Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

Absent is any ground between cheap garbage and expensive shit that actually works. Some products are in that middle-ground price range, but they're actually cheap garbage that's been marked up to rip you off.

This seems to have increased over time, especially as factories became better able to produce goods that use barely enough material to work at all, without a too-high defect rate. I wonder sometimes how much inflation this is masking—goods stay the same price or even get somewhat cheaper, but are significantly worse than before.

Tools/electronics can easily be bought from reputable providers: eu.mouser.com, tme.eu, uk.farnell.com, digikey.com, etc.. You can get a decent ratchet rj-45 crimp tool at around 40€ - like "Knipex 975110".

I think what we're seeing is a nice metaphor for manufacturing in the 1st world in general.

I am noticing it everywhere: clothing, furniture, cooking equipment, dishes & cutlery, even houseplant pots.

I wonder if this is a phenomenon similar to "shrinkflation", or if it's just the long-term corporate master plan.

Bizarrely if you search by price from highest to lowest looking for quality all you get is cheap looking products with no reviews that cost 150x the price of products with actual reviews for no discernible reason.

The whole marketplace is a cesspool.

The Amazon bullshit tools I bought just made a mess.

Now, all the cheap Amazon wrenches and stuff? I leave em all over!

Unfortunately you're wrong, it's a huge problem for books as well. No Starch Press already left Amazon because it was the only way to prevent fakes being sent out to customers buying the genuine book. Fakes including ones where the back cover wasn't printed or everything was printed black & white, low-quality paper etc. As Amazon just mixes fake & genuine products because they say the same thing on the package it's impossible for both sellers and buyers to know what they'll get. You get what the person handling the package will draw next from the pile.

Serious question, how do you find reputable specialty web stores nowadays? (for items which are not your professional specialty, i.e. when you don't have direct knowledge of the market or trusted contacts that can recommend those for you). Trying to google for items of medium quality, you only get shady reseller shops that are as bad as Amazon third-party market, or worse.

- commingling of inventory means you're not necessarily getting the stuff from the merchant you're ostensibly buying from

- which doesn't really matter anyway because merchant reviews are hard to find (couldn't find them at all on mobile)

- being able to change the product being sold while keeping the rating and review history. WAT

As in, the scammers could be scamming everyone but you but you'd still use it.

Are those nicknames for major retailers or are they knock offs themselves? After shopping at Wu-Mart in Beijing, I really can’t tell anymore.

> This is why we can't allow the concept of mom-and-pop shops to die off

In Beijing, I was much less likely to get scammed at Walmart or Carrefour than at the many local mom and pop shops.

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.

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.

Maybe, just maybe, that isn't the best investment. The competitors could pause while Amazon is having its fit.

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.

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…

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.

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.

I've also done Del Mar (110 restaurants), Downtown SD (around 80 before I stopped) and 30th Street (maybe 35 or so?).

Oh, and I've been in a group for the last 10 years that goes out to eat at a new restaurant every couple months.

Also asking on reddit on the appropriate subreddit is pretty helpful.

It is now incredibly difficult to find products by reputable brands that you stand a chance of recognising, and if you do, they are probably knock-offs too.

As I understand it, anything used or returned will also get an LPN barcode, which tracks that specific unit.

My review stating this was blocked. I made appeal multiple times and Amazon simply ignored me.

Last time I checked the listing had a perfect 5 star rating...

Hope this helps.

The problem is people will do anything for money. Both on the seller side, and on the (fake) buyer/reviewer side.

I recently came across site that's sort of "mechanical turk for scalping", and it was eye opening. IIRC helping to scalp a PS5 would earn 200 in commission.