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Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? If onli
by opportune 3y ago
Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there?
If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoI think AI is going to make it harder to separate the signal from the noise, though. We’re already seeing this play out with sites like Amazon that are just full of cheap junk that’s blatantly ripped off and undercut in price, or Google as people are complaining about the quality of search results.
- ianburrell 3y agoNotice that niche shopping sites don’t have reviews. Bigger sites have reviews but they don’t get gamed. Without affiliates or listing products like Amazon, there is no way for the spammers to make money. I’m surprised that places like Walmart or Target haven’t gotten burned by cross listings. They could drop the program and advertise as alternative to Amazon. If Amazon had “sold by Amazon” filter, it would be a lot more usable.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoAmazon (UK, at least) don't even have a working search function, it's ridiculous trying to buy a specific thing there.
- Matrixik 3y agoI think that's the reason why Allegro is market leader in Poland and Amazon is far, far away. I get really frustrated when I try to find anything on Amazon, sometimes to the point of thinking "how the hell they became so big with this shitty search?". When I search anything on allegro.pl it almost always return me products I search for and support tons of filters (and return actually nothing when they don't have it).
- labster 3y agoWe’re in a race to the bottom. There’s no way a company selling legitimate products will be able to compete or grow a customer base in the AI future, because we’ll be swimming in garbage.
- zebomon 3y agoI really don't see how one follows the other without then in sequence, as the comment you replied to describes, value-based businesses emerge to fill the obvious gap and compete.
- dylan604 3y agopeople still shop at Amazon, so I'm not too convinced in your argument
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoIt’s the delivery. I can often get something inconsequential for net cheaper, faster from Amazon. Local stock is usually next day. And I can often get stuff internationally cheaper and faster through Amazon than the real retailer. You’d have to duplicate this to take them on.
- dylan604 3y agostep by step that slope gets just a little more slippery, or is it the frog in the pot of boiling water?
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoThe delivery part of the service is really good when things go right. Very difficult to get a hold of someone when they lose a package even when they explicitly tell you “contact us”. But if you stick to inconsequential items, it’s great. I needed a few USBC cables and charging cables the other day and got them next day at half the price. I checked the local stores and none had what I was after. But yeah, I agree with your point
- pixl97 3y agoWhy be a billionaire when you can be a trillionare? Greed will ruin everything.
- nomat 3y agoImagine like an LLM trained on everything you've ever done since birth included as part of the data set. and then one of those for each other person in the world. they could slice and dice you into a thousand different groups. at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost or wondering where anything is located. You will just know. or at least, be told. Something else to consider is the fallibility of human memory. As we generate more information we're gonna have to start abstracting and delegating some of those storage and retrieval tasks to the computer, trusting it completely. Today maybe you can remember things but what about your parents?
- waihtis 3y agoWell, currently the top LLM fails at repeatedly generating a stable set of pretty simple regexes for me, so where pretty far from a full-blown LLM dystopia at this point.
- mavhc 3y agoThe question is does the rapid progress in LLMs continue over the next few years, or do we reach another local maximum. Is "currently" going to improve rapidly?
- waihtis 3y agoas I understand we're approaching local maximum with LLMs and that is what I base the previous comment on, but fully layman and no insight into deeper layers of LLM R&D
- sznio 3y agoLLMs are too dumb to be useful, but smart enough to be destructive. You don't need to be able to generate correct regexes to create a blogspam article about regexes that will go to the top of the search results.
- 3y ago
- mrweasel 3y ago> If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers That slide has already started. I can't buy stuff on Amazon anymore, because I don't trust the quality or that I'm not scammed. Unless I trust the author I'd question buying self published books. There's a number of Chinese website, like Wish, that I don't understand. Why bother shipping an item to a customer if you're running a scam? People order dress and get a plastic Christmas tree... Why even bother sending the tree? Why produce shitty products that break after first use, why not just straight up rob people, seem more genuine and with less environmental impact. There are whole categories of products that can not longer be bought online and an even larger category that can only be purchased from trusted companies. The level of scams have reached new heights in the past year and unless we do something to address "A.I." generated content the internet will drown in useless nonsense.
- gnopgnip 3y agoAmazon has been problematic for a while. I think it was 2019 when I remember filtering to sold by amazon.com was a lot harder, but before that there were still problems with tons of low quality products and fake reviews Costco bucks this trend though
- phpisthebest 3y ago>>Why even bother sending the tree? Why produce shitty products that break after first use, why not just straight up rob people, Could be the same reasons Scam Contractors do "some work" if you hire someone to redo your bathroom, and they take the money and run, that is clear criminal fraud. If they take the money, so some amount of work, then run it becomes a civil contract dispute.
- martin_a 3y ago> Why bother shipping an item to a customer if you're running a scam? Plausible deniability. "There seems to have been some..." looks up excuse for the day "... unfortunate mix-up with your order." Lots of people will just not react, because it's not worth their money and at least they received something.
- 3y ago
- eloisius 3y ago> Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? This already happens over and over, and with AI it’s only going to be worse. Company makes a decent product, gains reputation, and then strip mines their good will for quick cash while quality plummets. After a while, you just distrust the whole online shopping experience. Even if someone is selling a good product, the lemons are ruining the whole market.
- bsenftner 3y agoAnd you can say "the lemons are ruining the whole market" in relation to software engineering jobs too.
- eloisant 3y agoI have already stopped using Amazon for specialized products. I buy board games on sites that only sell board games. I buy electronics/computer parts on sites that only sell that.
- jimhefferon 3y agoI also try to do that. However, the more sites that hold my information ...
- eropple 3y agoYour information isn't particularly valuable outside of financial data, and most of the ones you're likely to go to store your financial data centralize on a few generally-very-well-behaved providers. And credit card fraud is the bank's problem, not yours.
- willis936 3y agoIt's only possible to compete if the index is fair. You could never launch a store like that without google in the fold. Google doesn't have an interest in increasing signal, only in increasing revenue. We'll need to see some trust busting first.
- JohnFen 3y ago> If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it Some people have. This is one of the main reasons why I stopped using Amazon years ago. But lots of people won't. If people were that rational, then the thousands of straight-up obvious and traditional scams perpetrated every day wouldn't still work.