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Several years back, Facebook courted me to help them "combat abuse" in its many forms on their platform. But then I discovered that it was all bullshit, and the
by mynameisash 5y ago
Several years back, Facebook courted me to help them "combat abuse" in its many forms on their platform. But then I discovered that it was all bullshit, and they just wanted me to join them for their mundane ML/data engineering work such as doing video recommendations. They have a serious abuse problem but apparently choose to ignore it.
So it goes with Amazon. They have many issues with useless reviews, bad actors gaming the system, inaccurate descriptions, and so on. I get that it's a hard problem, but it's not like this is a mom & pop shop here; Amazon is a $1.5T company with incredible resources at its disposal. That they haven't made this a fringe, near negligible annoyance on their retail site seems to me a strong indicator that they either don't really care or they actually benefit from it in some way.
- flak48 5y agoIf solving a problem isn't going to 1) move the stock price up and /or 2) move a metric that gets someone promoted or 3) help avoid significant negative publicity in some way, it's never going to get solved
- mynameisash 5y agoI agree with your somewhat cynical take. What's even more frustrating is that Amazon has been a company that ostensibly ignores those things and focuses only on customers. (I worked there years ago, and I genuinely liked that we could answer design questions simply by asking, "What would our customers want?") Focus on customers and the stock price goes up and negative perception go away. This should be an absolute no-brainer: What do Amazon's customers want? Better, more trustworthy, not fraudulent reviews. Search results that reflect the intent and not gamified FBA/3P products. Confidence that whatever they buy will be what they want and will last.