If you list a book as published in 1602, it's in a different aisle.
December 3, 2021 10:20 AM Subscribe
SLNYT: What Happened to Amazon’s Bookstore? The state of Amazon today.
Amazon argues in court papers that the same shield that protects Facebook and Twitter from being sued over posts by their users — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — protects it as well, even if the product is a physical item.
Mark Lemley, the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, said the company was probably right. “I don’t think Amazon will be liable for misstatements posted by others, and certainly not if it wasn’t aware of them,” he said.This makes me a bit mad. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like if your company is running a marketplace you should be held to higher standards. How does eBay fit in?
posted by Going To Maine at 11:02 AM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
Despite that endorsement, Mr. Boland sued Amazon at the end of August, accusing the all-devouring retailer of, in essence, eating Perfect Crime’s lunch. His suit says Amazon let Sandy Dunes and other vendors on its platform run wild with Perfect Crime titles, offering copies for ridiculous amounts.
I guess I'm not sure what the theory is here. Nobody is going to buy a copy for that much, and since these are third-party sales anyway, they're not "lost sales" to the author. I suspect I'm missing something. Why should Amazon, eBay or Craigslist be obligated to stop people offering the book for whatever (stupid) prices they want?
posted by BungaDunga at 11:04 AM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
I guess I'm not sure what the theory is here. Nobody is going to buy a copy for that much, and since these are third-party sales anyway, they're not "lost sales" to the author. I suspect I'm missing something. Why should Amazon, eBay or Craigslist be obligated to stop people offering the book for whatever (stupid) prices they want?
posted by BungaDunga at 11:04 AM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Algorithms. If you sort something by price, it appears at the top. If you put in an earlier publishing date, it appears at a more desirable location.
posted by Melismata at 11:06 AM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by Melismata at 11:06 AM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Mr. Boland takes the misuse of his name personally. “When a seller claims to have a 1602 edition that it’s charging nearly $1,000 for, it’s defaming me by implying that the book existed before I wrote it — i.e., that I’m a plagiarist,” he said.
Man, that's... tenuous. I don't think defamation works that way. Does defamation work that way?
posted by BungaDunga at 11:08 AM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
Man, that's... tenuous. I don't think defamation works that way. Does defamation work that way?
posted by BungaDunga at 11:08 AM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
Every once in awhile, I will look for an obscure, older book, and the first one that is shown is a ridiculously priced $900+ edition. I know this is BS, but it comes up first. These third party scam sales are front facing at Amazon. Any legitimate item can be buried beneath these. Buyer beware, indeed!
posted by njohnson23 at 11:10 AM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 11:10 AM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
(the whole second half of the article makes much more sense, covering the deluge of fake and fraudulent "books" that Amazon cheerfully allows people to sell, and print-on-demand crap. It's a very weird choice for this article to lead with a doomed lawsuit filed by a pro se litigant that isn't alleging Amazon's even damaging sales of his book but instead is arguing defamation somehow)
posted by BungaDunga at 11:14 AM on December 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 11:14 AM on December 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
Correction: Dec. 3, 2021Ironic?
A photograph with an earlier version of this article was published in error. The image showed a man named John Boland who was not the subject of the article. The image has been replaced.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:17 AM on December 3, 2021 [8 favorites]
It's funny because this is absolutely a problem, but it's not a "I must sue Amazon" problem. Amazon is just slowly pissing away consumer trust because they think their size will make up for it, but no amount of size will make up for it when folks stop buying things from Amazon because it has the reputation of being full of cheap knockoff shit and scams.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:18 AM on December 3, 2021 [32 favorites]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:18 AM on December 3, 2021 [32 favorites]
We're running into a version of this problem with depressing frequency right now, although for ordering a laptop rather than books. We've been trying to order a particular laptop, by serial number. The correct item displays on Amazon and yet every single time we've ordered, we've gotten the wrong one, thanks to the lack of third-party-seller quality control. Because Amazon has a good return policy, there's been no trouble getting our money back, but that doesn't really solve the problem of not having the thing we wanted to order, that they say is available.
I don't see, though, how any of this is easily solved. What incentive does Amazon have, to rein in the third-party sellers? It can't kick them out en masse, because then there'd be a chance you wouldn't go to Amazon first for your shopping. It can discipline individual sellers, but it's easy to spin up a new seller with a fresh clean history. There's no real downside for Amazon itself, unless enough people stop shopping there. Will that happen? The article hints at the slowing growth of their sales, but is that enough?
posted by mittens at 11:19 AM on December 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
I don't see, though, how any of this is easily solved. What incentive does Amazon have, to rein in the third-party sellers? It can't kick them out en masse, because then there'd be a chance you wouldn't go to Amazon first for your shopping. It can discipline individual sellers, but it's easy to spin up a new seller with a fresh clean history. There's no real downside for Amazon itself, unless enough people stop shopping there. Will that happen? The article hints at the slowing growth of their sales, but is that enough?
posted by mittens at 11:19 AM on December 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
As nearly awful as it is, I now use eBay as my source of "I bet I can find this on the internet" items if I cannot buy it directly from the mfg. I haven't purchased from Amazon in three years, I don't think. Which in its own way is too bad, it was very convenient.
posted by maxwelton at 11:24 AM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by maxwelton at 11:24 AM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
Every once in awhile, I will look for an obscure, older book,...
At which point, get thee to archive.org. (Oddly, they will have copies of books scanned by google but not available on google books, though available for a mark up by print on demand shops. More to the point, freely downloadable pdfs, if hard copy is not crucial.)
As a PSA for online book buyers, www.addall.com will scan the web for comparative prices, new and used.
posted by BWA at 11:26 AM on December 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
At which point, get thee to archive.org. (Oddly, they will have copies of books scanned by google but not available on google books, though available for a mark up by print on demand shops. More to the point, freely downloadable pdfs, if hard copy is not crucial.)
As a PSA for online book buyers, www.addall.com will scan the web for comparative prices, new and used.
posted by BWA at 11:26 AM on December 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
It's for everything, not just books and electronics. I couldn't find my favorite conditioner in the store anymore, so I tried an Amazon seller. The outside packaging clearly said "conditioner," and the inside packaging, which was visible through the clear plastic wrap, clearly said "shampoo," and the product itself was very obviously shampoo. I went through the whole "received wrong product" ordeal, and then got the exact same thing a second time, because the seller can't read English and/or didn't care and/or was being forced to work so fast that they missed it. Yup, I'm not doing Amazon as much these days either. /FWP
posted by Melismata at 11:30 AM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by Melismata at 11:30 AM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
It’s oddly like the private equity bust-out schemes, just shuffling the players. The consumers aren’t getting what they thought they would, and surely at some point consumers will buy less.
Which might allow a more reliable, more expensive market to arise, or we could be stuck in a low-trust economy, it’s historically common. Unfortunately it’s terrible for complicated high tech fields like medical and computing which we rely on.
There’s a ton of history analyzing the ability to trust strangers as an innate part of the rise of market economies and a global middle class (historian’s definition of middle class, not US advertising’s). Post hoc, propter hoc, everybody’s in hock.
posted by clew at 11:47 AM on December 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
Which might allow a more reliable, more expensive market to arise, or we could be stuck in a low-trust economy, it’s historically common. Unfortunately it’s terrible for complicated high tech fields like medical and computing which we rely on.
There’s a ton of history analyzing the ability to trust strangers as an innate part of the rise of market economies and a global middle class (historian’s definition of middle class, not US advertising’s). Post hoc, propter hoc, everybody’s in hock.
posted by clew at 11:47 AM on December 3, 2021 [10 favorites]
The slow but obvious degradation of the core experiences of big tech juggernauts is a fascinating and awful thing.
Whatever bad stuff they might have been doing at the time, there WAS a time when Facebook's feed was enjoyable to read for many people, when Google search was consistently useful, when buying stuff on Amazon was reliable.
This is a little different than services that started failing as businesses and started flailing (Yahoo). Or hit a big tech transition and needed to pivot to a different thing (Netflix). And while Google, Facebook, and Amazon all now have many new ways to make money, seeing them be awful at things that are both profitable and core to their identity is honestly shocking when I think about it.
posted by feckless at 11:50 AM on December 3, 2021 [55 favorites]
Whatever bad stuff they might have been doing at the time, there WAS a time when Facebook's feed was enjoyable to read for many people, when Google search was consistently useful, when buying stuff on Amazon was reliable.
This is a little different than services that started failing as businesses and started flailing (Yahoo). Or hit a big tech transition and needed to pivot to a different thing (Netflix). And while Google, Facebook, and Amazon all now have many new ways to make money, seeing them be awful at things that are both profitable and core to their identity is honestly shocking when I think about it.
posted by feckless at 11:50 AM on December 3, 2021 [55 favorites]
Every once in awhile, I will look for an obscure, older book, and the first one that is shown is a ridiculously priced $900+ edition
The way the re-pricing algorithms work is they look at recent sales (provided by the Amazon API), so if a $10 book is selling every day for $9.50 they will gradually reduce the price until your shop's copy is the cheapest and someone buys it.
So the problem starts when there arent any sales for days or weeks, then the algorithm works in reverse, gradually increasing the price. I guess the logic in this is "there must be a restricted supply, so the copy we are selling must be scarce, so increase the price".
The problem of course is when there are no sales for months or years, then the algorithm just keeps going until it gets ridiculous. If at any point another seller puts up a copy with a sensible starting price and it sells, then all the algorithmic prices will start to drop down again.
There is considerable scope in all of this for some price fixing and there have been several prosecutions against Amazon suppliers acting as a cartel. My guess is that those successes are bringing out the no win no fee lawyers.
posted by Lanark at 11:51 AM on December 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
The way the re-pricing algorithms work is they look at recent sales (provided by the Amazon API), so if a $10 book is selling every day for $9.50 they will gradually reduce the price until your shop's copy is the cheapest and someone buys it.
So the problem starts when there arent any sales for days or weeks, then the algorithm works in reverse, gradually increasing the price. I guess the logic in this is "there must be a restricted supply, so the copy we are selling must be scarce, so increase the price".
The problem of course is when there are no sales for months or years, then the algorithm just keeps going until it gets ridiculous. If at any point another seller puts up a copy with a sensible starting price and it sells, then all the algorithmic prices will start to drop down again.
There is considerable scope in all of this for some price fixing and there have been several prosecutions against Amazon suppliers acting as a cartel. My guess is that those successes are bringing out the no win no fee lawyers.
posted by Lanark at 11:51 AM on December 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
there WAS a time when Facebook's feed was enjoyable to read for many people,
I wonder about this one, mostly because I first joined pre-feed. I cynically suspect it was always depressing, but also always addictive.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:53 AM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
I wonder about this one, mostly because I first joined pre-feed. I cynically suspect it was always depressing, but also always addictive.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:53 AM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Is this the right place to pitch my brick - and - morter version of "wirecutter"?
posted by rebent at 11:55 AM on December 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by rebent at 11:55 AM on December 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
"A 2011 thriller was supposed to cost $15. One merchant listed it at $987, with a 17th-century publication date."
Not a single mention of money laundering in that article or this thread, wild.
posted by mhoye at 12:02 PM on December 3, 2021 [11 favorites]
Not a single mention of money laundering in that article or this thread, wild.
posted by mhoye at 12:02 PM on December 3, 2021 [11 favorites]
It is slightly less convenient to buy books elsewhere. I do go to physical stores more for other stuff.
But in general, not using Amazon is pretty easy. I stopped because of their union busting, but they keep giving me reasons to stay away.
posted by emjaybee at 12:06 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
But in general, not using Amazon is pretty easy. I stopped because of their union busting, but they keep giving me reasons to stay away.
posted by emjaybee at 12:06 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Every once in awhile, I will look for an obscure, older book, and the first one that is shown is a ridiculously priced $900+ edition
I posted a query about this over on AskMefi last year. The answers were very enlightening.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:07 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
I posted a query about this over on AskMefi last year. The answers were very enlightening.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:07 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
But in general, not using Amazon is pretty easy. I stopped because of their union busting, but they keep giving me reasons to stay away.
Not using their main store, sure. But when you include things like shows on Prime, the various other stores (Zappos, Whole Foods, Audible) and services (Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB) it gets super hard. And if you tried to avoid stuff that used Amazon infrastructure (AWS but also delivery stuff, warehouses), close to impossible.
posted by feckless at 12:27 PM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
Not using their main store, sure. But when you include things like shows on Prime, the various other stores (Zappos, Whole Foods, Audible) and services (Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB) it gets super hard. And if you tried to avoid stuff that used Amazon infrastructure (AWS but also delivery stuff, warehouses), close to impossible.
posted by feckless at 12:27 PM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
That's not a criticism of avoiding/boycotting the store, btw. Just ... the scope of the problem is so big now.
posted by feckless at 12:29 PM on December 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by feckless at 12:29 PM on December 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it would be a very inefficient way of money laundering compared to a business that deals with a lot of cash. Money laundering operations loved video stores and laundromats. Copies of books from 1602? Not so much.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:35 PM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 12:35 PM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Amazon is just slowly pissing away consumer trust because they think their size will make up for it, but no amount of size will make up for it when folks stop buying things from Amazon because it has the reputation of being full of cheap knockoff shit and scams.
My name is Etsymandias, king of kings;
Look on my listings, ye Mighty, and despair!
posted by pwnguin at 12:58 PM on December 3, 2021 [22 favorites]
My name is Etsymandias, king of kings;
Look on my listings, ye Mighty, and despair!
posted by pwnguin at 12:58 PM on December 3, 2021 [22 favorites]
Hasn't money laundering just pivoted to "Crypto" currencies and/or NFTs?
At the very least, you buy the hardware, space and energy with your dirty money, in a slack jurisdiction and then generate "crypto" value, no?
posted by rozcakj at 1:00 PM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
At the very least, you buy the hardware, space and energy with your dirty money, in a slack jurisdiction and then generate "crypto" value, no?
posted by rozcakj at 1:00 PM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
I don't see, though, how any of this is easily solved. What incentive does Amazon have, to rein in the third-party sellers? It can't kick them out en masse, because then there'd be a chance you wouldn't go to Amazon first for your shopping.
There is going to be some inertia here but at some point the risk of getting a misrepresented product will drive people to other vendors. Sure, Amazon is huge and owns a huge percentage of online shopping but so did Sears with catalogue shopping. For a lot of things I already consider Amazon as less reliable than aliexpress or dx.com and stuff costs more. Consistent shipping used to be the big draw for me where I could generally expect things to arrive in a few days with Prime shipping. Now though so much stuff is drop shipped with shipping dates weeks out even when filtering for Prime items only. So many items that say
The pandemic really accelerated availability by forcing a lot of the brick and mortar stores I frequent to finally either get online or up their online game to make it usable.
posted by Mitheral at 1:01 PM on December 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
There is going to be some inertia here but at some point the risk of getting a misrepresented product will drive people to other vendors. Sure, Amazon is huge and owns a huge percentage of online shopping but so did Sears with catalogue shopping. For a lot of things I already consider Amazon as less reliable than aliexpress or dx.com and stuff costs more. Consistent shipping used to be the big draw for me where I could generally expect things to arrive in a few days with Prime shipping. Now though so much stuff is drop shipped with shipping dates weeks out even when filtering for Prime items only. So many items that say
FREE delivery for Prime membersYou'll give me an estimated delivery date after I order?!? Gee, thanks. Maybe I'll just bike on down to Princess Auto/Canadian Tire/Best Buy/Costco/The Source/Lordco and have it in my hands today or in a couple days at most. Sure maybe it'll cost a bit more and I'll have to put on pants but if I have to return even 1 in 20 items those savings get chewed up in my time and aggravation.
Order now and we’ll notify you via email when we have an estimated delivery date for this item.
The pandemic really accelerated availability by forcing a lot of the brick and mortar stores I frequent to finally either get online or up their online game to make it usable.
posted by Mitheral at 1:01 PM on December 3, 2021 [14 favorites]
An unrelated problem I've had with getting books from Amazon in recent years: They often arrive damaged.
To be clear, I loathe Amazon, and don't order anything from them if I can find it anywhere else, but occasionally I use them because they are my only option, and sometimes someone decides to gift me something from them.
I've received a few expensive, fairly large art and photography books that were packed in a completely thoughtless way, and reached me with bent corners, warped covers, etc. It's striking that the company has become so careless about what was once their core business.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:03 PM on December 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
To be clear, I loathe Amazon, and don't order anything from them if I can find it anywhere else, but occasionally I use them because they are my only option, and sometimes someone decides to gift me something from them.
I've received a few expensive, fairly large art and photography books that were packed in a completely thoughtless way, and reached me with bent corners, warped covers, etc. It's striking that the company has become so careless about what was once their core business.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:03 PM on December 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
Wait, when did Amazon start selling books?
posted by loquacious at 1:14 PM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by loquacious at 1:14 PM on December 3, 2021 [9 favorites]
I've been thinking about Amazon a lot lately, because there was an item that I needed to buy, and it was only available through Amazon in the country I was in. So I tried to buy it. And after trying multiple times without success, I just gave up. There were too many weird hoops I had to jump through and I just got lost.
It was the first time in probably fifteen years I had tried to buy anything through Amazon, and it was a mystifying ordeal. It used to be so simple.
It made me think of how Borders was driven into the ground by business people who didn't have a background in bookselling. The books industry has this reputation of genteel fustiness, but in reality it's almost absurdly cut-throat and incredibly complex. One aspect of that is that bookstores sell an incredibly wide range of unique products, an order of magnitude more than any other kind of store.
And every single one of those products, every single book a store sells, depends on its reputation, i.e. how well known it is and how much it is liked. But also, crucially, there are so many damn books out there that every single customer is going to have radically different wants, so the trick is to get the right book, who the customers themselves don't even know they want, into the right hands.
As a business model, this kind of background prepares you extremely well for long-tail selling, as you have to juggle a near infinite number of products, and figure out how to match the customer with the product. The people who took over Borders had a background in different kinds of retail, and they completely fucked up because they didn't understand the long-tail aspect inherent in bookselling.
Amazon, in the early days, made its bones in bookselling. Despite all the hype about algorithms and automation, it was essentially people making all the major decisions about how best to help customers find the products they want. And when they moved into other products than books, their experience and know-how made them experts at putting customers in front of products they wanted to spend money on. They were taking the sophisticated bookstore model into other kinds of retail, and ate everybody else's lunch, and left a trail of destruction in their wake, because no one but booksellers had any experience with running that kind of business.
But they seem to have bought into their own hype, and decided to start automating everything. At the same time they began to make their store infinitely more complicated by allowing random people to start selling through Amazon. Because they thought they were such a great technology company, they figured it was just a matter of writing the right code and devising the most efficient algorithm.
But that wasn't it, because the thing booksellers know is that to get a customer to buy the thing they want and you have, the bookseller has to be able to think like the customer, use empathy and intuition. And algorithms just aren't very good at that, because they essentially operate on the level of large groups of people, but the bookseller is working at the individual level.
I'm not saying that Amazon will go the way of Borders, but that the bookselling core that made it so successful, the model that allowed it to take over online retail, has been lost. They seem to have fully pivoted to being a tech and logistics company, and the customer experience has gotten much worse in the process.
But one aspect that reminds me of Borders is that Borders kept getting worse for a long time, but still survived just because it was the only place to buy books in many places, and just because it was so huge. For a lot of people, buying books means ordering off Amazon. And it is a gigantic corporation. It could enter a death spiral, and still take decades to play out.
Thankfully, independent bookstores are still reasonably plentiful, all things considered, because bookselling is such an innovative and cut-throat industry, that they've figured out a way to survive. So please support your local bookstore, because you absolutely want them to stick around selling books, because if we set booksellers loose on the world again, they'll leave nothing but destruction in their wake.
posted by Kattullus at 1:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [42 favorites]
It was the first time in probably fifteen years I had tried to buy anything through Amazon, and it was a mystifying ordeal. It used to be so simple.
It made me think of how Borders was driven into the ground by business people who didn't have a background in bookselling. The books industry has this reputation of genteel fustiness, but in reality it's almost absurdly cut-throat and incredibly complex. One aspect of that is that bookstores sell an incredibly wide range of unique products, an order of magnitude more than any other kind of store.
And every single one of those products, every single book a store sells, depends on its reputation, i.e. how well known it is and how much it is liked. But also, crucially, there are so many damn books out there that every single customer is going to have radically different wants, so the trick is to get the right book, who the customers themselves don't even know they want, into the right hands.
As a business model, this kind of background prepares you extremely well for long-tail selling, as you have to juggle a near infinite number of products, and figure out how to match the customer with the product. The people who took over Borders had a background in different kinds of retail, and they completely fucked up because they didn't understand the long-tail aspect inherent in bookselling.
Amazon, in the early days, made its bones in bookselling. Despite all the hype about algorithms and automation, it was essentially people making all the major decisions about how best to help customers find the products they want. And when they moved into other products than books, their experience and know-how made them experts at putting customers in front of products they wanted to spend money on. They were taking the sophisticated bookstore model into other kinds of retail, and ate everybody else's lunch, and left a trail of destruction in their wake, because no one but booksellers had any experience with running that kind of business.
But they seem to have bought into their own hype, and decided to start automating everything. At the same time they began to make their store infinitely more complicated by allowing random people to start selling through Amazon. Because they thought they were such a great technology company, they figured it was just a matter of writing the right code and devising the most efficient algorithm.
But that wasn't it, because the thing booksellers know is that to get a customer to buy the thing they want and you have, the bookseller has to be able to think like the customer, use empathy and intuition. And algorithms just aren't very good at that, because they essentially operate on the level of large groups of people, but the bookseller is working at the individual level.
I'm not saying that Amazon will go the way of Borders, but that the bookselling core that made it so successful, the model that allowed it to take over online retail, has been lost. They seem to have fully pivoted to being a tech and logistics company, and the customer experience has gotten much worse in the process.
But one aspect that reminds me of Borders is that Borders kept getting worse for a long time, but still survived just because it was the only place to buy books in many places, and just because it was so huge. For a lot of people, buying books means ordering off Amazon. And it is a gigantic corporation. It could enter a death spiral, and still take decades to play out.
Thankfully, independent bookstores are still reasonably plentiful, all things considered, because bookselling is such an innovative and cut-throat industry, that they've figured out a way to survive. So please support your local bookstore, because you absolutely want them to stick around selling books, because if we set booksellers loose on the world again, they'll leave nothing but destruction in their wake.
posted by Kattullus at 1:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [42 favorites]
Maybe I'll just bike on down to Princess Auto/Canadian Tire/Best Buy/Costco/The Source/Lordco and have it in my hands today or in a couple days at most. Sure maybe it'll cost a bit more and I'll have to put on pants but if I have to return even 1 in 20 items those savings get chewed up in my time and aggravation.
Yes! I had also hoped in another thread that pandemic dynamics would goose the inventories of brick and mortar, since the retail immune system has reacted to the Amazon infection by reducing the diversity of their, uh, "mix" I believe it's called. You can go to Best Buy and find two options for every technical item (to the degree that they still carry them): 1) the cheap half-assed $20 version that everybody who buys one graduates from after they learn how poorly it works (though it does "work"), and 2) the market-leader that costs $120 and is what "the pros" use (as well as everybody else because of #1). It's not quite a Hobson's choice, but it's close, and I would LOVE if Amazon fell off everybody's radar and Fry's came back from the dead (as bad as they were, in their way) and there was real selection out there, even if it took gas in order to be able to compare them. I realize this is yelling at a cloud with an onion on my belt.
Hasn't money laundering just pivoted to "Crypto" currencies and/or NFTs?
Not yet, the pyramid isn't tall enough. VC and real estate and Banksy works are still the preferred money-washing mediums. If you want to keep up on the cutting edge here, just pay attention to what Saudis are buying.
posted by rhizome at 1:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Yes! I had also hoped in another thread that pandemic dynamics would goose the inventories of brick and mortar, since the retail immune system has reacted to the Amazon infection by reducing the diversity of their, uh, "mix" I believe it's called. You can go to Best Buy and find two options for every technical item (to the degree that they still carry them): 1) the cheap half-assed $20 version that everybody who buys one graduates from after they learn how poorly it works (though it does "work"), and 2) the market-leader that costs $120 and is what "the pros" use (as well as everybody else because of #1). It's not quite a Hobson's choice, but it's close, and I would LOVE if Amazon fell off everybody's radar and Fry's came back from the dead (as bad as they were, in their way) and there was real selection out there, even if it took gas in order to be able to compare them. I realize this is yelling at a cloud with an onion on my belt.
Hasn't money laundering just pivoted to "Crypto" currencies and/or NFTs?
Not yet, the pyramid isn't tall enough. VC and real estate and Banksy works are still the preferred money-washing mediums. If you want to keep up on the cutting edge here, just pay attention to what Saudis are buying.
posted by rhizome at 1:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
I HATE that they own Abebooks as well, and wish I could get directed to some alternatives. My search results feel more and more “curated” with each passing year. A book I was after on late 1700s upholstery that came out in 2016 for $65 is now asking $400 to $1000.
posted by brachiopod at 1:26 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by brachiopod at 1:26 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
I'm beginning to have regrettable questions about the $47K 1747 original edition of Steal This Book I recently acquired.
posted by riverlife at 1:37 PM on December 3, 2021 [33 favorites]
posted by riverlife at 1:37 PM on December 3, 2021 [33 favorites]
I HATE that they own Abebooks as well, and wish I could get directed to some alternatives.
Amazon alternatives.
posted by JanetLand at 1:52 PM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
Amazon alternatives.
posted by JanetLand at 1:52 PM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
Amazon is just slowly pissing away consumer trust because they think their size will make up for it, but no amount of size will make up for it when folks stop buying things from Amazon because it has the reputation of being full of cheap knockoff shit and scams.
I've always assumed Amazon's downmarket trajectory was a purposeful plan to out-walmart Walmart.
posted by ryanrs at 3:30 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
I've always assumed Amazon's downmarket trajectory was a purposeful plan to out-walmart Walmart.
posted by ryanrs at 3:30 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Amazon alternatives.
There's Bookshop too. It bundles up local stores into a single web front end somehow
posted by paper chromatographologist at 4:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
There's Bookshop too. It bundles up local stores into a single web front end somehow
posted by paper chromatographologist at 4:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
I've been getting all my books from Bookshop.org since about the time the pandemic started. In addition to wanting to support my local bookstore, I've also experienced having books from Amazon arrive damaged.
And I've been very bothered by not really being able to know in advance if you're buying from a third-party seller, and I was getting more and more concerned about counterfeit items. There was also just an editorial in the New York Times about the recent large-scale retain theft that's been in the news and about how stolen items are being sold on places like Amazon by third-party sellers. I can be extremely naive, and before I saw this article, it didn't even occur to me that Amazon might be profiting from the sale of stolen goods.
I'm sorry to say I haven't quit Amazon altogether, but I'm using alternatives more and more.
posted by FencingGal at 5:03 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
And I've been very bothered by not really being able to know in advance if you're buying from a third-party seller, and I was getting more and more concerned about counterfeit items. There was also just an editorial in the New York Times about the recent large-scale retain theft that's been in the news and about how stolen items are being sold on places like Amazon by third-party sellers. I can be extremely naive, and before I saw this article, it didn't even occur to me that Amazon might be profiting from the sale of stolen goods.
I'm sorry to say I haven't quit Amazon altogether, but I'm using alternatives more and more.
posted by FencingGal at 5:03 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
Amazon also owns Wondery, podcast fans.
posted by sock poppet at 5:29 PM on December 3, 2021
posted by sock poppet at 5:29 PM on December 3, 2021
Do we not have laws any more? Its selling fake or misrepresented goods not illegal? The thing that puzzles me most is that we, collectively, just accept this, when this would be an actually productive use of a system of courts and laws. I don't really care if they go after Amazon and ebay or the third party sellers - in the end, you should be able to go to a retailer (online or off) and order a thing, and know that you will be getting that thing.
Why just accept that this isn't how it works? Isn't this sort of thing why we have government?
posted by Dysk at 5:36 PM on December 3, 2021 [17 favorites]
Why just accept that this isn't how it works? Isn't this sort of thing why we have government?
posted by Dysk at 5:36 PM on December 3, 2021 [17 favorites]
I feel that Amazon tries to scam me every step of the way. 90% when I can't find something and go to Amazon to look, I end up canceling out because they try to rip me off. Latest example: "free shipping" but they still charge a "shipping and handling" fee.
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:49 PM on December 3, 2021
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:49 PM on December 3, 2021
Do we not have laws any more? Its selling fake or misrepresented goods not illegal?
I wonder if anyone here has experience returning things that were fake. My experience with Amazon in general is that they're very good about accepting returns and offering refunds. Perhaps if they do that for individuals who complain, they can get away with just letting it happen for the majority of people who don't.
I'm just guessing here based on my experience with Amazon returns in general. I would think that people would be expected to try to resolve the issue with Amazon before taking it to court.
posted by FencingGal at 5:54 PM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
I wonder if anyone here has experience returning things that were fake. My experience with Amazon in general is that they're very good about accepting returns and offering refunds. Perhaps if they do that for individuals who complain, they can get away with just letting it happen for the majority of people who don't.
I'm just guessing here based on my experience with Amazon returns in general. I would think that people would be expected to try to resolve the issue with Amazon before taking it to court.
posted by FencingGal at 5:54 PM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I'm not saying individuals should be suing Amazon. Regulators should. Governments. The notion that this sort of larger problem should be the responsibly of individual consumers to resolve never even occurred to me.
Yes, I know the US is basically dysfunctional, but Amazon does business elsewhere in the world too.
posted by Dysk at 5:58 PM on December 3, 2021 [11 favorites]
Yes, I know the US is basically dysfunctional, but Amazon does business elsewhere in the world too.
posted by Dysk at 5:58 PM on December 3, 2021 [11 favorites]
It's a nightmare trying to buy a Kindle version of a classic text when you have a specific edition in mind. No, I don't want to pay .99 for something I could download from Project Gutenberg for free. I've started going directly to publisher's sites because they usually have a direct link to the correct version or they link to a non-Amazon e-book.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:59 PM on December 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by betweenthebars at 5:59 PM on December 3, 2021 [6 favorites]
The slow but obvious degradation of the core experiences of big tech juggernauts is a fascinating and awful thing.
Yeah. I've been feeling this so much in recent years.
posted by trig at 6:09 PM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
Yeah. I've been feeling this so much in recent years.
posted by trig at 6:09 PM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]
This is a little different than services that started failing as businesses and started flailing (Yahoo). Or hit a big tech transition and needed to pivot to a different thing (Netflix). And while Google, Facebook, and Amazon all now have many new ways to make money, seeing them be awful at things that are both profitable and core to their identity is honestly shocking when I think about it.
Amazon is an extra-interesting case because they've accidentally spun up an entirely new product, and then cornered the market on it, in the span of about ten years. I don't know if this is common knowledge outside of tech circles, but Amazon functionally IS the internet now. Every tech company who isn't a multi-billion-dollar behemoth with rooms full of servers buried under a mountain in Wyoming uses Amazon Web Services to host their stuff. It's reached the point that NOT using Amazon to host your stuff requires that you explain yourself to angry investors, because the other cloud hosting providers are badly outclassed, and doing your own hosting is reserved for cranks and PhD students. On the rare occasions that AWS has a serious outage, it looks to the rest of the world like most of the public internet has just stopped working altogether. I don't have numbers at hand, but I'd estimate that the web hosting side of Amazon makes approximately one squillion dollars a year. And yet this part of Amazon didn't exist for the first half of the company's young life. They could shutter the entire retail operation, and still be a trillion-dollar company. I wonder how much that drives the decisions they're making about third-party sellers. It's like having the mother of all safety nets: even if they sink the whole marketplace in the long-term, the company will stay afloat because they've got a golden goose furiously laying eggs in the back room.
posted by Mayor West at 6:19 PM on December 3, 2021 [35 favorites]
Amazon is an extra-interesting case because they've accidentally spun up an entirely new product, and then cornered the market on it, in the span of about ten years. I don't know if this is common knowledge outside of tech circles, but Amazon functionally IS the internet now. Every tech company who isn't a multi-billion-dollar behemoth with rooms full of servers buried under a mountain in Wyoming uses Amazon Web Services to host their stuff. It's reached the point that NOT using Amazon to host your stuff requires that you explain yourself to angry investors, because the other cloud hosting providers are badly outclassed, and doing your own hosting is reserved for cranks and PhD students. On the rare occasions that AWS has a serious outage, it looks to the rest of the world like most of the public internet has just stopped working altogether. I don't have numbers at hand, but I'd estimate that the web hosting side of Amazon makes approximately one squillion dollars a year. And yet this part of Amazon didn't exist for the first half of the company's young life. They could shutter the entire retail operation, and still be a trillion-dollar company. I wonder how much that drives the decisions they're making about third-party sellers. It's like having the mother of all safety nets: even if they sink the whole marketplace in the long-term, the company will stay afloat because they've got a golden goose furiously laying eggs in the back room.
posted by Mayor West at 6:19 PM on December 3, 2021 [35 favorites]
things that are both profitable and core to their identity
in 2021, is pretty much entirely AWS. Shovels in a goldrush.
posted by flabdablet at 7:29 PM on December 3, 2021
in 2021, is pretty much entirely AWS. Shovels in a goldrush.
posted by flabdablet at 7:29 PM on December 3, 2021
"There’s a ton of history analyzing the ability to trust strangers as an innate part of the rise of market economies and a global middle class (historian’s definition of middle class, not US advertising’s)."
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a LOT, combined with --
"Do we not have laws any more? Its selling fake or misrepresented goods not illegal?"
One of the underappreciated bits of the US Constitution is the contracts clause, which basically says that federal and state governments can't retroactively fuck with private (or public!) contracts. If the contract was legally formed (both parties were competent adults, consideration was given, etc.), it's very, very difficult to get it voided. And the Contracts Clause is sort-of the practical activation of the political philosophy idea (per Hobbes, in particular) that to have a functioning society, people have to be able to trust each other telling the truth. (And most especially in "public" interactions, by which political theorists mostly turn out to mean market interactions -- if I promise to sell you a bushel of wheat for $5, it better for darn sure be an actual bushel, or we're going to revert to a state of nature where you stabbing me for my wheat seems like a better idea, since you can't trust I'll give you a bushel for $5.)
And I've been thinking a lot lately about how the US's interpretation of its First Amendment, and particularly of corporations' First Amendment rights to say whatever the fuck they want, has slowly and steadily undermined the Contracts Clause. The United States has a hell of a hard time regulating advertising, because corporations are people and money is speech. There are a handful of limits on what corporations can say, but in 1958 -- early in the era of legal decisions about modern advertising -- the Supreme Court protected what's called "puffery" -- advertising statements that basically anyone would know are just big talking to try to sell you something. So Cadillac can advertise, "The smoothest car you'll ever ride in!" and it's basically completely excluded from false advertising rules because it's puffery. You can see how "the best baking soda for your cookies!" in an advertisement being the sort of thing you can't sue about rapidly swallows THE ENTIRETY OF ADVERTISING SPEECH, so that it becomes almost impossible to enforce any rules about advertising whatsoever, since almost everything corporations say in advertisements is now protected by the First Amendment, and marketing and advertising departments rapidly become sophisticated enough to slot every claim they want to make into puffery and avoid any regulated claims. (The FDA and FTC, demanding accuracy in labeling, are fighting rearguard actions, and can only demand accuracy in LABELS, not advertisements.)
But this enormous freedom to say ANY FUCKING THING YOU WANT in advertising starts to gradually swallow the Contracts Clause, where both parties have to know what they're agreeing to and both parties have to truthfully represent their offer/product/cash/ability to perform. The Contracts Clause is meant to insist that two people otherwise-unknown to each other can truthfully agree to make an exchange of goods or services, and the law will insist that that truthful agreement will be executed and respected. But the First Amendment as interpreted by the courts has almost completely undermined any requirement that corporations EVER be truthful.
I'm not doing a great job of connecting the dots here, but I'm going to keep trying. The Chicago Tribune just had a huge story on the massive increase in gang violence in Chicago, which has been puzzling, because it's always been related to drug dealing in the past (and turf wars about drug selling). But drug numbers weren't moving. What was driving the violence? Tribune:
It's now been about 6 or 7 years since I was on my local school board, and a HUGE portion of expulsions for violence -- a clear majority of them! -- even then came from people who engaged in physical violence and "mob action" (typically a bunch of people beating on one dude) pre-arranged that violence on social media. And often posted video of the resulting violence on social media. We had students who went to prison as adults for in-school violence, and did social media companies who gleefully posted their videos of those violent, criminal beatings take any responsibility? No. Did they even remove the videos? Also no. Even if someone involved in the case got a court order to take a violent video of a beating down, it would pop up over and over and over again on YouTube, Facebook, and other sites that host video. And sometimes it would incite further retaliations, two years after the fact. I literally never saw a social media company held responsible for their part in incredible, criminal violence against children, even when there was a court order that they had to stop reposting the video. They never stopped. It always popped up again. They always claimed helplessness. How could they possibly know? They can ban your video for using a copyrighted snippet of song, but HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY KNOW that a video they had been court-ordered to remove (and had removed!) would stay removed? Random singer from 1962 whose music appears in the background of someone's birthday video, who hasn't enforced their copyright in 25 years and is dead? NEVER CAN BE POSTED and you'll go to Facebook jail for trying. Incredible violence against a child that was court-ordered to be removed, reposted repeatedly in its entirety? FACEBOOK HAS NO IDEA, NOBODY CAN POSSIBLY POLICE THAT! Local courts always gave up. And to be fair, they were not sophisticated enough, or well-funded enough, to force the issue. The US Congress is also clearly not sophisticated enough to even understand the issue, let alone enforce anything.
Okay, so, circling back to Amazon and its 3rd-party-seller and fraud problem, most of what they do falls into clearly-carved-out exceptions for advertising and sales pitches. Where it doesn't, Amazon will shut down the offending storefront, but act totally surprised when that same store pops up with a new storefront six days later. And so far, the US has been totally unsuccessful at insisting technology companies stop pretending they DON'T KNOW that a banned seller is returning or a banned video is being reposted. Because NOT KNOWING is a defense against liability, so all these companies work very, very, VERY hard to "not know" how their platforms are being illegally used and abused, and to pretend they have no idea it's happening and can't possibly detect or prevent it. Until the US insists they put in place a robust regime to detect and prevent abuses, and only give companies safe harbor against liability if they have robust and effective regimes (with actual responsible humans who can go to actual jail for failing, and not just algorithms that can suck without repercussion), it's just going to get worse.
But I also think the problem isn't as small as Amazon's crap marketplace and its fake products or Facebook's total refusal to police violence and hate speech. I think the encroachment of "free speech" on the contracts clause is a lot bigger, and a lot worse. Anti-abortion organizations that create fake clinics to lure in people who want abortions, hand them a bunch of bullshit fake information, make a bunch of promises of support and charity, and then drop those now-parents? PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT, when lying through their teeth and causing people to rely on those false promises. Illinois is in a multi-decade battle over public pensions (where governors of both parties just borrowed money from public pensions without intending to repay it, so they're now vastly underfunded), and GOP candidates constantly run on "STOP GIVING PEOPLE SUCH BIG PENSIONS AT PUBLIC EXPENSE!" It has been to the state Supreme Court a dozen times now, and literally every single time someone (*coughTheGOPcough*) sues to insist pensions be reduced (because unionized teachers should die of starvation obviously, as they are women and Democrats mostly), the state Supreme Court says GUYS THERE IS A FEDERAL CONTRACTS CLAUSE, the state (a clearly sophisticated actor!) formed contracts with these teachers who performed THEIR part of the contract 15 and 20 and 25 years ago, and you are FUCKING STUCK paying what you promised, it is LITERALLY IN THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION, you cannot just decide to not pay them, they already earned the pension, it is a contract. And the state GOP is in a full-on assault against the sanctity of contracts (I literally just barfed in my mouth when I said "sanctity of contracts" because it's such a conservative legal idea and it pains me to defend it by calling it sacrosanct) because contracts constrain them from putting people into indentured servitude or fucking over people they don't like.
But there's an awful lot of shittiness coming out of federal appellate courts and the US Supreme Court and the US Congress in general that makes a hell of a lot more sense when you look at it and say, "These people hate contracts that rely on truthfulness, and want to protecting lying as a First Amendment right." And this pains me in the extreme, as I came up as a First Amendment advocate, and clerked for a First Amendment advocacy group as a law student, a group that helped protect me from being expelled as a college journalist (who did a thing the college didn't like); a group I believe in as a journalist and a free-exercise person. But it's hard as hell for me to identify allies these days in the most prominent First Amendment advocacy groups, who are mostly not advocating for journalists to be able to tell the truth (as my group did), but who are mostly advocating for individuals and corporations and religious organizations to be able to lie and mislead. I mean it's honestly bizarre, not just for me, but for a lot of my colleagues from 20 years ago, to look at current First Amendment advocacy and realize the most prominent First Amendment advocacy groups hate literally everything we advocated for, and are fighting AGAINST truth and AGAINST journalism and AGAINST free exercise.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:47 PM on December 3, 2021 [59 favorites]
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a LOT, combined with --
"Do we not have laws any more? Its selling fake or misrepresented goods not illegal?"
One of the underappreciated bits of the US Constitution is the contracts clause, which basically says that federal and state governments can't retroactively fuck with private (or public!) contracts. If the contract was legally formed (both parties were competent adults, consideration was given, etc.), it's very, very difficult to get it voided. And the Contracts Clause is sort-of the practical activation of the political philosophy idea (per Hobbes, in particular) that to have a functioning society, people have to be able to trust each other telling the truth. (And most especially in "public" interactions, by which political theorists mostly turn out to mean market interactions -- if I promise to sell you a bushel of wheat for $5, it better for darn sure be an actual bushel, or we're going to revert to a state of nature where you stabbing me for my wheat seems like a better idea, since you can't trust I'll give you a bushel for $5.)
And I've been thinking a lot lately about how the US's interpretation of its First Amendment, and particularly of corporations' First Amendment rights to say whatever the fuck they want, has slowly and steadily undermined the Contracts Clause. The United States has a hell of a hard time regulating advertising, because corporations are people and money is speech. There are a handful of limits on what corporations can say, but in 1958 -- early in the era of legal decisions about modern advertising -- the Supreme Court protected what's called "puffery" -- advertising statements that basically anyone would know are just big talking to try to sell you something. So Cadillac can advertise, "The smoothest car you'll ever ride in!" and it's basically completely excluded from false advertising rules because it's puffery. You can see how "the best baking soda for your cookies!" in an advertisement being the sort of thing you can't sue about rapidly swallows THE ENTIRETY OF ADVERTISING SPEECH, so that it becomes almost impossible to enforce any rules about advertising whatsoever, since almost everything corporations say in advertisements is now protected by the First Amendment, and marketing and advertising departments rapidly become sophisticated enough to slot every claim they want to make into puffery and avoid any regulated claims. (The FDA and FTC, demanding accuracy in labeling, are fighting rearguard actions, and can only demand accuracy in LABELS, not advertisements.)
But this enormous freedom to say ANY FUCKING THING YOU WANT in advertising starts to gradually swallow the Contracts Clause, where both parties have to know what they're agreeing to and both parties have to truthfully represent their offer/product/cash/ability to perform. The Contracts Clause is meant to insist that two people otherwise-unknown to each other can truthfully agree to make an exchange of goods or services, and the law will insist that that truthful agreement will be executed and respected. But the First Amendment as interpreted by the courts has almost completely undermined any requirement that corporations EVER be truthful.
I'm not doing a great job of connecting the dots here, but I'm going to keep trying. The Chicago Tribune just had a huge story on the massive increase in gang violence in Chicago, which has been puzzling, because it's always been related to drug dealing in the past (and turf wars about drug selling). But drug numbers weren't moving. What was driving the violence? Tribune:
At the core of each indictment, though, is a common theme: That much of today’s violence is being driven not by sophisticated drug trafficking enterprises but by gang factions trying to boost their group’s reputation on the street or on social media, creating a seemingly endless cycle of shootings and retaliation.What can prosecutors or legislators do about this? Basically fucking nothing, because their posting of violent crimes to social media is largely First Amendment protected, and more explicitly protected by section 230 (which also protects MeFi and its comments). Social media companies throw up their hands and say "look, how can the algorithm be expected to know that this is an incitement to murder? We just have to endlessly republish it! If we use actual human people knowledgeable about local conditions to police ONE incitement to murder, we'll have to police all the incitements to murder, and how could any person possibly identify and prevent incitements to murder?" (I mean, newspapers did pretty well for 80 years, but that requires exercising editorial control.)
It's now been about 6 or 7 years since I was on my local school board, and a HUGE portion of expulsions for violence -- a clear majority of them! -- even then came from people who engaged in physical violence and "mob action" (typically a bunch of people beating on one dude) pre-arranged that violence on social media. And often posted video of the resulting violence on social media. We had students who went to prison as adults for in-school violence, and did social media companies who gleefully posted their videos of those violent, criminal beatings take any responsibility? No. Did they even remove the videos? Also no. Even if someone involved in the case got a court order to take a violent video of a beating down, it would pop up over and over and over again on YouTube, Facebook, and other sites that host video. And sometimes it would incite further retaliations, two years after the fact. I literally never saw a social media company held responsible for their part in incredible, criminal violence against children, even when there was a court order that they had to stop reposting the video. They never stopped. It always popped up again. They always claimed helplessness. How could they possibly know? They can ban your video for using a copyrighted snippet of song, but HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY KNOW that a video they had been court-ordered to remove (and had removed!) would stay removed? Random singer from 1962 whose music appears in the background of someone's birthday video, who hasn't enforced their copyright in 25 years and is dead? NEVER CAN BE POSTED and you'll go to Facebook jail for trying. Incredible violence against a child that was court-ordered to be removed, reposted repeatedly in its entirety? FACEBOOK HAS NO IDEA, NOBODY CAN POSSIBLY POLICE THAT! Local courts always gave up. And to be fair, they were not sophisticated enough, or well-funded enough, to force the issue. The US Congress is also clearly not sophisticated enough to even understand the issue, let alone enforce anything.
Okay, so, circling back to Amazon and its 3rd-party-seller and fraud problem, most of what they do falls into clearly-carved-out exceptions for advertising and sales pitches. Where it doesn't, Amazon will shut down the offending storefront, but act totally surprised when that same store pops up with a new storefront six days later. And so far, the US has been totally unsuccessful at insisting technology companies stop pretending they DON'T KNOW that a banned seller is returning or a banned video is being reposted. Because NOT KNOWING is a defense against liability, so all these companies work very, very, VERY hard to "not know" how their platforms are being illegally used and abused, and to pretend they have no idea it's happening and can't possibly detect or prevent it. Until the US insists they put in place a robust regime to detect and prevent abuses, and only give companies safe harbor against liability if they have robust and effective regimes (with actual responsible humans who can go to actual jail for failing, and not just algorithms that can suck without repercussion), it's just going to get worse.
But I also think the problem isn't as small as Amazon's crap marketplace and its fake products or Facebook's total refusal to police violence and hate speech. I think the encroachment of "free speech" on the contracts clause is a lot bigger, and a lot worse. Anti-abortion organizations that create fake clinics to lure in people who want abortions, hand them a bunch of bullshit fake information, make a bunch of promises of support and charity, and then drop those now-parents? PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT, when lying through their teeth and causing people to rely on those false promises. Illinois is in a multi-decade battle over public pensions (where governors of both parties just borrowed money from public pensions without intending to repay it, so they're now vastly underfunded), and GOP candidates constantly run on "STOP GIVING PEOPLE SUCH BIG PENSIONS AT PUBLIC EXPENSE!" It has been to the state Supreme Court a dozen times now, and literally every single time someone (*coughTheGOPcough*) sues to insist pensions be reduced (because unionized teachers should die of starvation obviously, as they are women and Democrats mostly), the state Supreme Court says GUYS THERE IS A FEDERAL CONTRACTS CLAUSE, the state (a clearly sophisticated actor!) formed contracts with these teachers who performed THEIR part of the contract 15 and 20 and 25 years ago, and you are FUCKING STUCK paying what you promised, it is LITERALLY IN THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION, you cannot just decide to not pay them, they already earned the pension, it is a contract. And the state GOP is in a full-on assault against the sanctity of contracts (I literally just barfed in my mouth when I said "sanctity of contracts" because it's such a conservative legal idea and it pains me to defend it by calling it sacrosanct) because contracts constrain them from putting people into indentured servitude or fucking over people they don't like.
But there's an awful lot of shittiness coming out of federal appellate courts and the US Supreme Court and the US Congress in general that makes a hell of a lot more sense when you look at it and say, "These people hate contracts that rely on truthfulness, and want to protecting lying as a First Amendment right." And this pains me in the extreme, as I came up as a First Amendment advocate, and clerked for a First Amendment advocacy group as a law student, a group that helped protect me from being expelled as a college journalist (who did a thing the college didn't like); a group I believe in as a journalist and a free-exercise person. But it's hard as hell for me to identify allies these days in the most prominent First Amendment advocacy groups, who are mostly not advocating for journalists to be able to tell the truth (as my group did), but who are mostly advocating for individuals and corporations and religious organizations to be able to lie and mislead. I mean it's honestly bizarre, not just for me, but for a lot of my colleagues from 20 years ago, to look at current First Amendment advocacy and realize the most prominent First Amendment advocacy groups hate literally everything we advocated for, and are fighting AGAINST truth and AGAINST journalism and AGAINST free exercise.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:47 PM on December 3, 2021 [59 favorites]
An unrelated problem I've had with getting books from Amazon in recent years: They often arrive damaged.
With all the stories about Amazon workers/drivers risking their jobs if they take the time to go on a bathroom break, it's probably not a surprise that packages aren't tenderly packaged and handled with care until they get to their destination. (The switch from boxes to flimsy plastic mailing envelopes hasn't helped either).
And don't get me started on all the times my Amazon packages ended up going to my next door neighbor.
posted by gtrwolf at 7:49 PM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
With all the stories about Amazon workers/drivers risking their jobs if they take the time to go on a bathroom break, it's probably not a surprise that packages aren't tenderly packaged and handled with care until they get to their destination. (The switch from boxes to flimsy plastic mailing envelopes hasn't helped either).
And don't get me started on all the times my Amazon packages ended up going to my next door neighbor.
posted by gtrwolf at 7:49 PM on December 3, 2021 [1 favorite]
Amazon may be making more from their Marketplace business than AWS.
I feel that Amazon tries to scam me every step of the way.
A brilliant thing about Amazon’s model now is that they are screwing the “sellers,” too.
posted by jimw at 7:52 PM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
I feel that Amazon tries to scam me every step of the way.
A brilliant thing about Amazon’s model now is that they are screwing the “sellers,” too.
posted by jimw at 7:52 PM on December 3, 2021 [5 favorites]
Have to wonder if these "algorithms" are the reason third-party sellers sell certain books/physical media items for out-of-print prices when they're still available (at normal prices) at the company/label's own website.
posted by gtrwolf at 7:59 PM on December 3, 2021
posted by gtrwolf at 7:59 PM on December 3, 2021
But the First Amendment as interpreted by the courts has almost completely undermined any requirement that corporations EVER be truthful.
Have yous ever thought about scrapping the whole "first amendment" thing? It seems like 90%+ of problems in the US ultimately trace back to "but we freeze peaches absolutely, so nothing can be done about this, ever".
posted by Dysk at 8:40 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Have yous ever thought about scrapping the whole "first amendment" thing? It seems like 90%+ of problems in the US ultimately trace back to "but we freeze peaches absolutely, so nothing can be done about this, ever".
posted by Dysk at 8:40 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
At this point it's plausible in the middle term in the sense that the folks who have most benefitted from it may establish such a hegemony that it becomes inconvenient. But in a positive sense? No, that implies such a radical realignment of every facet of society as to be unthinkable
posted by wotsac at 8:53 PM on December 3, 2021
posted by wotsac at 8:53 PM on December 3, 2021
I bought a new gaming laptop recently. My wife's first instinct was to go to Amazon. I was fine with that, with one caveat. No resellers. I would buy the product from Amazon, but not anyone else on their website.
Needless to say, I bought the laptop through Microcenter. Which has a shit website that does not believe that addresses can have numbers in the street names, but was honest, sold me the exact model I wanted, sold me a model that had not been previously opened and used, and when there was a defect in the graphics card, was happy to allow me to do an exchange. Not a return and then rolling the craps dice, hoping I get the right product. An exchange. And I worked with real people to get it done.
If it's going to cost over $100, do not buy it from Amazon. It's not worth it. Especially since they just came up with a new policy that for some items (which seem to be randomly selected by the algorithm) they will not pay for return shipment unless you drop the product off at one of their lockers or store or something. It's $8 to return stuff via UPS or Fedex otherwise.
I wish there was a way to take stuff away from AWS. But everyone outside of Google or Microsoft uses it these days.
posted by Hactar at 9:25 PM on December 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
Needless to say, I bought the laptop through Microcenter. Which has a shit website that does not believe that addresses can have numbers in the street names, but was honest, sold me the exact model I wanted, sold me a model that had not been previously opened and used, and when there was a defect in the graphics card, was happy to allow me to do an exchange. Not a return and then rolling the craps dice, hoping I get the right product. An exchange. And I worked with real people to get it done.
If it's going to cost over $100, do not buy it from Amazon. It's not worth it. Especially since they just came up with a new policy that for some items (which seem to be randomly selected by the algorithm) they will not pay for return shipment unless you drop the product off at one of their lockers or store or something. It's $8 to return stuff via UPS or Fedex otherwise.
I wish there was a way to take stuff away from AWS. But everyone outside of Google or Microsoft uses it these days.
posted by Hactar at 9:25 PM on December 3, 2021 [7 favorites]
things that are both profitable and core to their identity
in 2021, is pretty much entirely AWS. Shovels in a goldrush.
it’s interesting because I think of Amazon’s corporate culture as being by reputation, nominally customer/product-focused - in the sense that Google is engineering focused, and in the sense that Amazon’s kind of cult-y company principles shit really stresses it
And yet, at this point, their core product kinda sucks, and does not care about customer satisfaction at all. And their other bread-and-butter is this behind-the-scenes infrastructure thing.
posted by atoxyl at 10:24 PM on December 3, 2021
in 2021, is pretty much entirely AWS. Shovels in a goldrush.
it’s interesting because I think of Amazon’s corporate culture as being by reputation, nominally customer/product-focused - in the sense that Google is engineering focused, and in the sense that Amazon’s kind of cult-y company principles shit really stresses it
And yet, at this point, their core product kinda sucks, and does not care about customer satisfaction at all. And their other bread-and-butter is this behind-the-scenes infrastructure thing.
posted by atoxyl at 10:24 PM on December 3, 2021
If it's going to cost over $100, do not buy it from Amazon. It's not worth it. Especially since they just came up with a new policy that for some items (which seem to be randomly selected by the algorithm) they will not pay for return shipment unless you drop the product off at one of their lockers or store or something.
Worth pointing out that a (growing?) number of items sold by third-party sellers don't even offer free returns at all. You have to read the fine print on each listing if you want to be sure you'll have the option to return without paying for it.
No resellers. I would buy the product from Amazon, but not anyone else on their website.
That helps with things like faster shipping and easier returns, but it doesn't give you any guarantees about the stock you get - Amazon apparently combines stock from all the sellers of a given product that it handles shipping for, so your item might be "sold by Amazon" but actually sourced by one of the third-party sellers.
posted by trig at 11:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Worth pointing out that a (growing?) number of items sold by third-party sellers don't even offer free returns at all. You have to read the fine print on each listing if you want to be sure you'll have the option to return without paying for it.
No resellers. I would buy the product from Amazon, but not anyone else on their website.
That helps with things like faster shipping and easier returns, but it doesn't give you any guarantees about the stock you get - Amazon apparently combines stock from all the sellers of a given product that it handles shipping for, so your item might be "sold by Amazon" but actually sourced by one of the third-party sellers.
posted by trig at 11:21 PM on December 3, 2021 [3 favorites]
Seems like the obvious move, if you had competent regulators and modernized antitrust laws, would be to break up Amazon into AWS, Marketplace (platform/distribution/logistics), and Amazon (the actual retailer), and then regulate the hell out of Marketplace.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:40 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:40 PM on December 3, 2021 [4 favorites]
AWS would be just another large hosting company if it didn’t have one big magic customer that can throw money at it so that AWS can charge whatever dumping prices it wants to for their services. Monopolies at work.
posted by romanb at 12:13 AM on December 4, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by romanb at 12:13 AM on December 4, 2021 [5 favorites]
Amazon apparently combines stock from all the sellers of a given product that it handles shipping for, so your item might be "sold by Amazon" but actually sourced by one of the third-party sellers.
I can't help wondering if this is why so many people seem to get the wrong version of the book they ordered - like where Valancourt in the article talked about getting reviews from people who'd ordered their version of Carmilla but had been sent a cheap "slap a stock photo on the Gutenberg text" edition. I used to think that was user error - but I'm not so sure anymore.
posted by Jeanne at 1:35 AM on December 4, 2021
I can't help wondering if this is why so many people seem to get the wrong version of the book they ordered - like where Valancourt in the article talked about getting reviews from people who'd ordered their version of Carmilla but had been sent a cheap "slap a stock photo on the Gutenberg text" edition. I used to think that was user error - but I'm not so sure anymore.
posted by Jeanne at 1:35 AM on December 4, 2021
No disagreement that Amazon is somehow turning itself into less trustworthy Aliexpress (albeit with better customer service) but one of the things that just blows my mind is just How Bad Amazon search is. It's like 1995 level yahoo bad. It's amazing just how crappy they are at letting me find the item I'm looking for. Sure they will show 15 items that are not at all what I'm looking for (and they 5-6 cheap imitation products that nope, don't want to buy) but not the item that if I search in google as "amazon same search string I used on amazon" is the first result.
It's not even like they are showing me ALMOST what I'm looking for hoping to get me to buy something slightly different. Not it's like "oh you wanted a pot, let me show you birdbaths" level bad. This is a core part of their business, let me find what I'm looking for, and they can't even get that right. It's mind boggling that this is still considered a reasonable place to shop.
posted by aspo at 1:44 AM on December 4, 2021 [5 favorites]
It's not even like they are showing me ALMOST what I'm looking for hoping to get me to buy something slightly different. Not it's like "oh you wanted a pot, let me show you birdbaths" level bad. This is a core part of their business, let me find what I'm looking for, and they can't even get that right. It's mind boggling that this is still considered a reasonable place to shop.
posted by aspo at 1:44 AM on December 4, 2021 [5 favorites]
Amazon’s business model is “flea market”, and if you look at their desire to avoid responsibility for what’s on sale, that can make a lot more sense in that light.
They don’t care that there’s 15 listings for a single product because to care at all is in contradiction with the flea market ethos of “we’re not responsible for what people sell you”.
If you look at it as “which of Walmart’s costs can we externalize”, a primary cost to Walmart is responsibility for the products sold. So by adopting the flea market model, Amazon can fire personnel responsible for product selection, quality control, and cataloguing.
If you wouldn’t buy it at a flea market, don’t buy it at Amazon. It’s always been that way, but everyone is just now realizing that. I would buy paperback books at a flea market, but not first edition hardcovers. I dumped Prime because I don’t need an annual pass to a flea market.
This is why Amazon is freaking out about being held liable for faulty electronics sold on their site: if they lose the liability shield of “we’re a flea market”, the core conceit of their entire business model goes down the drain. They risk their foundational advantage over all competitors. If held responsible for what they sold you, Amazon’s retail flea market model collapses.
posted by Callisto Prime at 5:38 AM on December 4, 2021 [12 favorites]
They don’t care that there’s 15 listings for a single product because to care at all is in contradiction with the flea market ethos of “we’re not responsible for what people sell you”.
If you look at it as “which of Walmart’s costs can we externalize”, a primary cost to Walmart is responsibility for the products sold. So by adopting the flea market model, Amazon can fire personnel responsible for product selection, quality control, and cataloguing.
If you wouldn’t buy it at a flea market, don’t buy it at Amazon. It’s always been that way, but everyone is just now realizing that. I would buy paperback books at a flea market, but not first edition hardcovers. I dumped Prime because I don’t need an annual pass to a flea market.
This is why Amazon is freaking out about being held liable for faulty electronics sold on their site: if they lose the liability shield of “we’re a flea market”, the core conceit of their entire business model goes down the drain. They risk their foundational advantage over all competitors. If held responsible for what they sold you, Amazon’s retail flea market model collapses.
posted by Callisto Prime at 5:38 AM on December 4, 2021 [12 favorites]
Yeah, I'm not saying individuals should be suing Amazon. Regulators should. Governments. The notion that this sort of larger problem should be the responsibly of individual consumers to resolve never even occurred to me.
Yes, I know the US is basically dysfunctional, but Amazon does business elsewhere in the world too.
I agree with you theoretically in terms of what I would like to see, but I don't think it will happen for reasons other posters have since explained better than I can (hadn't thought about other countries though - that's a good point).
A very long time ago, I discovered that the mental health part of my company's Blue Cross insurance coverage was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Trying to get this straightened out was an utter nightmare. Blue Cross insisted they were doing nothing wrong - "nothing illegal about that" I was told - even though the policy included something expressly forbidden by the act (I believe it was limiting mental health care by dollar amount instead of number of visits - though this was over twenty years ago, so I might be wrong about that). Another Blue Cross rep told me that companies had a choice about whether to follow the ADA (nope), and a third said the law hadn't gone into effect yet (nope again). I had already called NAMI to make sure I wasn't missing anything in regard to the law. In the end, the problem was solved for me personally because my company got a different policy from Blue Cross. Our HR at least understood that employee benefits that VIOLATE FEDERAL LAW are a bad idea.
I was naive enough to think that the state insurance commission would look into it. Boy, was I wrong about that. I called, explained the situation, and was told that employers had the choice of what insurance to buy. I stated again that Blue Cross was selling policies that were in violation of federal law and was told again that the decision of what insurance to buy was up to employers and that if employers wanted to follow the law, they had that option. I came away believing that the purpose of the state insurance commission was to protect insurance companies.
I was so angry I thought about contacting Geoffrey Feiger's law office (this is Michigan) because even though I have issues with him, he clearly loves making a splash looking like he's fighting for the little guy. And I was just so angry. In retrospect, I wish I'd done that.
Anyway, this is a kind of long way of saying that in a reasonable world, regulators and governments would ride Amazon on this stuff, but making it the responsibility of individual consumers is unfortunately par for the course.
posted by FencingGal at 5:56 AM on December 4, 2021 [9 favorites]
Yes, I know the US is basically dysfunctional, but Amazon does business elsewhere in the world too.
I agree with you theoretically in terms of what I would like to see, but I don't think it will happen for reasons other posters have since explained better than I can (hadn't thought about other countries though - that's a good point).
A very long time ago, I discovered that the mental health part of my company's Blue Cross insurance coverage was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Trying to get this straightened out was an utter nightmare. Blue Cross insisted they were doing nothing wrong - "nothing illegal about that" I was told - even though the policy included something expressly forbidden by the act (I believe it was limiting mental health care by dollar amount instead of number of visits - though this was over twenty years ago, so I might be wrong about that). Another Blue Cross rep told me that companies had a choice about whether to follow the ADA (nope), and a third said the law hadn't gone into effect yet (nope again). I had already called NAMI to make sure I wasn't missing anything in regard to the law. In the end, the problem was solved for me personally because my company got a different policy from Blue Cross. Our HR at least understood that employee benefits that VIOLATE FEDERAL LAW are a bad idea.
I was naive enough to think that the state insurance commission would look into it. Boy, was I wrong about that. I called, explained the situation, and was told that employers had the choice of what insurance to buy. I stated again that Blue Cross was selling policies that were in violation of federal law and was told again that the decision of what insurance to buy was up to employers and that if employers wanted to follow the law, they had that option. I came away believing that the purpose of the state insurance commission was to protect insurance companies.
I was so angry I thought about contacting Geoffrey Feiger's law office (this is Michigan) because even though I have issues with him, he clearly loves making a splash looking like he's fighting for the little guy. And I was just so angry. In retrospect, I wish I'd done that.
Anyway, this is a kind of long way of saying that in a reasonable world, regulators and governments would ride Amazon on this stuff, but making it the responsibility of individual consumers is unfortunately par for the course.
posted by FencingGal at 5:56 AM on December 4, 2021 [9 favorites]
One thing that went wrong with Amazon was letting third party sellers (mysterious folks with very few reviews) swamp out reputable sellers. I used to buy diabetic test strips from Amazon, and all of the sudden, not only was there a huge list of third party sellers, but the good folks I was buying from weren't there any more. I don't know whether Amazon blocked them or they gave up and left.
Yes, Amazon doesn't distinguish between editions. I ended up buying the lovely calligraphic (Sheila Waters) Under Milk Wood from the publisher. (Sample.)
When Amazon was new, the prices for used books were outrageous, and then they seemed to figure out used books. I suppose they're deteriorating it now.
I think the search was worse, but it's still not good.
If amazon goes down, what do you think will happen?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:32 AM on December 4, 2021
Yes, Amazon doesn't distinguish between editions. I ended up buying the lovely calligraphic (Sheila Waters) Under Milk Wood from the publisher. (Sample.)
When Amazon was new, the prices for used books were outrageous, and then they seemed to figure out used books. I suppose they're deteriorating it now.
I think the search was worse, but it's still not good.
If amazon goes down, what do you think will happen?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:32 AM on December 4, 2021
I HATE that they own Abebooks as well, and wish I could get directed to some alternatives.
JanetLand > Amazon alternatives.
TIL today that AbeBooks (WP) has been owned by Amazon since 2008.
I’ve had very good results ordering used and out-of-print books from ABE resellers for many years. Since moving to northwestern small-town USA several years ago, it’s a +200 mile round trip to/from any medium/large city with a decent bookstore. Mrs. cenoxo prefers Amazon audible books on her Fire tablet, and we frequently buy other stuff from them.
posted by cenoxo at 6:48 AM on December 4, 2021
JanetLand > Amazon alternatives.
TIL today that AbeBooks (WP) has been owned by Amazon since 2008.
I’ve had very good results ordering used and out-of-print books from ABE resellers for many years. Since moving to northwestern small-town USA several years ago, it’s a +200 mile round trip to/from any medium/large city with a decent bookstore. Mrs. cenoxo prefers Amazon audible books on her Fire tablet, and we frequently buy other stuff from them.
posted by cenoxo at 6:48 AM on December 4, 2021
If you wouldn’t buy it at a flea market, don’t buy it at Amazon.
With the difference that I can personally inspect the object I'm buying at a flea market. I've bought plenty of low quality stuff at flea markets but I knew I was getting Levvis and not Levis.
I can't help wondering if this is why so many people seem to get the wrong version of the book they ordered
Yep. You may have noticed some reputable brands including weird stuff in their sales. Melnor for example gives has stainless washers with their timers. This is to prevent the product being combined with secondary sellers.
posted by Mitheral at 8:16 AM on December 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
With the difference that I can personally inspect the object I'm buying at a flea market. I've bought plenty of low quality stuff at flea markets but I knew I was getting Levvis and not Levis.
I can't help wondering if this is why so many people seem to get the wrong version of the book they ordered
Yep. You may have noticed some reputable brands including weird stuff in their sales. Melnor for example gives has stainless washers with their timers. This is to prevent the product being combined with secondary sellers.
posted by Mitheral at 8:16 AM on December 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
I used to buy diabetic test strips from Amazon, and all of the sudden, not only was there a huge list of third party sellers, but the good folks I was buying from weren't there any more.
This is because those test strips are sourced from randos on the street via low-grade insurance fraud. Go to the right neighborhood and you will see signs stapled to telephone poles offering to buy test strips for cash.
posted by ryanrs at 9:01 AM on December 4, 2021 [9 favorites]
This is because those test strips are sourced from randos on the street via low-grade insurance fraud. Go to the right neighborhood and you will see signs stapled to telephone poles offering to buy test strips for cash.
posted by ryanrs at 9:01 AM on December 4, 2021 [9 favorites]
ryanrs, someone approached me online to buy test strips.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:17 AM on December 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:17 AM on December 4, 2021 [4 favorites]
Thank you, Eyebrows - I was really hoping you would share some of your thoughts informed by your legal expertise. I hadn't known about the contracts clause, and definitely not about puffery.
I'm also a big fan of the First Amendment, and have given a lot of (less expert) thought to interactions between free speech and harms to others. For me, a lot of that has centered on fraud. If someone claims to be selling something they're not, they're committing fraud, and if Amazon is collecting the money - even if they're not the seller, but just acting as an intermediary - it seems like they should have some legal liability, and it seems like it should be possible to enforce that.
posted by kristi at 10:47 AM on December 4, 2021
I'm also a big fan of the First Amendment, and have given a lot of (less expert) thought to interactions between free speech and harms to others. For me, a lot of that has centered on fraud. If someone claims to be selling something they're not, they're committing fraud, and if Amazon is collecting the money - even if they're not the seller, but just acting as an intermediary - it seems like they should have some legal liability, and it seems like it should be possible to enforce that.
posted by kristi at 10:47 AM on December 4, 2021
Email died because of spammers, an uncurated channel flooded with noise.
Social media news feeds flooded with fake stories, uncurated by the organisations who run those channels.
Marketplaces uncurated also lost to scams and noise.
It seems to be that the Internet Protocol that can route around brokenness can't deal with being flooded with signals that choke links and deny service. I used to have a killfile but never worked out how to "invert the killfile."
>I wish there was a way to take stuff away from AWS.
It's part of a respectable Disaster Recovery plan and important for supplier sourcing competitiveness that we have a secondary supplier we can switch to -- if only there was a better multi-cloud infrastructure specification tool than Hashicorp's Terraform.
>AWS can charge whatever dumping prices it wants to for their services.
Their software innovation is managing and reselling pre-booked servers -- but quarter after quarter of earnings goes to building more capacity to dump on the market. Most of the service is stuff you rent, all free-at-point-of-use open source you can run elsewhere. Amazon Linux 2022 is the feeder for IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Fedora) and Oracle Cloud has Oracle Unbreakable Linux (not truly a better moral choice, is it?) a clone of IBM-Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
posted by k3ninho at 12:36 PM on December 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
Social media news feeds flooded with fake stories, uncurated by the organisations who run those channels.
Marketplaces uncurated also lost to scams and noise.
It seems to be that the Internet Protocol that can route around brokenness can't deal with being flooded with signals that choke links and deny service. I used to have a killfile but never worked out how to "invert the killfile."
>I wish there was a way to take stuff away from AWS.
It's part of a respectable Disaster Recovery plan and important for supplier sourcing competitiveness that we have a secondary supplier we can switch to -- if only there was a better multi-cloud infrastructure specification tool than Hashicorp's Terraform.
>AWS can charge whatever dumping prices it wants to for their services.
Their software innovation is managing and reselling pre-booked servers -- but quarter after quarter of earnings goes to building more capacity to dump on the market. Most of the service is stuff you rent, all free-at-point-of-use open source you can run elsewhere. Amazon Linux 2022 is the feeder for IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Fedora) and Oracle Cloud has Oracle Unbreakable Linux (not truly a better moral choice, is it?) a clone of IBM-Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
posted by k3ninho at 12:36 PM on December 4, 2021 [2 favorites]
A kind of side effect of the absolute mess that Amazon has become seems, to me at least, a sort of onrushing death of Brands As A Thing. Sure, while there is hyper awareness and the ongoing commodification of scarcity (any collectible, for sneakers to, what the hell, a resurgence in garbage pail kids and Pokémon cards), go on Amazon and try to search for any brand item and you’ll have to wander through a dozen results made by a company with randomly generated letters forming something that looks, if you don’t ponder too closely, like a realistic name a company might have, offering roughly the same thing as you’re looking for. Even better, with all of these pseudo brands climbing all over each other like scorpions in a plastic bucket, as soon as any one of them starts to gain any brand recognition, the others will jump to copy their success, dragging them back down into the mess of vaguely word-like recognizability. Scarcity chasing is essentially a status thing, but with how fractured it all is, that status plays out in smaller and smaller circles, where only others into the same niche would stand in awe of that mint condition card with the weird color misprint, while the rest just shrug, make noncommittal noises and do our best to escape the conversation. Past that, and with the general enshittening of all things, we’re starting to see there isn’t much difference in quality between Brand Name Thing and Knockoff Similar Thing.
Take, for example, Anker, which essentially came to life as a knockoff brand, making accessories that worked, for the most part, and we’re always much cheaper than Apple or whomever. You can still find anker product if you’re determined, but anything they sell will be swamped by other sellers with essentially the same thing, just a little cheaper.
The “eh, fuck it, I just need some usb cables, I don’t want to spend all day” sales strategy that Amazon has enabled really feels like a solid nail in the coffin for the concept of the brand, and as someone exposed to No Logo at a formative age, it’s something I’ve been following now and then, popcorn in hand, smile on my face.
posted by Ghidorah at 2:15 PM on December 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
Take, for example, Anker, which essentially came to life as a knockoff brand, making accessories that worked, for the most part, and we’re always much cheaper than Apple or whomever. You can still find anker product if you’re determined, but anything they sell will be swamped by other sellers with essentially the same thing, just a little cheaper.
The “eh, fuck it, I just need some usb cables, I don’t want to spend all day” sales strategy that Amazon has enabled really feels like a solid nail in the coffin for the concept of the brand, and as someone exposed to No Logo at a formative age, it’s something I’ve been following now and then, popcorn in hand, smile on my face.
posted by Ghidorah at 2:15 PM on December 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
go on Amazon and try to search for any brand item and you’ll have to wander through a dozen results made by a company with randomly generated letters forming something that looks, if you don’t ponder too closely, like a realistic name a company might have
Somebody has probably done some Real Journalism on this, but my assumption has been that this phenomenon basically represents the Chinese factories that actually make all of the electronic junk the world buys realizing that they can cut out the middleman.
posted by atoxyl at 4:00 PM on December 4, 2021 [6 favorites]
Somebody has probably done some Real Journalism on this, but my assumption has been that this phenomenon basically represents the Chinese factories that actually make all of the electronic junk the world buys realizing that they can cut out the middleman.
posted by atoxyl at 4:00 PM on December 4, 2021 [6 favorites]
And yes, the way it intersects with Amazon’s total lack of quality control or trustworthy review systems means that any given product you might search for is available under half a dozen brand names you’ve never heard of, all in the same price range - often just low enough to be slightly worrying for a product that plugs into the wall or contains a lithium battery - with basically the same reviews, which somehow average out okay but have a bunch of individual reviewers saying it broke after six months.
posted by atoxyl at 4:07 PM on December 4, 2021
posted by atoxyl at 4:07 PM on December 4, 2021
Somebody has probably done some Real Journalism on this
There definitely have been articles on it, and yeah, it's essentially the factories that OEM factories just realizing they can put any of a number of names on a single product and sell it directly, either through Amazon, Yahoo, Rakuten, or whatever. It's like the capitalist equivalent of voting for the face eating leopards party. "I never thought offshoring production, eliminating labor costs, and cutting out all possible overhead would happen to me!" the mid-level manager cries.
Or, to go a bit further into the nostalgia bin, it's brand names holding a box of generically named consumer electronics demanding that a southeast Asian factory tell them who taught them how to do this, and the reply is "You, all right! I learned it from watching you, Anker!"
posted by Ghidorah at 8:26 PM on December 4, 2021 [7 favorites]
There definitely have been articles on it, and yeah, it's essentially the factories that OEM factories just realizing they can put any of a number of names on a single product and sell it directly, either through Amazon, Yahoo, Rakuten, or whatever. It's like the capitalist equivalent of voting for the face eating leopards party. "I never thought offshoring production, eliminating labor costs, and cutting out all possible overhead would happen to me!" the mid-level manager cries.
Or, to go a bit further into the nostalgia bin, it's brand names holding a box of generically named consumer electronics demanding that a southeast Asian factory tell them who taught them how to do this, and the reply is "You, all right! I learned it from watching you, Anker!"
posted by Ghidorah at 8:26 PM on December 4, 2021 [7 favorites]
I guess for me the main value of a brand is being able to associate it with some level of quality control and standards. So for example if I buy Ikea furniture I generally know what I'm getting into, whereas flatpack furniture from other places has somewhat more of an unknown factor. Sometimes that's important, sometimes not. Buying an Anker charger feels like a slightly different proposition than buying from a random alphabet soup supplier without a decent record of producing solid items. It's not like Anker stuff is 100% perfect, but at least they have a track record I can evaluate them on.
So losing that adds to the sense of risk and to my inability to trust either the people I'm buying from or the products themselves.
Which, again, doesn't matter for a lot of things, but does for a lot of others. I want to buy a specific kind of electronics product right now, and I'd like decent odds that it'll last longer than a few months (somewhat important) and really good odds that it won't ever cause a fire (extremely important), and I feel like I have absolutely no basis on which to evaluate the options I'm seeing.
posted by trig at 11:03 PM on December 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
So losing that adds to the sense of risk and to my inability to trust either the people I'm buying from or the products themselves.
Which, again, doesn't matter for a lot of things, but does for a lot of others. I want to buy a specific kind of electronics product right now, and I'd like decent odds that it'll last longer than a few months (somewhat important) and really good odds that it won't ever cause a fire (extremely important), and I feel like I have absolutely no basis on which to evaluate the options I'm seeing.
posted by trig at 11:03 PM on December 4, 2021 [3 favorites]
I think some of what's chipping away at that sense of value in brands is akin to the discussion of how Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc are showing signs of stagnation and fatigue in their core products: many of the brands that had, until recently, lived up to our feeling of value and quality control have, in fact, seen their standards slip, their products become shoddier. Not in some sort of origins-of-planned-obsolescence like in the 80s where people were complaining that washing machines no longer lasted thirty years, but in a general sort of feeling that a lot of things are just not well designed, not well built, and no one seems to be doing QC anymore.
I think IKEA is an interesting example. Not that their products have necessarily declined (though I feel they have), but that the competition, the furniture makers whose marketshare IKEA eats into just sort of looked at IKEA and the largely disposable furniture their customers are purchasing and thought, shit, why do we make this nice, expensive stuff no one is buying? Why not lower our standards and save a few bucks?
posted by Ghidorah at 11:32 PM on December 4, 2021 [1 favorite]
I think IKEA is an interesting example. Not that their products have necessarily declined (though I feel they have), but that the competition, the furniture makers whose marketshare IKEA eats into just sort of looked at IKEA and the largely disposable furniture their customers are purchasing and thought, shit, why do we make this nice, expensive stuff no one is buying? Why not lower our standards and save a few bucks?
posted by Ghidorah at 11:32 PM on December 4, 2021 [1 favorite]
A useful part of firms was bundling manufacture, quality control, and sales together so that each group profited about as long as the others did their work well. Potentially - plenty of infighting, but plenty of warning stories about ignoring one leg of the stool and the whole concern going bust. This was important even before brands as consumerist construction of identity.
We talk about Amazon and Alibaba decoupling sales from their old channels as though sales were the only important thing, and we worry about where manufacturing is because of jobs and environmental laws, but turns out the quality control clamped between those two things was pretty important.
posted by clew at 11:19 AM on December 5, 2021 [4 favorites]
We talk about Amazon and Alibaba decoupling sales from their old channels as though sales were the only important thing, and we worry about where manufacturing is because of jobs and environmental laws, but turns out the quality control clamped between those two things was pretty important.
posted by clew at 11:19 AM on December 5, 2021 [4 favorites]
it becomes almost impossible to enforce any rules about advertising whatsoever, since almost everything corporations say in advertisements is now protected by the First Amendment, and marketing and advertising departments rapidly become sophisticated enough to slot every claim they want to make into puffery and avoid any regulated claims. (The FDA and FTC, demanding accuracy in labeling, are fighting rearguard actions, and can only demand accuracy in LABELS, not advertisements.)
This considerably overstates the case. Advertising is probably the most regulated form of speech in the U.S. The FDA and FTC do in fact have considerable power to police advertising claims. Additionally, there are numerous massive class actions filed every year over misleading and false claims made by companies about their products -- and quite frequently, the companies either lose those suits, or agree to settle with the plaintiffs.
I'm not saying that some companies don't sometimes get away with egregiously misleading claims, at least for a time. But it's not a complete free-for-all.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:57 AM on December 8, 2021
This considerably overstates the case. Advertising is probably the most regulated form of speech in the U.S. The FDA and FTC do in fact have considerable power to police advertising claims. Additionally, there are numerous massive class actions filed every year over misleading and false claims made by companies about their products -- and quite frequently, the companies either lose those suits, or agree to settle with the plaintiffs.
I'm not saying that some companies don't sometimes get away with egregiously misleading claims, at least for a time. But it's not a complete free-for-all.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:57 AM on December 8, 2021
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posted by goatdog at 10:25 AM on December 3, 2021 [2 favorites]