Comment by dogtimeimmortal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogtimeimmortal | Hacker News Reader

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dogtimeimmortal

Also, there's the whole taking your money and completing the deal part. A whole bunch of sites seem to be breaking their own pages these days, leaving Amazon the sole remaining venue that still works.

I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.

anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:

ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).

walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.

newegg: main-page still loads mangled.

zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)

thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.

so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?

I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.

Examples: 1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized. 2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back. 3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).

I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.

Funny, talk to sellers who use eBay and they will say how it's all stacked against them and that eBay accepts disputes from buyers almost unconditionally and they have no recourse and how much abuse there is by buyers who claim they received damaged goods or the wrong item.

Both can be true.

This is a market for lemons.

As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses.

Trust is the real rare commodity.

And the rational response to a low trust environment is to act with low trust. This is so fragile!

> I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.

It's always been bad but it's gotten worse and there's no recourse other than a dispute. I had a seller label a midi device a particular version (known to work with Linux and Mac) but when it arrived it was an older version that requires a proprietary Windows-only driver. I went back to the listing and the photos were of different versions. Seller refused the return. Ebay was unhelpful. Great.

ebay has hidden the "report listing" button so well i thought they removed it. but it is still accessible behind a plus sign ("+") in the corner of the page.

This sounds like you are running an ad blocker that’s breaking stuff.

I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.

Nah, it's Firefox, not the ad blocker. I run into similar problems all the time, and disabling my ad blocker never solves it. If you pop open the developer console and look for errors, it usually boils down to Firefox having stricter policies about cross-origin requests. Even major web properties simply don't bother testing for even the most superficial functionality on browser engines other than Blink any more.

Correct, specifically Firefox 78-esr. Life is hard, and my old mac is out of date. I still haven't found my preferred brand of linux, though sometimes the experience is better there(though not always). I usually also test in PaleMoon, Basilisk, and SeaMonkey, with varying degrees of success. I was lazy this time, and did not test further.

note, the current front-runner for my linux migration is MX. I'm still looking around though. will i ever actually make the plunge. one day my mac will just die i am sure.

Do you think it's more likely all these major websites are broken, or that you are doing something to cause the problem?

I think it's extremely likely that all these major websites are built specifically to work with Google Chrome, and I would call that “broken”, yes.

It's worse than that. They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs. And they keep getting worse - I'm sure they've all got some big dashboards that say "evil bots blocked", the numbers just keep going up up up (false positives and all), and whatever middle manager championed the initiative to block customers gets a pat on the back and a mandate to do more.

Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. Amazon has similar functionality, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. The most I've ever seen on Amazon is a simple captcha before the login page, period. Whereas on other sites, if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight of the primary goal being to serve customers!

Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price as it is elsewhere because it's only on Amazon becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business.

I've got a web app that receives over 1000 requests every second, of which 1-2 are optimistically humans. These bot blocking pages are not for show.

My argument wasn't that they are for show, but rather that the false positive rate is way too high and the incentive seems to tune them ever upwards.

Also context here, 1000 requests/second is doable on modest hardware as is. Mitigations with a false negative rate of 10% get that down to 100 req/s, which is doable on even a Rasperry Pi. You don't need to block every request but those 2 in order to have a usable site.

We can imagine some rough contours of the problem - require being logged in to do any expensive query, serve static pages otherwise, rate limit accounts that do many expensive queries (especially without buying anything), and project the login page with some mild proof of work to prevent credential stuffing.

From what I've seen, Amazon comes much closer to this (I've only ever seen a captcha when logging in), whereas other web stores just keep cranking that false positive rate up and up.

They are very expensive requests.

So another case of "good enough" inefficient code/design, and then making users suffer for it.

I can sympathize for a small project, but we're talking about good size web stores here. If their basic product pages aren't static, that's on them.

No, they are expensive by design. They are intended to do expensive things.

> They all put up browser surveillance / captcha blockwalls to "stop bots" (even despite bots being legitimate shoppers these days!) that make the sites just straight up not work on most of my browser configs.

What do you mean by this? For example, we do escalating proof of work and I'm not sure how this would make a site not work, even for very exotic configs with high risk signal (e.g. spoofed user-agent, proxies, etc). It will definitely consume more CPU cycles, but I don't see how it would affect functionality.

Disclosure: I work for Friendly Captcha.

I don't use eBay much, but I use Firefox exclusively and never recall any issues with it there.

> walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.

Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine.

"however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now."

Responding before coffee maybe? They already stipulated this

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