I don't understand what Amazon thinks it's doing with its legions of data scientists, analysts, product managers and engineers that they consider so much more important than solving this problem, which will destroy their reputation long-term and create space for a competitor.
At this rate, Amazon will be on its way to becoming Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted.
Ensuring a competitor can’t arise in other ways? Unlike Yelp, Amazon has oodles of expensive and difficult-to-replicate physical infrastructure, hordes of low-level staff, exclusive supply contracts aplenty, enough cash reserves to price-dump anybody into oblivion, and probably many other things I don’t even know I don’t know about.
Competition only works when barriers to entry are absent, small, or at least surmountable. “Disruption” is one way to circumvent that, but it isn’t magic, either.
I’m sure the brick and mortar stores felt similar before Amazon came and ate their lunch. Expensive and difficult to replicate infrastructure is a protective measure until it suddenly becomes a millstone around your neck due to its cost and inertia.
On the other hand customer trust is also a great moat to protect you from being usurped, and no company will ever come to rue having too much consumer trust. Amazon is foolish to spend this consumer trust down for increased profits.
They don't even have to spend cash to price-dump. Wallyworld and the membership warehouses get cheap prices by dangling huge purchase orders in front of companies. "We can always go to your competitor" is the unspoken threat.
> Amazon has oodles of expensive and difficult-to-replicate physical infrastructure, hordes of low-level staff, exclusive supply contracts aplenty, enough cash reserves to price-dump anybody into oblivion, and probably many other things I don’t even know I don’t know about.
The playbook to disrupt this was made clear when AirBNB disrupted, or at least bit a good chunk out of, the hotel industry, which could have been described in very similar terms. And they didn't have to replicate any of their physical infrastructure to do it.
Shopify, BigCommerce, and similar players are already doing it to Amazon. I predict this trend will continue.
Same for YouTube. they allow blatant crypto scam videos to run (such as videos impersonating famous people like Michael Saylor) yet none of their hundreds of highly paid engineers are able to do anything even though it is such a blatant fraud and people are losing a lot of money. It's like "who cares if users are being ripped off. sucks for them. not our responsibility." Unless a law is passed holding these companies accountable, little will change.
> yet none of their hundreds of highly paid engineers are able to do anything
Moderation doesn't scale well, so hundreds of engineers don't go very far even if you put them all on moderation. Google doesn't like to put money on anything that can't be automated (even when it's the appropriate, like customer service), hence you see only ML filters that of course can't tell the difference.
Also, careful what you wish for. As we've seen, one man's moderation is another man's 1A violation. I'd much more prefer comments, downvotes and user defined filters to do the accountability, than a guaranteed-shitty DOA moderation/truth keeper team. I worry much more about YT's slow creep towards a fully auto-play, advertiser friendly TV equivalent.
Yes it does when it comes to free speech. What gives you the impression that it doesn't? I mean it might not be good for your stocks, but companies have most of the same free speech rights that a regular person has.
I get unusually annoyed by fake movie trailers. The type that edit together random scenes from previous movies and get 17M views.
Like… wtf. If an actual content creator uploads something they filmed in their own garage but there’s a sliver of a poster in the background with Mickey Mouse in it, it’s instantly flagged as a copyright violation.
Straight up reposting of 5 minutes of a movie pretending I be a new one? Fine, go ahead…
Lots of ad dollars to be made on 17M views so I'm not surprised they really take their time to carefully consider and weigh up the opposing arguments of removal, free speech and what not /s
Meanwhile the one with 200 views gets their channel banned along with their Google account.
Assuming this is the person's first viral video and they have no affiliate contract yet, do they get something in retrospective?
And if someone is a partner, how much money would they make just by the views? Let's exclude followers etc.
Do they get something for just the views or do they have to have ads in the video?
Thank god I am not the only one experiencing this.
I am generally interested in space related subjects, but my feed is constantly full of fake 'live' SpaceX and Elon Musk videos. These are just old SpaceX streams overlayed with crypto scams.
No matter how often I report these videos as misleading, the keep being recommended to me. At the beginning, reporting a video would make it disappear from my feed instantly, but now, even after reporting the video stays in my feed. My guess is that the report/view ratio of my account is probably so bad now that Youtube is no longer processing my reports as trustworthy.
Those hundreds of fake reviews are a feature, not a bug for Amazon. They drive sales. And when the chickens come home to roost, as you say, Amazon will probably figure out a completely different trick to juice sales.
In the short term Amazon may benefit from this. But the fake reviews, throw-away brands, and counterfeit items are gradually corroding Amazon's credibility and brand identity among customers. This is the first year I've heard family members (who are frequent Amazon customers) complaining about these kinds of issues.
But the fake reviews, throw-away brands, and counterfeit items are gradually corroding Amazon's credibility and brand identity among customers.
Amazon are very good at making money. This is not a problem for them; it's an opportunity.
Before Amazon lose all their credibility they'll introduce something like "Amazon Assured" that sells customers a guaranteed real item. They'll charge sellers for the privilege of having the "assured" status on the product page, and make filtering by assured status something that's only accessible to Amazon Prime users.
Users will believe Amazon are doing this to protect them.
I don't get the implied scorn. Isn't reliable information valuable? Worth paying for?
It sounds like you think this information should be priced in. I'm accustomed to that as well, since it has mostly been the commercial default for most of my life, but maybe unbundling it is worth a shot.
After all, "Consumer Reports" isn't free either, and caveat emptor has forever been the law of the market.
By the time the negative long term effects are felt, the executives responsible for the short term juicing will have extracted massive personal wealth.
And they enable the competition - Aliexpress has the exact same stuff as Amazon now, but at cheaper prices. And they are working very much on the long shipping times with warehouses around the world. Sure, the service and support is far removed from Amazon, but then prices for the same crap are often 50% less. Also to me it seems they are much harder on cheating sellers.
And Aliexpress also just refund you money if target delivery time of NN days run out. And then you get your afforable chinese crap for free with no requirement to ship it back to Aliexpress.
Indeed. As much as few I know trust Yelp, there really isn't anything close to an effective alternative, except for maybe the Uber Eats ratings.
This is why this is not a problem for Amazon. Removing Amazon from my life would require substantially restructuring it and losing a lot more time procuring goods. Have I been burned a few times by shoddy goods? Yes, the alternative is spending time in stores or spending days waiting for packages. I can order something in the morning and have it delivered by the evening.
FWIW, I've dropped Amazon and it was mostly just a change of habit. After becoming familiar with other options, it has been just as easy to order (and better in other ways).
It depends on what I'm looking for. People I know, local news, objective data, just trying different places until I find one I like. There are no great answers.
I think it's a question of incentives. For scammers, 100% of their success is dependent on beating the review system. For Amazon, losing the battle will cost them much less than 100% of their profits.
I'm no genius but it would seem like with some human trainers and some smart AI algorithms this could all be fixed fairly rapidly. Maybe I just don't understand machine learning well enough :)
At this rate, Amazon will be on its way to becoming Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted.