13 ms·

What’s hard to believe about several thousand sellers all copying each other’s homework?

derefr 4y ago
Because it's not just the big things that are the same; it's the little points of style that a "marketplace of ideas" wouldn't think to share or copy. You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. It'd both be too hard, and not worth it, to do so; and they already have their own handwriting style. So why would they?
- pishpash 4y ago
  This must be something that materializes out of the seller interaction with Amazon, because the same aesthetic does not appear on eBay, or for that matter Aliexpress.
- travem 4y ago
  > You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?
  - derefr 4y ago
    What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." I noticed these patterns because I personally went through the top 100 items in every leaf-node category of the Amazon store a few months back (because I treat "finding obscure solutions to problems I didn't know I had" as a hobby.) No new Amazon seller is going to do that; and so no new Amazon seller is going to notice every detail of the pattern. Or, to put that another way: if this were a "marketplace of ideas", there'd be a certain amount of mutation, of copying error, to be expected, from individual sellers not noticing all of the stylistic quirks other sellers use; and instead substituting something random. But instead, what you see is perfect copying of style, with no mutation or variation, among what are ostensibly thousands of distinct sellers/brands. That's implausible. (Also, for a bit of a knock-down argument I maybe should have pulled out sooner: when there's an update to the "optimal style" used by these brands? They all change. All at once. Thousands of different brands got rid of the 【】 — replacing it with [] — on the same day, some time last year. Real independent sellers, even if they notice tiny changes in popular style like that, can't react that fast, and don't have time to be constantly updating all their product listings. But a SaaS sales platform with a post-maintenance bot sure does!)
    - oceanplexian 4y ago
      Conspiracy Theory: Maybe the sellers aren’t human but actually an ML model run amok
      - happycube 4y ago
        MOFFBUZW does sound like a logo Dall-E 2 would spit out.
    - the_gipsy 4y ago
      Maybe amazon cracked down on those weird barckets, just for cleanliness sake.
    - redler 4y ago
      That sort of bulk change, all at once, might just be Amazon deciding to canonicalize the bracket menagerie.
      - derefr 4y ago
        Not so: the change happened across all these thousands of brands that had the exact style; but it didn't happen to the minority of posts that were from "real" independent Chinese marketplace-of-ideas sellers, who had copied the style with errors, or independently reinvented it. Those other listings still use the dictionary-headword brackets. So no Amazon-side canonicalization was performed.
    - flyaway123 4y ago
      > What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." You're assuming cause & effect here. To this point, imagine: - The crowd following the leader / a particular success story - Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network - "Educational" boot camps to "get rich". There are towns where people gathered to learn from "the pros" (search for related documentaries) - Learning from the same person, e.g. via tiktok-esque platform - Subscribed to update packages - Generator to fill forms > That's implausible. 'thousands' is tiny in terms of scale at China. Imagine yourself as a seller within a network of an extremely competitive network, with a "succeed or hunger" mindset, would you follow and immediately implement any changes that can improve your chance of success? e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】" Try to relate why being on the first page on HN can bring certain websites down? I think you are also underestimating what 'travem' mentioned about language and literacy. Again, imagine you have a limited or zero grasp of the English language. The alphabetical letters are just gibberish to your eyes, but you know you can copy them as your native language characters on your PC/smartphone. Would you attempt to be creative or play it safe?
- jonas21 4y ago
  Ah, but if you both learned to write from the same person, then you would expect the handwriting to look similar (even if you didn't let them see your notes). And I think that might be going on here. Take a look at a Chinese-language web site, like http://news.baidu.com http://news.baidu.com You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned, lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, and nearly all the latin script on the page is composed of short strings of all-caps text (many of which are acronyms like "IPO" or "AEX" that would be nonsensical if you didn't already know what they meant). Some of these stylistic elements are naturally going to bleed over into Amazon listings too.
  - derefr 4y ago
    That's certainly an alternative possibility; more likely, IMHO, than sellers copying one-another perfectly. However... > You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned It does, but there are only two examples of it on the page right now. (It is a thing common to Chinese text generally, but it's not the first thing you'd reach for.)【】gets used on this page as a sort of "tag" or "section" for a story. In Amazon product descriptions, meanwhile, it's being used to form a sort of two-tier "【title】body" text; as if compressing a slide-deck slide onto a single line. That's not what those characters are "for", in Chinese. It's a misuse. A Chinese reader would be confused. > lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, There are no emoji bullets on Baidu; there are styled bullets. But also, when I say "emoji bullets", I don't mean that they use emoji as bullets; I mean that they use regular bullets, and then use emojis as additional "decorations" for each point. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png . AFAIK, nobody does this, anywhere on the Internet, Chinese or otherwise, other than on these brands' Amazon product pages. Because it's silly. Consider also: if this was just "the way Chinese people write product descriptions on marketplace websites", then you'd expect to see it happening on e.g. AliExpress, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Maybe there’s a $50 start your own business pdf going around that has precise instructions that people just follow.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  They're just standard features of the Chinese language

Because it's not just the big things that are the same; it's the little points of style that a "marketplace of ideas" wouldn't think to share or copy. You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. It'd both be too hard, and not worth it, to do so; and they already have their own handwriting style. So why would they?

pishpash 4y ago
This must be something that materializes out of the seller interaction with Amazon, because the same aesthetic does not appear on eBay, or for that matter Aliexpress.
travem 4y ago
> You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?
- derefr 4y ago
  What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." I noticed these patterns because I personally went through the top 100 items in every leaf-node category of the Amazon store a few months back (because I treat "finding obscure solutions to problems I didn't know I had" as a hobby.) No new Amazon seller is going to do that; and so no new Amazon seller is going to notice every detail of the pattern. Or, to put that another way: if this were a "marketplace of ideas", there'd be a certain amount of mutation, of copying error, to be expected, from individual sellers not noticing all of the stylistic quirks other sellers use; and instead substituting something random. But instead, what you see is perfect copying of style, with no mutation or variation, among what are ostensibly thousands of distinct sellers/brands. That's implausible. (Also, for a bit of a knock-down argument I maybe should have pulled out sooner: when there's an update to the "optimal style" used by these brands? They all change. All at once. Thousands of different brands got rid of the 【】 — replacing it with [] — on the same day, some time last year. Real independent sellers, even if they notice tiny changes in popular style like that, can't react that fast, and don't have time to be constantly updating all their product listings. But a SaaS sales platform with a post-maintenance bot sure does!)
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    Conspiracy Theory: Maybe the sellers aren’t human but actually an ML model run amok
    - happycube 4y ago
      MOFFBUZW does sound like a logo Dall-E 2 would spit out.
  - the_gipsy 4y ago
    Maybe amazon cracked down on those weird barckets, just for cleanliness sake.
  - redler 4y ago
    That sort of bulk change, all at once, might just be Amazon deciding to canonicalize the bracket menagerie.
    - derefr 4y ago
      Not so: the change happened across all these thousands of brands that had the exact style; but it didn't happen to the minority of posts that were from "real" independent Chinese marketplace-of-ideas sellers, who had copied the style with errors, or independently reinvented it. Those other listings still use the dictionary-headword brackets. So no Amazon-side canonicalization was performed.
  - flyaway123 4y ago
    > What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." You're assuming cause & effect here. To this point, imagine: - The crowd following the leader / a particular success story - Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network - "Educational" boot camps to "get rich". There are towns where people gathered to learn from "the pros" (search for related documentaries) - Learning from the same person, e.g. via tiktok-esque platform - Subscribed to update packages - Generator to fill forms > That's implausible. 'thousands' is tiny in terms of scale at China. Imagine yourself as a seller within a network of an extremely competitive network, with a "succeed or hunger" mindset, would you follow and immediately implement any changes that can improve your chance of success? e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】" Try to relate why being on the first page on HN can bring certain websites down? I think you are also underestimating what 'travem' mentioned about language and literacy. Again, imagine you have a limited or zero grasp of the English language. The alphabetical letters are just gibberish to your eyes, but you know you can copy them as your native language characters on your PC/smartphone. Would you attempt to be creative or play it safe?
jonas21 4y ago
Ah, but if you both learned to write from the same person, then you would expect the handwriting to look similar (even if you didn't let them see your notes). And I think that might be going on here. Take a look at a Chinese-language web site, like http://news.baidu.com http://news.baidu.com You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned, lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, and nearly all the latin script on the page is composed of short strings of all-caps text (many of which are acronyms like "IPO" or "AEX" that would be nonsensical if you didn't already know what they meant). Some of these stylistic elements are naturally going to bleed over into Amazon listings too.
- derefr 4y ago
  That's certainly an alternative possibility; more likely, IMHO, than sellers copying one-another perfectly. However... > You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned It does, but there are only two examples of it on the page right now. (It is a thing common to Chinese text generally, but it's not the first thing you'd reach for.)【】gets used on this page as a sort of "tag" or "section" for a story. In Amazon product descriptions, meanwhile, it's being used to form a sort of two-tier "【title】body" text; as if compressing a slide-deck slide onto a single line. That's not what those characters are "for", in Chinese. It's a misuse. A Chinese reader would be confused. > lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, There are no emoji bullets on Baidu; there are styled bullets. But also, when I say "emoji bullets", I don't mean that they use emoji as bullets; I mean that they use regular bullets, and then use emojis as additional "decorations" for each point. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png . AFAIK, nobody does this, anywhere on the Internet, Chinese or otherwise, other than on these brands' Amazon product pages. Because it's silly. Consider also: if this was just "the way Chinese people write product descriptions on marketplace websites", then you'd expect to see it happening on e.g. AliExpress, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.
colechristensen 4y ago
Maybe there’s a $50 start your own business pdf going around that has precise instructions that people just follow.
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
They're just standard features of the Chinese language