly, looks good, haven't tried yet" were always concerning reviews on ahem, darker markets. You always wondered if they tried it and died so they couldn't come back to update their review, but reviews like that were rampant.
And I don't think the FTC was up to the marketplace's neck, they were actually honest and genuine reviews someone took the time out of their day to submit.
I wonder how many short trademarks are left now that Amazon has incentivized generating new ones as quickly as feasible.
Hey! At least be thankful that your six letter chinese trademark roulette word is pronounceable! Better than my SMYGLX
How does you sound this out? My brain sounded it out as "faux pas" with the S annunciated, which is pretty funny given the circumstances.
I think you'll find they're a tech company
They're the furniture subsidiary of American Sub Restaurant Very Clean Come In.
meh, probably not significantly worse than the actually well-known and distinguished furniture brands like KALLAX, HEMNES, FINNBY, or BAGGEBO
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/cat/bookcases-10382/
I bought junk furniture like this when I was in college. It’s actually much worse than ikea.
If you are careful when putting together ikea furniture, certain models are actually really durable and sturdy. Oh and of course sometimes the European models are nicer than the American ones.
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These are names for product lines, not brands, and usually derived from Swedish words.
IKEA has huge economies of scale, a ruthless focus on efficiency, little marketing, and reasonably low margins (~8%).
At any given price point, their products are likely to be the best available, with the caveat that they do offer things at price points where everything in the market is disposable crap. Their mid-price stuff can be great value though.
I’ve bought a number of IKEA products made from solid wood that are 10+ years old, have moved multiple times, and still look/work great, including some Hemnes dressers.
Those are product names, not brands.
Yes, but IKEA is well-known, and is somewhat well known for product names like that.
"Ailisidun923", on the other hand?
When do we as a society get to the point where we feel requiring Amazon to have products be human-reviewed before posting is a burden that the $1.602T company can probably shoulder?
Let them solve these with AI or whatever, but the government should invest in punishing the shit that FAANG companies do and then hand in the invoice.
When I decide I need AI to read through their AI.
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If you search " I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request", you get results for some "products" on amazon
I really hope they keep this up and it gets “real reviews” so we can prove Amazon is full of shit. It’s so full of shit I don’t buy products unless it has many thousands of reviews just because of noise
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Amazon is effective in promoting products based on user cookies. The price indeed fluctuates to compete with rivals. They often curate products that provide higher margins. Sometimes, it is challenging to determine the best product from reviews due to mixed experiences worldwide.
Submitted earlier today - would be nice if people instead of re-submitting the exact same thing that didn't get traction, emailed hn@yc and asked for it to go in the second chance pool, it's more polite to the original submitter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969417
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