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Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]
- raydiatian 3y agoAmazon is at a scale where it’s more profitable to behave outside the law and accept the fines, than behave inside. This is a problem.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoCue every Big Tech Company.
- CSMastermind 3y agoSeems like an excellent opportunity for another retailer to pen a partnership deal with him. "Amazon sucks that's why we have a deal with NewEgg where you can get 10% off using my link in the description."
- maxk42 3y agoNot a great look, Amazon.
- codegladiator 3y agoAmazon needs a process before deleting accounts to check if the target has a big social media presence somewhere that it might create a backlash. Such accounts need to be handled differently.
- voytec 3y agoMy take from this video is that social media presence was the reason for account deletion. Amazon doesn't care about bad press (do they even get positive media coverage?). It's day like any other and it doesn't seem to hurt them.
- RobotToaster 3y ago>Amazon doesn't care about bad press They've literally deployed bots or paid shills[0] on twitter before to pretend to be happy amazon warehouse workers. [0]It wasn't clear which one.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gnicholas 3y agoI actually think triage systems like this are part of the problem. I know some social media management platforms offer this type of insights, so brands can be more responsive to people with large followings. But do they deserve better support than the rest of us?
- somenameforme 3y agoI'm certain the comment was ironic, emphasizing that there's a real possibility, if not probability, that Amazon has done this exact childish vindicative behavior on others, but we'd never know about it for those individuals lack the ability to reach millions at the tap of a button. It's also another warning about just blindly sacrificing your privacy or other interests to a massive corporation. Because that massive corporation, like any entity, is made up of lots of people - plenty of them just as petty and immature, as any other person.
- gnicholas 3y agoYes, may have been ironic; but did the first guy who was wronged have a big following on social media?
- bell-cot 3y ago> ...do they deserve better...? Morally, probably no. But humans are vastly more inclined to discrimination by caste / class / fame / etc. than they usually admit to, and failure to give special treatment to the "right" people will often generate a serious backlash. A CEO is responsible for his company's reputation and financial results - does he "deserve" his job if he ignores that unfortunate fact about the environment in which his business operates?
- Terr_ 3y agoWhile having a biased and unequal system like that would be beneficial to Amazon's bottom line... it sounds as if you're also saying it's a normatively-good thing. The flip-side of that approach is that the company can maximize unjust or arbitrary rules against "nobodies" who lack fame or political-clout.
- otikik 3y agoThey should have the same process for all accounts. The process just needs to be good.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoBut how will I satisfy my bootlicking needs if they had a good service?
- pyeri 3y agoHow much of a nuisance it really is if an American got cancelled by Amazon+Google? Assuming any attempt to create an alt account will be thwarted by the process (name won't match credit cards or bank accounts, etc.), I can imagine a dystopian future ~20 years from now where such people will become absolute pariahs in the society. Especially if the current trend of smaller tech companies cow towing the lines of established big tech players continues.
- samtho 3y agoI’m imagining a dystopian future where to KYC gets way out of control and you are required to undergo a credit, background, and reference check to make an account on a major platform. My guess is that as more of the internet turns to shit that feeds an AI machine that consumes this shit only to regurgitate it later, there will be a need to find out who is really human anymore.
- donmcronald 3y ago> My guess is that as more of the internet turns to shit that feeds an AI machine that consumes this shit only to regurgitate it later, there will be a need to find out who is really human anymore. Big tech is already setting up to take advantage of the situation and the “AI influx” is the narrative they’ll use to sell it to the average person. We’re going to end up with a verified ID system and Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook will be the gatekeepers. IMO it’ll happen via Passwordless (auth) and I think the recent push for verification systems on porn sites is just a dry run for what they’ve got planned for the mainstream.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoWell, there are often scare-articles running about the "social credit system" in China, and I think that many corporate leaders are watching China very closely in order to establish the same systems in the West. I think that likewise, consumers should pay attention to how this takes shape in China, because we'll be next on the list for implementation and deployment.
- deleted 3y ago
- rmbyrro 3y agoI hope you're being sarcastic here.
- nubinetwork 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 among others
- kossTKR 3y agoSo Amazon wrongly accuses some random dude of racism after he says "Excuse me how can i help you" from their robotic doorbell, then bricks all of his amazon smarthome products remotely, then bans this man from their associates program for even making a video about it on youtube after 10 years. Are we living inside of the movie demolition man now? I absolutely hate large corporations. Racism off course is never ok, but the megacorp should never even be able to brick someones bought products in the first place, or surveil them for that sake. We need some new heavy laws to whip these corporate psychos into place before we end up mirroring the chinese point system.
- amelius 3y agoWe should ban the selling of products that cannot be used as advertised without a connection to the original vendor.
- Lutger 3y agoThe Chinese point system is exactly what this reminds me of. It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society.
- andsoitis 3y ago> It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society Communism is when all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. So pure communism precludes corporations that are owned by private individuals.
- amelius 3y agoPerhaps you should explain what is the difference for the 99.99% of people that don't own the big capital.
- masklinn 3y agoThere’s nothing ironic about it, much of cyberpunk is an exploration of the totalitarian nature of hypercorporatism. It’s also not a variant of communism: first, in the Marxist-Leninist interpretation the purpose of the single party is expression of and progress towards the dictature of the proletariat, the single-party state is not communist (they claim socialism instead) and the ultimate goal is self-abolition (turns out all other issues aside it’s difficult to make such a system abolish itself). Second, Libertarian Marxist as well as Trotskyists oppose the use of a transitional one-party state and “democratic centralism”.
- prvc 3y ago>I have a full-time job working for a billionaire Out of curiosity, as a very occasional viewer of his channel: what is it that he does in that role?
- Krutonium 3y agoBasically, Right to Repair Lobbying, and giving grants to companies that align with that, as I understand.
- defrost 3y agoI believe he's recently started working for Eron Wolf under the FUTO banner. (but I might be wrong). This might be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJPmbcU-Vzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJPmbcU-Vzo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35911406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35911406
- dustypotato 3y agoEron Wolf sounds like an Elon Musk parody
- ddalex 3y agoAren't we (almost) all working for billionaires ?
- anywhichway 3y ago
- curiousgal 3y agoWhenever something like this happens it's worth looking at the entire scope, this is not as simple as Amazon banning the guy. You need to look at the steps that took place, someone had to actually make the call and have him banned. There was probably an email chain and this was the decision that they arrived to. Linking shitty things that happen to a person rather than some abstract corp gives the right perspective. Evil.
- mozman 3y agoThe worst part is the decision was made without proof. As distasteful or offensive as it was alleged to be its still just words. Who cares.
- curiousgal 3y agoProof of what? I didn't even consider that the allegation had an iota of truth!
- username332211 3y agoThat the decision was made without proof is the best, not the worst part of the whole affair. If there was one iota of proof, half the people on the internet would be arguing how it's Amazon's right and duty to brick people's homes if they say the bad word. None of them realizing that once such precedent is established, the Amazon corporation will be using and abusing it to it's own advantage. Such non-immediate concerns are beyond half the people in the internet, who lack the ability to project the future more a year ahead.
- stuaxo 3y agoYep - we should never ever forget that companies are just groups of people who make decisions, and they should be accountable.
- JohnFen 3y agoA huge part of the entire point of corporations is to keep individuals from being held accountable.
- TekMol 3y agoFor those who don't watch the video: This is about his affiliate account. It is surprising, that there is so little competition for affiliates these days. Amazon seems to be almost the only game in town. Sure, there are thousands of other affiliate programs. But they pay surprisingly little. Often affiliates earn only like $0.05 per click (on average). While the same company pays $1 per click on other channels like Google Ads. I am not sure why, but I suspect that it is because companies are so afraid of getting scammed. They trust Google, but not individuals. They pay $1 per click on Google Ads, need 20 clicks to acquire a new customer and are happy with a $20 price per customer because they know the lifetime value of a customer is higher. But to affiliates, they pay 5% of the customers $20 order, so $1. Divided by 20 clicks, that is $0.05 per click. So the affiliate channel is underpaid by a factor of 20. Why is no company tackling this inefficiency in the market?
- chrischen 3y agoThe 20 clicks it takes for an affiliate is out of the control of the advertiser, and is determined by the publisher and the source of traffic and the intent level of the traffic they are driving. Google, through their predictive models more or less is promising a certain CPA whereas a publisher may not have such guarantees. So obviously publishers need to be paid on performance instead. Affiliate advertisers still have to compete since publishers have a choice of who to actually publish.
- TekMol 3y agoI don't think that the 20 times lower PPC on affiliate links vs Google Ads is due to market forces. From the numbers I see, Google Ads are paid roughly "correctly". The ad spent per new customer is somewhere around the lifetime value of the customer. At least in competitive verticals. But for affiliate links, it is about 20 times lower. Your argument that market forces should drive the affiliate market towards the same equilibrium is exactly my question. Why doesn't it do that? Visit some random website about some random product. You don't see a variety of affiliate advertisers. You almost always only see Amazon. The cases where there are more than just Amazon links, it is often just to justify the site as a "price comparison" site. But reality is that even on those sites, the vast majority of revenue comes from Amazon.
- Yeri 3y agoSummary: The YouTuber had his Amazon affiliate account canceled after 7 years without warning or evidence of wrongdoing. The reason given was that purchases made through his links were for personal use or made by friends and family, which he denies. He finds the timing suspicious as it came a week after he made a video criticizing Amazon for canceling a customer's account for a racist doorbell claim. He argues that the small amount of revenue from his affiliate links is inconsequential to him. He believes Amazon is becoming less accountable as it grows in power and treats customers worse. While not excusing Amazon's actions, he questions whether enough vetting was done before canceling his account. The snap decision shows how trigger happy Amazon is to remove people's accounts.
- charcircuit 3y ago[flagged]
- throwaway392323 3y agoThis isn't some personal drama. If true, this is serious cause for alarm If Amazon is really retaliating against people critisizing them in public like it's really really bad. Like he said, if Amazon came out publicly and said that we don't want to partner with people that have an adverserial relationship with us, that be bad but at least more straightforward. Punishing people like this indirectly is dangerous in so many ways that I can't even explain it. It's especially dangerous for a company like amazon that's invovled in so many ways in everyday lives.
- andsoitis 3y ago> Like he said, if Amazon came out publicly and said that we don't want to partner with people that have an adverserial relationship with us, that be bad but at least more straightforward. Why does it need to be said? Why would anyone want to partner with someone who has an adversarial relationship? Would you?
- iopq 3y agoOnly if the issues they raise are justified and the fault of my company, then I could consider fixing them and wouldn't kill the messenger
- CompuHacker 3y agoAmazon is large. One would hope that the two internal organizational units would have sufficient separation so as to allow normal operations to continue between affiliate-linking and life-ruining. And, come to think of it, door-unlocking.
- richrichardsson 3y ago> Why does it need to be said? Because being direct with the truth is far more preferable than some bullshit weasley unrelated excuse for why they're terminating the relationship. This is the case in all situations, even when the truth "hurts".
- villgax 3y agoWhere's FTC at?
- CapsAdmin 3y agoI can't believe I'm saying this, but isn't it normal for programs like these to just randomly terminate because some numbers somewhere aren't right? Maybe I don't understand the affiliate program, but throughout the video I keep thinking this is an accusation against accusation.
- activiation 3y agoThe timing is suspect.
- NohatCoder 3y agoYup, it is perfectly possible that their divination AI has flagged and closed his account without any human intervention. Basically it is a lottery.
- yawnxyz 3y agothe lengths people go to cancel their Amazon account nowadays
- DeathArrow 3y agoOf course, it's not cool that Amazon can terminate anyone's account as they please. But I suppose it's their right. The real problem is Amazon having monopoly. If there were some true competition, I couldn't care less about Amazon closing my account as I could go to a competitor.
- andsoitis 3y ago> The real problem is Amazon having monopoly. What does Amazon have a monopoly on?
- DeathArrow 3y agoOnline retailing.
- jjgreen 3y agoAccording to this page, Amazon holds a dominant market share of 60-70% in book sales https://blog.gitnux.com/amazon-book-sales-statistics/ https://blog.gitnux.com/amazon-book-sales-statistics/
- mcherm 3y ago> What does Amazon have a monopoly on? Audiobooks. https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-available-on-audible-83cb182f2f91 https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-availab...
- prmoustache 3y agoHe should consider lucky amazon cancelled his account for him, most people seem to struggle cancelling their amazon accounts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Gordonjcp 3y ago[flagged]
- tomerbd 3y agoI always suspected these doors are racists
- say_it_as_it_is 3y ago[flagged]
- nicky0 3y agoWut? Perhaps don't post your comments based on the headline only.
- mrcartmeneses 3y agoThe anger in these videos is palpable. He’s doing us a great service by championing right to repair and consumer tech rights. But he needs a three-week holiday to Thailand before he snaps
- InTheArena 3y agoWith all due respect to Louis - he always sounds angry.
- jansommer 3y agoDidn't get that vibe at all. He seems to be very direct and to the point.
- ngvrnd 3y agoHe's just got a lot of energy.
- guraf 3y agoAnd yet somehow he always looks like he's slowly dying of a serious disease.
- code_biologist 3y agoI think all four of my ancestor comments are common "New Yorker" things.
- bilalq 3y agoTo use Amazon's terminology here, it really feels like they're becoming a Day Two company. It took decades to cultivate the perception that Amazon cares about customers more than any other company. It takes so much less to destroy that image. Google has already started paying the price for their customer-hostile behavior. It's a meme at this point how unreliable Google is for anything. Amazon and AWS have consistently been touted as the opposite. Contrast Google IoT Core with SimpleDB. The Googlification of Amazon will be to its detriment.
- SpaceNoodled 3y agoIt was Day Two at Amazon by the time Jassy took over, roughly the same time they began paying lip service to being the "most customer centric" company on their "leadership principles" rather than actually just doing it. It became more and more apparent every month and precipitated my exit.
- ignite 3y agoNothing shows this like the switch from showing recommended books/products to showing ads. Ads generate more revenue today, but I can't find good books to buy an Amazon, so I go elsewhere. It's clear which is better for the customer (and for Amazon long term), but they can't give up on the revenue stream, even if it will eventually kill them (since it drives their customers to other platforms, and provides a place for competitors to grow).
- botverse 3y agoThey have been royally MBA’d
- namelessone 3y agoWhat does "Day Two company" mean?
- bilalq 3y agoIt's lingo from Amazon's corporate culture. This article explains it well: https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon-defines-and-operationalizes-a-day-1-culture https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon... > Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.
- hungryforcodes 3y agoSorry, I guess I am nieve. But what is a racist door bell?
- TonyTrapp 3y agoThis story, which Louis commented on in previous videos: https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-w... On HN (among other threads): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296250
- hungryforcodes 3y agoWow. An "allegedly" racist door bell, but it's an accurate description. Thanks!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- activiation 3y agoI hope that he takes the time to change those affiliate links for any other store.
- dav_Oz 3y ago>Dear Louis Rossmann, our affiliate program is designed to direct positive attention to Amazon. The way you have represented the company in your opinions in how we do business are antithetical to the way we believe we represent ourselves in the world. As a result of this disagreement we will no longer have you as our affiliate. Signed Amazon. Well, it took some underpaid service worker (doing this repetitive work probably 1000x/day) just 1 sec to click a button to choose from a bunch of generic texts reviewed by a legal team to cancel your affiliate relationship with them and you even "got" it. Very effective. Win/Win. Maybe in the future Amazon will refine this with their own customized LLMs: legally watertight, some "honesty" fine-tuning and who knows from time to time sprinkled with some limericks just for the creepy giggles ... And owning to the previous experience with Amazon the way more important point: >Don't try to compete with Amazon [...] they will literally destroy you. The corollary to that: if you decide to do even some penny business with them, you are wholly at their whim. The machine at work seems to be very trigger happy atm.
- flenserboy 3y agoThis real-time slide into dystopia is going to take some weird turns along the way.
- JohnFen 3y agoBut we seem to be cruising down that path so quickly that we might not even notice the weird turns.
- scioto 3y agoAnd that's why I don't leave reviews on Amazon, or pretty much any site these days. I have purchased (okay, indefinitely rented) too much media on Amazon, eBooks, videos, etc., and I don't want to lose them because of a non-five-star review.
- stronglikedan 3y agoI stopped with reviews a long time ago, but not for fear of cancellation, but rather - they seem to have a habit of removing honest reviews, and it just wasn't worth the time to leave them just to have them removed.
- xwdv 3y agoAnother reason we need a better alternative to AWS: they will go as far as to shutdown your AWS infrastructure if you are somehow labeled as a racist or a racist sympathizer by their system.
- guraf 3y agoSource?
- Garvi 3y agoA few years back I bought a new Motorolla phone(for the replaceable battery) from the official Motorolla US Amazon store. I received a broken device with the packaging seal broken and the antenna not working at all. It was clearly a previously returned device that I also sent back. So that's the reality of how they do business.
- lost_tourist 3y agon=1 is a bad statistic to base decisions on. I've had a couple of duds from Amazon out of hundreds of things ordered. No problem returning broken things at all.
- stainablesteel 3y agoi'm only left wondering at what level of amazon has this pettiness occurred
- throwawaymedia 3y ago"racist trees", "racist doorbell", "racist photos"... my god, when will all this nonsense stop? When will the mass media stop feeding people with that crap? As a lesson, every single news company that writes about racism more than twice a year must be canceled from all the platforms out there. This shit is out of control and has damaged many people's brains. Or is that coming from politicians who love the "Divide & Conquer" principle?
- Karunamon 3y agoWhen it stops working. Even up thread, here on HN, someone said they are "okay with racists being locked out of their homes".
- BrotherBisquick 3y ago> When will the mass media stop feeding people with that crap? They won't, and that's why I think we, as a society, need to move past journalism. That sounds like sarcasm, but it isn't. And I know what you're thinking- "oh but a free press is one of the legs of the tripod of society!" Well it was, decades ago. Now it's literally all tabloids and propaganda. It's time let it go. We have various tools that allow individuals to securely communicate with each other. Let people communicate the news, word-of-mouth. We don't need bloggers and corporations anymore to put a spin on the facts. "Democracy dies in darkness" is a threat, not a plea. Do you listen to cancer when it admonishes you, "don't excise me, or you'll be sorry!"
- JohnFen 3y ago> Let people communicate the news, word-of-mouth. But if that sort of thing is the main source of news, I think you'll find it would result in even more misinformation than journalism produces.
- brightlancer 3y agoBy definition, the "free press" isn't limited to government credentialed organizations. A free press is essential to a liberal society (real liberal, not leftist authoritarianism). Ben Franklin didn't publish for free, so we should recognize a free press includes for-profit press. And long before there were bloggers, there were pamphleteers. We need all of it.
- hippich 3y agoOur personal Amazon account was closed, per their claim, because we used our prime account for business purposes or something like that. We often bought gifts and shipped it directly to our friends. We also did it for our friends from Belarus, sending gifts to their friends in the USA. I bet it triggered some kind of anti-dropship rule. I am very particular at trying to not tie myself into their ecosystem, but we had two kids fire tablets with some purchased games that we lost access to as well. After a month or so of back and forth eventually they enabled ability to log in to access digital purchases only. But it was my impression they do not have an easy way to separate different branches of their offerings, and often it is all our nothing, since even after partial account reactivation, many parts of the Amazon website are broken. In the end, I created new account, and since I was attending University of People at that time, I got student's discount for all their services in the new account, which is enough for me to counter the hasle I had to endure while trying to get kids tablets work again :)
- gnicholas 3y agoFunny, we have ordered some stuff from Amazon and had it arrive from Sam's Club. I guess they don't have as strict of rules around drop shipping. I've also sent Costco mugs all over the country to backers of my Kickstarter, with no trouble!
- BlakeSimpson 3y agoI feel like this is becoming more and more common with not only Amazon, but other big companies like anything rideshare (Lyft & Uber), food/shopping delivery, and others. Whenever you try to bring up a problem that might cause bad publicity, they "proactively" start deactivating accounts.
- EdSharkey 3y agoParler. Someone defend their detonation for power/politics by Amazon and Apple. Do it!
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- dangus 3y agoThere's so much support for Louis out there for being right about a bunch of things. And it is true that he is right about a whole bunch of things. That said, I can't stand his shtick anymore. Louis getting wronged by corporations is content fuel. It's also high blood pressure content. It makes you mad at stuff. I've got enough of that in my life, I don't know about you. (Another example: Not Just Bikes can be like this as well, despite me agreeing with the dude. The tone and script of the videos makes the problem of car dependency, which, again, is a legitimate problem, seem more devastating than it really is)
- rasz 3y agoCould he sue Amazon for slander/defamation? Amazon claims he defrauded them = they claim he is a fraudster.
- spokeonawheel 3y agoI blame amazon for the massive inflation. They need real competition to make their prices accountable and they affected then entire world with greed.