I keep trying to explain to people: they aren't "ads" they are "pay for customers to ever see your product". It's an extortion ring, basically.
Just like nobody ever opens page 2 of Google search, people rarely scroll down very far on Amazon's product search page. These "ads" just put the highest bidders' products at the top-K spots (and K keeps increasing) so that customers aren't see the most relevant products, just the ones who paid the most money.
Amazon spent 20+ years building customer trust. Now it's reaping its reward by selling it off wholesale.
The sentiment of it being an extortion ring is correct. However, it's not as simple as placing the highest bidders' product at the top-K spots, because it's not a true auction system; not anywhere close. Amazon runs an ML algo that attempts to determine the actual cost benefit of serving an ad, and does everything in its power to maximize the value of the underlying ecosystem. It applies weights to warehousing fees, shipping fees, CVR, CTR, referral fees, customer retention & satisfaction, LCV, LSV, loan interest, etc. It's not that relevance isn't a focus, but the considerations are complex and somewhat reliant on sellers' data inputs.
You could bid $100 on your own brand KWs and get charged $0.37/click while a competitor in the adjacent slot will get charged $25. You could bid $100 on a competitor's brand KW and never get an impression because the algo has determined your product is a complete waste of that virtual shelf space.
I would think it’s like an auction for the things that don’t matter. For the most valuable brand KWs do you think the winner is randomly allowed to be determined by “the market”? Why not bring the brand to the table directly, and outside of the auction determine what they’ll have to pay.
To me, it seems like no company could keep their hands out of the cookie jar that is running an auction. Too much short term pressure to move things up and to the right. Amazing cash cow though.
Agreed, the only thing I buy from them anymore are books because I know what I'm getting (that said, trying out Bookshop to support local bookstores but they're often more expensive)
that price difference is being externalized somehow, so, if it's possible (and of course it's not for everyone) it's best to just pay the higher price imo. it's better for society and the neighborhood
It is similar to all the subscriptions for social networks now (snap, meta, twitter) that will boost your posts if you're a subscriber. The top posts will have X% of sponsored or boosted content and X will grow over time (to increase revenue).
"It's an extortion ring... Now it's reaping its reward by selling [customer trust] off wholesale."
I think this is hyperbolic. In my experience, they continue to deliver great products at reasonable prices, especially given inflation. I can regularly find the same products cheaper on Amazon than local brick and mortar retailers, as well as online Walmart and other online venues. If this is selling off my trust, they can keep selling it.
>I can regularly find the same products cheaper on Amazon than local brick and mortar retailers, as well as online Walmart and other online venues.
Well duh, the Chinese gov subsidizes their products to crush American businesses. Amazon is apathetic because of exactly what you say. Price is all that matters.
My experience with Amazon is that the quality of their offerings and service have fallen significantly over the years, to the point where there is no longer any reason for me to use them.
I lean more towards your side as I'm still a Amazon Prime user of 10+ years.
They capture at easily 50% of the goods I purchase.
That said for me it's not because they compete on price or quality. its convenience being in an apartment building with the nearest big box everything store being 15-20 minutes drive from me.
Why not? That sounds like cutting off your nose to spite your face! They usually have the best prices and fastest delivery. I'll just ignore the bits I don't like, and still shop there.
I went to Amazon without an ad blocker for the first time yesterday (wanted to try the fakespot service, but it requires an extension and "access all" so I created a clean profile for it). I was surprised how many ads there were on Amazon, I thought the situation was already bad with an ad blocker, considering they show a lot of hard-coded ads, but wow.
The most satisfying experience for me at the moment is the suggestions I get on a new tab in chrome on Android.
Not because the suggestions are amazingly good - sometimes they're ok - but because when they lead to some crap-infested site I can click to not see that site any more. That ability to cull keeps the suggestions workable for me.
I genuinely think the Google would benefit hugely by making this a possibility with their search engine. With the coming flood of chatgpt-generated shit sites, they have so much to gain by enabling human curation, even if page impressions take a hit.
Ffs Google, provide your users with a way to blacklist the more abominable parts of the internet and you'll engender serious customer loyalty and stickiness.
> That ability to cull keeps the suggestions workable for me.
Don't you have better use for your time? Normalizing the disaster that has become the internet (and absolving the key actors in that development) is robbing us all from experiencing a more sane online life.
Once google makes it possible, the next step will be a browser extension to synchronise with a crowdsourced list.
These lists will of course be at risk of the same pressures as ad blockers, with incentives for list maintainers to accept bribes to remove entries.
But over time, the quality of the lists will improve and so too will the quality of the UX for users of the aforementioned extensions. That is, assuming the goose isn't cooked already.
They used to have that feature, but then you could block the spammiest sites that make them money, can’t have that. Luckily, I neither use Chrome nor Google.
I use Edge browser on Android because it allows me to block ads. I also use NewPipe instead of the normal YouTube app and I can enjoy essentially an adless experience on Android.
I am generally getting overwhelmed with ads coming from every nook and cranny of life to the point that I don't even want to buy stuff anymore, for a lot of it its like: whats the point?
Sponsored segments on YouTube. Billboards. Sponsored texts in newspapers. "YC XXX is hiring" on HN.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsorblock and a few others. Ads are still everywhere. Not as everywhere as they'd be without it, but it's not like adblocks get rid of them all together.
I only watch music videos and very rarely a how to repair video.
> Billboards
I guess I sometimes see those in US TV shows ;)
> newspapers
I think I remember those things ;)
> is hiring
I guess, never saw those as ads. Though now that I think about it, I have started to want to figure out what BuildZoom does with custom homes, why YC funded them, and why I should care. Maybe one day I’ll see enough hiring posts to google them ;)
Lucky. In Helsinki they're in every metro station, every bus stop, and sometimes just in random spots along busy streets. Oh, and every metro car has screens playing video ads.
I don't really consider this a solution since I'm opposed to ads creeping into everything on principle, but try hitting the first or second button from the top on the right side. That mutes them around 80% of the time in my experience.
YC companies pay money to put a message in front of us, in the hope that some of us will respond by taking an action that is highly profitable for them. Seems pretty clearly ads to me!
Its trivial to skip ahead of the sponsor reads in youtube vids, or to scroll past the "is hiring" posts.
Frankly, these are minor annoyances. The people who get emotionally overwhelmed by them perhaps should resolve that internally rather than externally. Life is never going to be free from minor annoyances.
The only point I'm trying to make here is that they're still ads that adblocks don't protect you from. Web without an adblock is worse, but web with an adblock doesn't equal ad-free experience.
> The people who get emotionally overwhelmed by them perhaps should resolve that internally rather than externally.
What you're insinuating here is quite frankly insulting, brings nothing of value to what I was trying to say and the only thing I can offer you in return is to tell you to go fuck yourself.
Whenever a politician or volunteer contacts me, I tell them my #1 issue is banning billboards, or at least putting it up as a ballot measure / referendum.
Whenever one contacts me, it's usually by text spamming my private phone number that I didn't give them that's also on the do-not-call list, asking me to vote for them.
Luckily, I mostly don’t see any ads. Only for work, and on Amazon pretty much. Some more as product placement and in the physical world, but not a ton.
I love the new ad displays in the local shopping mall. They use LCD screens rotated 90 degrees and my sunglases are just the wrong filter angle so they become nice black displays for me. Physical adblocker :-)
My wife commented on how shitty some ambulance chaser ad was and all I could see was a black display. Now I want a law that requires all billboards and other such ads to be properly polarized so they can be blocked :-)
Go to amazon search for product. Find something that looks reasonable.
Confirm review section has a reasonable distribution of stars and check out a few 1 and 3/4 star reviews (hope they're written by a human) and see if there are any deal breakers.
Go to google and enter "<amazon product I'm interested in> reddit reviews".
Go to reddit read reviews and hope they're not written by astroturf accounts, bots, or chatgpt (have to manually review accounts).
If reddit confirms the product is okay, then I check if I can find it directly on a company site to order direct.
If yes, have to confirm with reddit again to make sure the site is reliable and does returns / replacements, etc.
If yes, buy direct. If no, go back to amazon to buy product there.
Something I heard recently on the cortex podcast is that Amazon is changing customer's understanding of how shipping works. While it is easy to set up a direct to consumer platform for a shop to sell their own goods, the shipping costs surprise the users because they are used to free shipping through Amazon.
Unfortunately, I can confirm this. When I purchase something like a t-shirt outside of Amazon, it feels weird to pay $8 for shipping, but it feels like forever waiting 10 days to actually receive it. It's not the end of the world, but yeah, Amazon has conditioned me.
Amazon is extremely organized (in terms of stock and shipping) and quite good at logistics, so it's very difficult to compete against them on that basis.
Amazon is really shit now. You try to buy a product and instead of showing you the actual brands it just shows you alibaba scam products.
I have to go to other sites and find the actual products and then search directly on amazon. It won’t be long before I just stop using amazon altogether.
I think (hope?) it's the beginning of a long, slow decline for Amazon as a marketplace, unless they fix this. This distrustful sentiment is something I hear from a lot of younger people (<40 year olds). I didn't even notice it myself until recently, but I am buying more and more stuff directly from other niche e-commerce websites, because I know half of the search results on Amazon are a scam.
In the middle of nowhere flyover, B&H has true 2 day delivery for no extra cost. Their prices are competitive with anywhere else as well. It's astounding.
I also like that they close the purchase feature for Shabbat. That feels nice, like a personal touch to an anonymous website.
B&H has great selection and prices, but man I don't like giving my money to a business that's strongly aligned to Satmar fundamentalism (which perpetrates all manner of social regressivism) and has a history of abusing workers that don't share the management's religion or skin color. I've demoted them to 'retailer of last resort' status for my personal shopping.
I love when we don't acknowledge the suggestion is the pain point. I can't get to work because I lack access to transportation. Crazy idea buy a car! Geez, why didn't I think of that?
Finding a reputable online retailer, with customer service, competitive pricing, and fast delivery that has your product in stock is hard. Managing a list of niche retailers that meet those requirements, one for electronics, one for home goods, one for furniture, etc. etc. is not something people want to do. Convenience drives behavior, and until there's an aggregator that does a good enough job (Google shopping or whatever isn't it), convenience will still drive people to Amazon.
Anecdotally, I was connected to a number of people on the Ads team and years ago, the upper ups in the G machine were already extremely nervous of Amazon's internal ads system.
Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search.
>Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search.
Ironically Amazon has been so aggressive with the ads recently I've lost all trust in searching on Amazon itself. I'm back to using Google to find the Amazon product page.
On Amazon I search for a specific brand and model and it's on page 4, buried until endless sponsored products. I have to go my order history to find the product page now. Sometimes the Amazon search is not just all endless products but literally incorrect products, stuff that I would have to return if I bought it by accident. Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.
Amazon product search feels not just bad but actively hostile, something I have to fight against to find the thing I actually want.
> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.
This exact thing happened to me. One of the problems, was that the bulb I was looking at, had a specific mini-candelabra socket, and the ones they showed me, had one that was just slightly larger, but looked almost identical (and the name was also “mini candelabra”). This was one of those “recommendations,” in the list at the bottom.
I actually ordered the wrong bulbs, based on this, and had to return them.
I have also had Amazon direct me to gray market and counterfeit goods, with extreme confidence; often insisting that the dodgy product was being sold by the manufacturer.
I now order direct from the manufacturer, for anything over about $50, even if I pay more (happens less frequently, these days. Amazon is no longer the bargain it used to be, and even gray market now sells for full retail). Sometimes, the manufacturers use Amazon for fulfillment, but I don’t mind, as they direct me to the real product.
It’s not 100% Amazon’s fault, as the scammers have figured out how to game the system, but Amazon is not trying to fix it. I assume that this is because they make so much money.
I have heard, anecdotally, that selling on Amazon has become a nightmare, for legit sellers; especially small ones. The scammers have no problem, putting up with B.S., but real sellers can drown.
Here’s something I experienced, a couple of years ago, when I was looking for a stand for my phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25582762 (the links in that post no longer do what they did, back then).
Amazon is rapidly dropping to my second or third place to look, I often start at Home Depot or Best Buy or other places without a marketplace first, then only sanity check Amazon to make sure I can't save somehow.
Same thing happened to eBay, any attempt to cut down on the scammers just reduced the number of actual real sellers, until basically there's nothing but scammers left for large swaths of the site.
Best Buy is at least toying with the idea of a marketplace - Best Buy Canada search returns mostly marketplace items, but for now at least you can still filter to only items sold by Best Buy.
eBay is still quite usable if you know what you're doing, and "scammers" here isn't referring to actual "ship you a brick instead of a laptop" but "water down search results with acres and acres of cheap Alibaba shit"
> The Amazon search is no... literally incorrect products, stuff that I would have to return if I bought it by accident. Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.
People keep going on about AI but the worlds most valuable company is incapable of arranging shit they sell into correct categories. You could be looming for a toothbrush and they will sell you a car seat.
Alza.cz delivers all over EU, they have an actual human categorise their stock, and it's a much better experience.
They don't sell absolutely everything, but they have electronics, Scooters, teslas, home appliances - you name it.
> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.
This is where ads really break the user experience. When I search for a specific air filter by model number it will prioritize ads for different air filters above the listings of air filters that are actually compatible.
Checking out on Amazon is easy. Everything else from the searching to the filtering to the reviews is openly user hostile.
Strongly agree. Dropped prime after I Amazon adds mean I couldn't find what I wanted. Now use google to find specific stuff on D2C websites (probably Shopify) and spend less. It's great!
I dropped prime after "two-day shipping on all orders" had degenerated into "we'll deliver it when we feel like it, and you can't get two-day shipping even if you're willing to pay extra for it".
I'm annoyed that they keep raising the price to pay for a streaming service I barely use. But I still can get most things next day or two days at most.
And I very much enjoyed the Lord of the Rings series they did. High production quality and pretty good story telling. But I suppose I am easily entertained.
Prime Video is the reason I never got prime. Was using it free for a year as a student end when that expired I considered signing up for the free shipping. But then they bundled the Delivery-Prime with the video streaming service which doubled the price if you are not interested in video streaming.
> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.
Amazon could improve their usability so much by providing proper metadata entry systems for sellers and enforce their proper usage by moderating their platform.
But that costs money, there are more than enough customers still buying stuff off of Amazon and the real cash cow is AWS anyway.
I have the impression that the spam is crowding out the long tail of products and is also driving away some better products with a unique selling point.
1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars.
2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up.
3) Google Search tech / product itself sucks. Power queries no longer work. This might be hard to unwind from as revenue numbers are propped up by answering "dumb queries" with ads.
4) AI will eat search's lunch. You'll increasingly ask LLMs, and these LLMs will push search ad revenue to a much lower margin, especially if the goal is to gain a reputation for quality.
Google has to figure this out quick. 50% of their revenue is from search. I think they're checkmated. There's no way out except to build something new and hope it works. That wouldn't be easy for anyone, but Google especially hasn't shown a history or aptitude for doing this.
The cool thing about Reddit is you might just be able to ask for a recommendation and someone will give it to you. Either someone else has asked before, or you find the right sub where the people with the answer are.
Just imagine what AI will do this in 4 years. You can no longer trust the recommendations, there are whole threads written by bots to push specific products.
Am I old? What kind of information. Not to be on Googles side here but, for information in video form... YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still. Right?
YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts, life updates, sponsorships, etc. Basically content that added no value to the user and only exists to make the video long enough to qualify for more ad pods. A 10 minute video would often only have 2 minutes of relevant content.
TikTok encourages the opposite: so content creators cram in as much information as possible, often speeding up music and talking. Sometimes with supercuts to even minimize the natural pauses between words. The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s and shares more similarities with a lightning talk and slide deck than a video.
TikTok encourages fast consumable content (fast fashion), not information. And yes there could be fluff in longer form videos? But that also can included context, and allow the viewer to skip or watch at their own pace.
You could listen to an audio book at 10x speed, but would you retain much of it?
I guess i would say, TikTok information is the personification of the meme of "How to Draw an Owl" quick and short. But does it convey enough information, could a longer form be better?
from my recollection of Scott Young's blog and to a certain extent my personal experience, you can generally up the video speed to 1.5x-2x and retain the same amount of comprehension - people generally talk much slower than you you can understand, because it takes more effort to say something than understand it.
Those Audible/SkillShare/VPN ads ruined YouTube for me, and I consume a lot less content on YouTube nowadays. Sponsor Block addon has saved me hours automatically skipping them, but I can't help but worry that it is only going to make things worse in the long term as creator revenue drops.
Yeah, most youtubers simply read off some prepared generic script... although there are a few exceptions like HeavyDSparks who at least make the effort to make a fun story tied in with the video's topic for whatever supplements they're shilling.
> YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts
I can watch YouTube on a television though.
And, just like a book, I can skip the parts I'm not interested in.
Are we at the point that research has become something that should be so effortless that even the tiniest annoyance is considered bad?
> so content creators cram in as much information as possible
> The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s
which is exactly the opposite of good information.
A lightning talk it's not information, it's an hint to something that should sparkle your interest, nobody actively search for lightning talks as a form of research.
At school I studied Roman history for ever, it's not like that Roman history is really that complicated (it is vast, it spans a very long time and there are many names and many battles, but still not complex stuff) it's that persistence of knowledge requires time, repetition and going into details.
You can cram Roman history in two paragraphs, but that's not information, that's trivia.
But mostly, good information requires reputation: you can't just take a 2 minute video crammed into 30 seconds chipmunk high pitch voice and call it "information". That's just someone talking about stuff, as far as the use knows, it could be 100% bullshit (and probably is).
Ironically, your comment has the same problem the people you are complaining about are a complaining about ... 8 paragraphs as opposed to the GPs 2.
I'm not learning Roman History from youtube/tiktok, I'm trying to figure out how to factory reset my parents DVR. 10 minutes of rambling is not useful.
I had a small problem with my dishwasher, and wanted to look up how to fix it. Youtube video was ~15 minutes long and in the end somehow contained less relevant information than the 1 minute TikTok.
Youtube shorts is trying to get in the mix, but no matter how I try to curate my feed, there's always around 30% bald men bullshitting mixed in (Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and a bunch of bad comedians). Their algorithm is strongly geared towards controversy, and I guess it works to increase engagement, but only for people who don't realize how toxic and unhealthy it is to watch stuff like that.
TikTok is a holy grail of distilled information. In two short years of TikTok recipes, my wife has learned how to cook better than almost any restaurant we eat at, and we're serious foodies. Zero to one hundred, just from TikTok.
There's everything from OSint TikTok to finance TikTok to archeologist TikTok... It's crazy, and it's good.
Once you find your niche, the information density approaches that of a black hole. It's really high quality.
Is it information or inspiration, a la Pinterest? I get some cooking youtubers can be long winded like cooking blogs of before, but I feel like you find people you like, and can way easier scrub the video to important parts on YT.
And I get us on HN are a particular cohort, but is there really as much depth of information? Literally had to help a family member fix their jeep over the holidays and "replace fuel pump jeep Cherokee 1998" is just not something I think Tiktok would be good at. Idk I should try and install it sometime i guess.
And then also, at least i've noticed on Instagram (and occasionally FB), that like sometimes I see something. Forget about it, click elsewhere, and then cant go back to find it again? Vs /feed/history and even browser history on Youtube?
Edit: Is this normal? I cant even search for videos on tiktok.com without an account?
it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill.
it only requires that you do it.
you don't need to study hard to learn to cook.
The average person can learn to cook from someone who already can do it (usually it's your parents...) in a week. It usually happens at the age of 15. From then on it's only a matter of practicing and experimenting. It doesn't require a tutor, contrary to what TV shows like master chef wants to sell to you.
I learned how to cook looking at my mom doing it and then tried some recipe from this book series from the '60s that were very popular in many homes when I was a kid.
> So? Millions of people lack basic skills, like 1/3 of the population struggles with digital skills.
You mean people can't use their hands?
Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills that mostly boil down to "they don't know software products" but they also "don't care about them" and it's a very very very broad field, many people take for granted their knowledge about complex stuff, but basic "digital skills" are easily learned through simply doing it. Just like cooking, but less useful.
Coincidentally, I never used TikTok, I don't know how it works, it's one of the few Chinese stuff that I really don't care about (but it's ironically loved by Americans who also hate China for everything else). Based on this sentence many people would say that I lack basic digital skills, but I am also a professional software engineer since 1996. Many of the things that are basic digital skills for me, are advanced stuff for people who only use a smartphone. Many basic skills, like using a real keyboard, are alien to touchscreen natives. And so on. TikTok is not a skill, but if it was I would lack that skill.
Meanwhile cooking is something that anybody can do, even chimps ca do it
Virtually every animal that is not an insect can be cooked the same way: open the belly, remove internal organs, cook it. Done. .
Fancy recipes are not "cooking", there's the same distance between playing soccer with your friends and being a professional soccer player.
Saying that TikTok helped someone to learn how to cook is misleading, the merit is of the person that started doing it and learned how to do it by doing it.
Replace TikTok with "grandma book of recipe" and the result is the same.
TikTok has no real value in this story, it just happened that someone used it for inspiration because that's what that person knew. Coincidence is not the same thing of correlation.
Have you seen British newbuilt homes? They must be using their feet!
> Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills
So is filling doing paperwork and navigating beurocracy.
We have an entire proffesion dedicates to doing just that, and every year thousands of people get in trouble because they ticked a wrong box in a form.
They suck because they never took just a little time to try to learn, because they think it's so basic that they can just figure it out while doing it. Or they were wrongly taught by their mothers from past generations when women cooked because of their sex and not because they were any good at it.
You kind of mean cooking as in "cutting and heating food" it seems to me. It's like saying a person can learn "computing" in a week, where they learn how to write a Word document and print it. Sure, it covers a need, and it's a good start. Everybody should learn some cooking and YouTube is a great instructor, but like everything it takes time and effort to become skilled.
What prior knowledge would you need to do computing?
Cooking a simple meal anybody can learn, just as typing a Word document and printing it. More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.
> What prior knowledge would you need to do computing?
Wikipedia to the rescue, as usual
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software.
now go to the average person, ask them what an algorithm is and be prepared to be disappointed.
Ask them what a pressure cooker or filleting is and you won't be.
> just as typing a Word document and printing it
that's not computing, that's typewriting.
typewriting is easy, as the adage says: monkeys can do it and eventually write Shakespeare.
> More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.
Not really.
More complicated cooking mostly takes more time, but it's not really more difficult. I would argue that many people can make cakes which is some of the more complicated food one can cook, but they amusingly say they can't cook.
Making sushi it's easy, but it needs a very long preparation.
More complicated computer stuff requires a lot of studying and you have to learn a lot of concepts that have no other use outside of computing world.
Sorry for double posting, I can't edit my comments anymore.
Amusingly I just discovered that TikTok is actually a very good educational platform but only for Chinese people in China.
The Chinese version of the popular short video app TikTok, known as Douyin, will force users in China who are under 14 years old to use the so called teenage mode that will limit them to 40 minutes a day between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. to ensure they get adequate sleep. Endless zombie-like scrolling is interrupted by mandatory 5-second delays. They’re also only shown specially-selected “inspiring” content.
The algorithm is vastly different, promoting science, educational and historical content in China
I don't know for sure if this is some form of Chinese propaganda, but assuming it's true, compared to the content that is more prominent in the rest of the World, it becomes increasingly hard to call ourselves "advanced societies".
I've heard much fuss about 4), but i'm still skeptical. Google makes most their money on commercial searches such as "what is the best TV", or "where to buy football tickets", not "please do my homework". And AI will have a hard time returning superior results on the former, because many people are looking for human reviews rather than an AI output.
In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT.
Definitely but would you be able to tell if a review you see is generated or written by a human?
We will have to face a reality where nothing on the internet can be trusted. Ironically traditional news outlets will probably become more relevant again.
Ironically, if they had focused more on delivering a good search experience instead of delivering ads and low-value "AI" features, they might have better prospects looking forward.
Google is still king of the traditional web. There are so many products and services that you cannot sell through Amazon and that you do not want to sell on Amazon. Social media is a joke when it comes to online sales, you have to invest 100 hours into social media to get the same results as investing 1 hour in a normal web site.
The search engine of Google has rapidly deteriorated, but people still go mainly to Google when they want or need to purchase something.
AI can not make contracts with humans and make a sale. People selling online instead of making free content seem to be the most protected against AI right now. An AI can never deal with money responsibilities.
Google's strongest arm right now are maps, where they are superior. Apple is finally catching up, and could compete with Google if they changed some of their truly idiotic maps policies. For what it's worth, Apple could probably easily destroy Google as a search engine, and they have the conservative attitude to make them a good candidate.
I'm not sending my purchase intent to Amazon. In fact I am ensuring I don't give them ads results via SEO (e.g., -site:amazon.com).
I don't want Amazon ads in my results which I know were forcibly generated at runtime by overriding competitors (i.e., breaking/hacking Google Search).
I don't want to purchase an item from Amazon knowing it could contain an empty box and/or defective product (i.e., no quality control), will take 5x as long to arrive, and I may not even receive a refund in the event I try to return the item.
Give me a service better than Amazon. I'm tired of being served subpar everything by them. Especially when they treat their employees and customers like trash. No thanks.
I agree except for "there is no way out" - for a company with Google's bankroll, there's always the option of an acquisition. That's the usual way for monopolists to stay relevant.
Yeah it's still too early for us to know for sure but I'd expect LLMs getting pretty bad pretty quick.
Once ads are added there is, again, a motivation to make replies very long and rambly. Even now I begin getting "annoyed":
Yes it's grammatically correct and "humanly" sounding but all I really want is five dashes with ingredients and instructions for an apple pie.
Given enough time, I'm confident the "Certainly I can help you. Here's what you need to..." will once again turn into a paragraph or two to have more opportunities to sell to advertisers.
The economics still don't seem to favor brief responses.
This is true and I don’t work for G but will say I use Google Shopping quite a bit for products especially outdoor gear and apparel (an area where Amazon sucks, at least they way I shop) and it’s a criminally underrated tool
> the ‘retail media’ gold rush: the realisation that a high-traffic website or app could be ad inventory even if you’re not a media company, that you have very relevant ‘consented’ first party data (at the very least intent if not broader profiles) and probably purchase attribution too, that all of this now has more relative value given the push against cookies and third party data everywhere else - and that advertising margins are a lot higher than retail margins.
I think it's not visitors, but repeat users which makes it possible and so valuable. This is going to be the next phase of Adtech. Uber has a $500M run rate from ads, Walmart has $2.7B (from the same article), and evidently more and more companies will discover, if you can aggregate traffic to some decent level, you can monetize it with first party data. This advantage is only going to increase once we see Android launch their own version of tracking consent, and Chrome gets rid of cookies. A good horizontal play here is to sell targeting, attribution, and profiling services to all these "aggregators of traffic".
Not sure about the revenues per se, but I think Doordash, Expedia, Robinhood, Airbnb could also potentially generate ad revenue at low cost just based how much traffic (and repeat users) they get
But it will come at least somewhat at the expense of their core business, surely? An Airbnb with ads looks a lot less trustworthy than one without, I think.
I already don't trust airbnb because of their random fees they keep applying after actually putting in my information. And their general unreliability when it comes to supporting hosts and costumers.
One tip you may appreciate is to use the Australian version of airbnb (.au), their regulators require them to show the true cost of the rental, including all fees in the headline price.
It operates exactly the same as your regional airbnb once you switch the location and currency. For example, switching to USD and searching for apartments in California
Depends on how relevant are the ads. I think it augments the business because now businesses are monetizing majority of visitors in some way. It's sustainable for long term if the ads are relevant enough for users to not drop off. Ads and trust are inversely correlated agreed, though looking at Uber and Amazon, I am not sure if that is true for every case. I might be an outlier, but amazon ads after I search for a product are actually quite useful. And probably why advertisers get a good ROI (evident in growth) and users aren't turned off by it (evident in sales revenue). Relevance score for any ad would matter for the company.
Booking.com - the biggest travel website in the world, already does this and has been for years.
They mainly charge via greater conversion fees (ie a bigger slice of the booking), as opposed to a cost per click model (which I think is Amazon’s preferred model).
This way, they have a huge incentive on making the ad as relevant as possible, otherwise they’ve wasted inventory through not monetizing the click at all (whereas cost per click means you make money regardless of wether the user clicks through).
For Expedia, it used to be the case that they made more from someone booking via an ad on the site than they did via direct purchases. Same model as Amazon Ads, really.
I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist.
I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-res photographing shelf-positioning in a massive supermarket chain. Every aisle. And then eye-scanning tests and analysis on legibility meant it was all used to upsell brands fighting for premium positioning.
They did the same thing for Walmart+ and honestly it's pretty terrible. Every business is going to try to be amazon now and while it's probably going to make money in the short term it'll eventually poison their brand. I want to know the hot sauce I'm going to buy isn't sold by some random dude who will send me expired items. I want to know the hard drives I'm going to buy are actually new. Same thing with newegg.
'I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website...'
This is certainly a trend led, I am guessing, by troves of internal search data that suggests people are searching for things they don't have the capacity to stock themselves.
"Do you stock purple widgets?" "No, we're Red Widget Emporium" is not an inappropriate answer. If anything, it improves the trust angle-- you're the experts on Red Widgets rather than a mile-wide-six-inches-deep generalist. I generally don't want to buy sheet lumber and breakfast cereal at the same store.
"We'll pretend we stock it but actually hand you to a second tier vendor who you'd never go to directly" is less compelling somehow.
I agree, but I think it also helps retailers swell their cashflow (since they don't have to tie up capital on stock) so, for them, it's just too compelling an advantage to pass up?
In a way, it does help a specialist differentiate him/herself in the market though. I am tending to buy more from small, specialist retailers for this very reason.
No, it's a blatant cash-grab by all big online stores.
And for awhile you can continue to search "shipped and sold by Company" but eventually that goes away, because the marketplace shit is pure profit for them.
It sells out the brand and turns them all into eBay/Alibaba clones and it's a major danger sign.
More and more I have to restrict Walmart to "stocked in store" to avoid useless crap.
Funny you should mention that because it's how I'd started searching the aforementioned Bunnings site. Filter by what's available and in stock at the local store.
The other development is having to check online reviews before purchasing just about anything. Previously, if I bought shelf brackets or similar, I could usually rely on the fact that they were stocked at at a reliable store to mean they were decent enough quality. They'd passed some sort of review. If they were terrible, they'd be pulled from shelves. But that's no longer the case. More and more cheap, unfit-for-purpose goods are being sold by formerly solid stores. They'll accept returns but keep stocking 1-star items and hoping most people forget to return. I've checked reviews and been saved by 1-2 star averages suggesting the manifold splits first use or the shelf supports a tenth of the rated weight.
That latter development is really, really annoying. I've started to order certain things from commercial suppliers like Uline (the advantage of having one local) simply because there's some things I don't want to deal with the thought process necessary to work out what is crap.
I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page.
Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website?
I think ads play the biggest part in why the Internet is so fill with junk today, to the point you have to sift through mountains of trash to find something genuinely useful.
> Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps?
Sorry to burst you bubble but this is how all of retail works including physical stores. From the moment you walk into a store everything you see from what products are “on sale” to the floor displays to where on the shelf an item appears is all “an advertisement” paid for by the product maker. The fact that you thought this was all like just a shop keeper assembling items to their preference is quaint. Amazon is simply a digital version of what stores have been doing since essentially the beginning of stores.
That all includes private label too. People criticize Amazon for selling their own products for less than brand names, but walk into any store and you’ll see the same thing with store or house brands. Again, this is all standard retail practice and not some evil new scheme.
I worked at a Kroger in high school and I learned this fact then. A lady was assembling a big display for s’mores supplies (Hershey’s, Reese’s, brand name marshmallows, and some graham crackers). They paid for a premium spot in the store right next to the checkout lanes since it was near Fourth of July and they wanted to maximize sales.
Even the placement on store shelves is paid for. The prime shelf space costs more than the bottom shelf, for example.
it’s more intricate than this. There is store shelf specific plans to define how inventory should be stocked at the SKU level on a given shelf. The distance between the price tags determine the actual shelf space facings usually, in addition to end-caps, which are very premium spaces.
Most large grocers outsource all of this management to intermediary firms that “manage” shelf space for chains, selling and updating their retail merchandising based on marketing campaigns and sales data.
You may find good pricing on brands/products on the lowest shelf, as they tend to be smaller firms that compete with the large players that pay premium for shelf-space, which is sustained by higher pricing.
Like many things people criticize Amazon for "starting", this has a long history in retail. When you walk into a store and see an attractive display at the end of an aisle full of products from one brand, that is a "end cap" and is something that brand paid for.
And "fulfilled by Amazon" or even a product shipped without Amazon's involvement at all comes from supermarkets. In the chips and snacks aisle, that section full of Frito-Lay products or soft drinks (come to think of it, Pepsi owns Frito-Lay): the store rents our a section of the aisle and it's managed by the manufacturer: their truck shows up and the truck driver restocks that section of the shelving, rearranges the product, etc.
The store is essentially just collecting rent and selling the goods on consignment. Amazon does the same and you know, doesn't provide any real support for those sales.
I knew a guy (older, old school generation) who's one among other responsibilities was to go store-to-store and bring the end cap materials. In addition he would spot check that the end cap displays their company paid for were in fact being placed.
The clerk can preferentially show you higher margin products that might be what you're looking for, and while a grocery store wouldn't bother other retail (ex: electronics, cars) will.
Everything is amplified since the physical space on a screen is much smaller than the field of vision in a store. The real estate on phone is basically 2 products or 4 on laptop at a time for everything. This makes the ads wayyyy more powerful-not to mention targeted-than shelf placement or end caps or whatever else.
Pretty much every banking app I've used in recent memory (Chase, Citi, AmEx) has some kind of ad in it. Either to promote the bank's services, or promoting partnership deals (extra points for spending at certain retailers; discounts if you add a retailer's deal to what is basically a virtual coupon book). They're not quite as intrusive at Amazon's search result ads, but they're there.
You know you can pay eBay to promote your listing. That is pretty much what they mean by ads in this case. Someone is paying to be the top spot or be promoted on search results.
I think Amazon has an ad network of sorts, so sellers bid for the sponsored search slot. In retailers who don't have such a platform, merchandisers take the call and boost/bury products in search results.
Ads on Amazon are far more annoying than ads on other web properties, because I go to Amazon for a very specific need. I search for Tide washing liquid and I see these sponsored products on top, way above the Tide result. From a purist viewpoint, this is disgusting. I have to come to you Amazon, to just give me what I want, not what you think I want.
That said, there isn't a better alternative so I just ignore the ads and go for the product no matter how far down the page that product appears.
Sadly neither of these are allowed to sell in India. It's an Amazon/Flipkart duopoly and I personally cannot stand the Flipkart shopping interface. Millions love it.
> I have to come to you Amazon, to just give me what I want, not what you think I want.
It's not what they think you want, they probably know exactly what you want.
It's what they're being paid to shill to you. It's more profitable for them to take that money and put you through a bad experience than to just sell stuff to you.
> just give me what I want, not what you think I want.
I feel the same way about writing suggestions in Gmail and “fuzzy search” common on a lot of sites. What’s the deal with this apparent trend of constantly trying to second-guess user intention?
I don’t recall whether it’s been within the app or the website but my bank has definitely shown me ads - ads for a credit card with their brand or opening a money market account. I doubt it’s that unusual for a bank to advertise like that. On the other hand, if they started showing Taboola-esque, “one weird trick” trash my opinion of them would really plummet.
That's old. It seems like every time I login I get a promo of some sort pushing me to sign up for some product offering they have. New low rate this, new high rate that. And you can't block them. It's a full page. I can't get my account page to load until I click "not interested" or something.
You know products labeled as Amazon's choice? Those are actually ads. Search for a product by a specific manufacturer and see that first in the results is a (usually) similar product from a different manufacturer? An ad.
They also use their customer data to sell ads off the Amazon site.
Imagine having ads in your store for the products that you sell. Disgusting.
edit: or less sarcastically, the problem with Amazon is the trash and counterfeits that they're selling, and that they're willing to promote garbage to the top for cash. It's that Amazon has no respect for its own reputation as a store or a marketplace. It's not that Amazon sells products for money.
When you go to a grocery store, manufacturers have paid money for specific locations in the store to draw your attention to their product. This is everywhere. Advertising is not something that only free services turn to in order to make money. It is something that everybody turns to in order to make money because they've got a platform for advertisement.
> Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads
Why would you think this? An IRL analogue is that the grocery store is full of ads and displays meant to catch your attention — paid for by the food/product manufacturers.
They auction the search result space, like Google search. I guess for prime members it would be nice to have the option to turn off. I have noticed this happening on lots of websites now, particularly grocery websites.
Whenever I have a transaction with my brokerage, Chase adds a note telling me how much better Chase's investment arm is than them in my transaction feed.
So the companies that sell on Amazon pay money to Amazon (from the revenues they get from Amazon's customers) to have their products listed more favorably than competitors (one of which is actually Amazon).
I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...
The difference is that there are many stores to negotiate with for shelf space - in the online world there is only one serious player (although this does seem to be changing over time)
The main difference is the retail companies still vet the suppliers before letting them duke it out for shelf space.
Monster may have paid Best Buy to be on the shelf, but at least I have some guarantee that Best Buy actually bothered to check that the HDMI cable is actually an HDMI cable (and if it wasn't, would notice and pull it eventually).
Amazon lets anyone sell anything, and then takes a cut in multiple ways.
In the US, each area usually has Costco/Walmart/Target, Best Buy/Apple, Home Depot/Lowes, Staples/OfficeDepot, Kroger/Albertsons/regional grocer, Nordstrom/Macys/Kohls/Old Navy/Gap.
I blame television + social media favoring stupid, anger inducing soundbites over well thought out rhetoric.
And Duverger's law [0] leading to a duopoly of two political parties who spend all their time bickering and scheming to get more power because they've decided politics is a football game where the goal is to score more than the other team and not a civic duty to run the country for the benefit of the people.
Somewhat tangential, the second graph shows not just Amazon, but every big tech’s advertising revenue growing like crazy year over year from 2016 to 2021, particularly Google and Facebook. Growth slowed a bit in 2020 (still grew nonetheless) but rebounded hard in 2021. Excuse the question from someone who don’t pay attention to the ad industry at all: WTF happened to the popular narrative at the time that companies were cutting ad spend during covid?
It was very short lived as an overall trend and while some big physical venue based advertising (e.g. for Disneyland) did stay low for years, online and digital products (like say Disney+) more than made up for it
When you walk in your local grocery store and see a Pepsi display with a football player or something and a big stack of Pepsi products right there how do you all think that happens?
This thread is showing me that a shocking number of people have never considered that the layout of the stores they shop in are not either arbitrary or necessarily based on what's best for the customer.
When you ask the shopkeeper where the Pepsi is, and he insists on showing you a Coke knockoff while actively hiding the Pepsi from sight, that is when you stop patronizing the store. This is what people in this thread are fired up about.
What's interesting is that in this model a lot of companies might be paying for ads without ever seeing a return, because they cannot outbid those at the top. In that case, Amazon would be sponging up money from a lot of players and returning it to a few. Which would be ok, but the problem is that you can either play the game or drop out. So it becomes a little bit of a gig economy thing where in theory you're free but in practice companies are squeezing you for everything.
That's not how online ads work? You bid for ad space, but you pay only if you get clicks, and are booted out fast if you don't get any. If you're always outbid, or nobody clicks on your ads, your spend is zero.
You would be right about that. "Sellers only pay the ad fee when a potential customer clicks on their Amazon listing. If no one clicks then there's no cost. As your ad is representative of your product and your Amazon listing is professional, you should be able to get a sale out of a significant number of your clicks" (Sep 21, 2021). If it's still like that, yeah that's different.
I think maybe Amazon's algo is wrong. I've seen alot of people comment that they search for a brand and get crap instead. I would think they need to take the fees they charge for a sale into account when serving ads.
Also, people's previous history. If you don't buy crap don't show it high in the results.
And, intent. are they really searching for a new product or just using search to find the product/brand they want
The retail and ads portions here seem inextricably linked. It does not seem possible to treat those as separate things.
What's more, if you tell amazon "no more retail ads", surely they can just do what normal stores do, and charge a slotting fee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee) instead.
If right now the first 10 results on amazon.com for "mattress" are all ads because those companies paid $1000 to be advertised first, how is that meaningfully different from amazon only carrying 10 mattresses at all, and instead of charging ad fees, charging a $1000 slotting fee to the mattress companies?
I am not particularly arguing for or against anything, just speculating that breaking it up would, in practice, be hard. Perhaps some other regulatory action would work better.
There’s a $40bn/yr business here. I’m sure somebody can figure out how to decouple.
Also, many breakup scenarios for Amazon involve spinning out the fulfillment business. Who cares if Amazon.com stocks 10 mattresses if I can just build a competitor stocking 10,000 while using the same infrastructure.
Facebook in particular given that their erroneous metrics literally put several media companies out of business. Not only did they charge for nonexistent engagement, but the BS engagement numbers they were providing were so enticing that it created a huge push towards expensive-to-create video content.
I am not sure people are really prepared to take the implication of how unfair Amazon seems to its logical conclusion, because it means undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism. Regulation targeted at increasing competition (breakups, rather than regulation Amazon as a monopoly of a kind and entrenching them) might result in a better outcome, or it just might make things more expensive and then you have to repeat the same breakup and regulation process again every 15 years.
On a global scale, it helps if your country is where all the biggest companies are coming from, especially to compete with big companies from other countries.
> Is it? Newspapers aren’t exactly thriving and it’s not because of Amazon.
Would you have a problem if a random local newspaper company had significant influence over what 50% of the U.S. bought, watched, read, listened to, ate, and needed for medical purposes in addition to market power that made it stay that way?
Except the issue isn't whether there are "dozens of other ways of buying things online, people just choose not to" but whether Amazon's market share is so large as to prohibit anyone from being able to compete with it.
Amazon sells ads on its marketplace. It also sells ads that integrate within its marketplace listings in a fashion that can be difficult to discern. It offers a fulfillment service that is integrated with its marketplace. It offers an integrated third party marketplace. These, are of course, facts. Whereas my initial response to was just the hypothetical point that you misunderstand how anti-trust law is applied. I don't think this has been much of a conversation seeing as how you are just being purposefully obtuse. It's clear you are making no efforts to come at this with good faith and I'm not going to bother any further otherwise.
You can use outrage if you want, but the fact remains that Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly, not in the legal sense and not in any layperson sense.
You’re kind of proving my point for me, that there’s no actual argument here, just general negative sentiment.
None of those facts do that, as Walmart offers everything you listed.
I just happen to live in AR and know a number of people who work on the relevant teams that do each of these things at Walmart, and given Walmart.com's growth in the last year, Amazon is far from the only company able to provide these services profitably.
Is Amazon a competitor? Yes. Do they have a monopoly? Heck no.
Oh wow, you conveniently know the exact people doing those exact things at Walmart but instead first made up that I expressed a negative sentiment. Yeah, okay.
Huh, what does that have to do with whether or not Amazon has a monopoly? I think at this point it’s clear they do not, you just didn’t have the info about the industry you were commenting on.
No, because the fact that competitors exist doesn't mean that there are not anti-trust concerns, not sure why I keep having to repeat this to you but oh well.
Ads are to Amazon now what finance was to GE. Suddenly there are ways to make infinite money without continuous huge expense on physical infrastructure. Slowly other divisions will look like too much hassle for little gain when ads can generate 10s of billion dollars without millions of sq. ft warehouses which are anyway hell-holes as per media.
It's that really hard to buy from other online stores? Sure, you won't have all things together and you might have to use a few stores to replace Amazon, but overall it might be a better experience.
Amazon does have some major advantages in the "free shipping" areas, but those are starting to be outclassed, especially as Prime becomes more and more shit.
The "free delivery" minimums are pretty easy to hit at some place like Walmart or Target or Home Depot, and often it's just free shipping period.
And since 2day shipping is dead at Amazon even with prime, you just start cart-collecting and ship when it hits the amount.
Or you pay shipping to places like Monoprice, rather do that than pay amazon "more" for the "same thing (literally)" with free shipping.
what this slotting fee does, is the same as one induvidual would own all the city buildings in a small city - price of rent goes up up up, price of products go up up up, and then its just empty, everyb goes shopping somewhere else.
i never buy these products because u know its a scam of 800% margin.
there are no products anymore that are decent priced. it all like thai taxi mafia
I bought an echo dot on a whim. I was going to post in the thread about Alexa's 'failure' about how miserable the experience was, how demanding of access it was, how little function it delivered in return.
But the second half of that story - the reason it led to me blacklisting Amazon belongs here:
A day or two after installing the Echo Dot, I wrote a very personal and long postponed email to my sister. We haven't communicated much in years. But COVID ended our mother's life, and ultimately lead to me having a heart attack and being diagnosed with a genetic condition. I wanted to pick up on something she said about memories of the house we shared growing up. I mentioned, in brief, the table tennis set up, and the bright red, multi-layered, over engineered table tennis bat I was bought as a youngster. I wanted to note that it was more expensive than those of my two elder siblings - and I didn't really know why that was the case. I was gently making a concession about the dynamics of our family and how maybe they said something about us as people - fourty years later. - as sensitively as I could, in the face of estrangement, mental health issues for both of us, family tragedy, the march of time on our bodies.
The next time I logged into Amazon - I was confronted by page after page of adverts for over engineered bright red table tennis bats.
End of relationship with Amazon.
I rarely use hotmail for personal emails, so maybe that was how the information leaked. But I doubt that. I think it was about that Echo dot sitting their verifying my identity as an amazon customer.
Amazon getting 'people' so wrong is - for me - just one of many signs that the FAANG's business model of the last 15, 20 years - is utterly doomed. Anyone thinking that opportunities to do better aren't staring the rest of us in the face, needs to wake up, and realise they maybe insects, in economic terms, but they're living on dinosaurs. Don't allow yourself to be decieved into thinking your current "host" is the only one that could ever provide you with an environment to survive, or thrive. The West seemingly will not allow anything resembling a meteor strike. Rather it would delay and absorp any change over as long a period as possible. I tend to believe that we're actually doing what people in history have always done, when they end up looking very silly and naive: succumbing heavily to recency bias. Evolution and History will eventually have it's way.
Human identities and the makings of relationships are not the shallow constructs we have learned to consider them as. A flag and a brand do not show you what is inside. Convenience is forgettable if there is something more personal at stake, any half-decent alternative will do. It's the organisations who know what that means who will come good. I can't help but think, in a quasi-manic hyperconnected way, that this ties in very neatly with what "AI" is going to give us, how it is best considered. And also the need for verified identities.
From the moment the web arrived, I prized anonymity, and never paid a subscription. Twenty years later - I see the limits of that approach as fundamental to why the web has turned out to be such a terrible, traumatic, unsatisfying experience. In that one instance, it was clear to me, that they'll steal your identity and tell you what it means to be you. What you can have, as well as what turns you on.
Hence I am actually excited about a future where I can demonstrate my identity as my "property", harness that in ways that will satisfy me. And that will include paying for services that work better for me.
Pretty crazy. Amazon actively harvests your data, w/ and w/o your consent. Because you tried Echo, that's all it took. You connected it to wifi/bluetooth, and Amazon was then able to access all your connected devices; all of them. Anyone who downloaded the Alexa app, Amazon took over your phone, accessing all your apps, your mic and your camera, as well as accessing all your devices that share wifi/bluetooth connection. We're talking some of the most intimate of situations Amazon has copies of, without your knowledge or acute consent.
Once connected to wifi/bluetooth, Amazon can access any devices that share that connection, e.g., your laptop. With that Amazon can freely access your browser, your keystrokes, your camera, your mic. All of it.
Just like nobody ever opens page 2 of Google search, people rarely scroll down very far on Amazon's product search page. These "ads" just put the highest bidders' products at the top-K spots (and K keeps increasing) so that customers aren't see the most relevant products, just the ones who paid the most money.
Amazon spent 20+ years building customer trust. Now it's reaping its reward by selling it off wholesale.