Comment by _heimdall
5 days ago
I don't think its so easy to pull apart what people are buying and what they want to buy.
Amazon has a pretty crippling hold on the online retail industry, and they collect massive amounts of data to decide what to put in front of people.
Targeted marketing and the partnership between marketing and psychology is nothing new, it has gotten stronger though. I have a hard time looking at a market run like that as a roughly free market where the successful products indicate what buyers actually want rather than what they were best coerced (or "nudged") into buying.
I would say there are other viable platforms people could offer on but Amazon actively punishes people for trying to work out of their ecosystem by penalizing them for offering lower prices than on Amazon
It's an optimization loop where one part of the cycle (showing people stuff and seeing if they buy it) is very fast, and one part (product development) is very slow. This is sure to find local, rather than global maxima.