Amazon’s search is so transparently corrupt and useless, I can search the exact product I want to buy in quotes and it will show me an entire page or more of other products it wants me to buy before the result I was looking for.
i kinda like that better than the typical pronunciation tbh, but also unfortunately for us CD coined the term so we cant even be on a high horse about how he decided to spell and say the word he made up and now we all use.
i still might start saying it shite for fun though.
> As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers.
These people are so far removed from reality that you could easily call these social circles a (more or less spontaneously organized) cult, and they have to warp the world around them to serve them even more. Buying twitter, buying newspapers. They are telling us that the "others" are brainwashing us.
> This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does.
Bezos isn't an entrepreneur, because an honest business owner wants to be proud about their own work.
Yes, I agree with you. He is both real and it is depressing as the state of world is. I sometimes have take solace in utopian fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson's have my spirits high and have a positive look out. It is just me.
Usually Doctorow is tedious in his presentation mainly because of how angry he is at what he's reporting on. It's not that it's unwarranted, it just hard to digest because of it. This article, which eventually arrives at Amazon's absolutely unforgivable corrupt implementation of a second-price auction for advertising placement, is worth the read.
The article spends a couple paragraphs complaining about Amazon not allowing sorting by unit price. This would be a very useful feature, I agree, but I don't think I've ever seen a online grocery or department store retailer which supports it. The brick and mortar retailers he praises don't let you _sort_ by unit price either, they just show it to you on the shelf (often because a regulation requires it), same as Amazon.
Test search term: pretzels. Couldn't find a way to sort or filter by unit price at Target.com, Ralphs.com, Walmart.com, Vons.com, not even beloved Costco.com.
If anyone does know a grocery or department store which lets you sort by unit price, I'd be interested to see it.
So many e-commerce companies have made product search a dark pattern. It’s exactly why LLMs are coming for their lunch. Why would I use a marketplace in the future when I can get a terminal agent to scour the web and sort the products however I see fit? And prices will be cheaper since the LLM will find the sellers direct website where they don’t have to give the marketplace its cut.
The general argument against this is that “how can I trust the stores my terminal agent finds?” I much rather trust an objective LLM than these modern marketplaces that remove or simply don’t publish bad reviews, game reviews with programs like Vine, or start selling generic versions of the same popular products third party sellers sell.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 4.6 ms ] threadAmazon’s search is so transparently corrupt and useless, I can search the exact product I want to buy in quotes and it will show me an entire page or more of other products it wants me to buy before the result I was looking for.
i still might start saying it shite for fun though.
Announcement of the FTC lawsuit; (2 days ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529685
Listing practices found illegal in EU; (14 days ago, 0 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393379
And a blog post by Seth Godin. (17 days ago, 705 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345263
Test search term: pretzels. Couldn't find a way to sort or filter by unit price at Target.com, Ralphs.com, Walmart.com, Vons.com, not even beloved Costco.com.
If anyone does know a grocery or department store which lets you sort by unit price, I'd be interested to see it.
https://www.target.com/s?searchTerm=pretzel
https://www.ralphs.com/search?query=pretzels
https://www.walmart.com/search?q=pretzels
https://www.vons.com/shop/search-results.html?q=pretzels
https://www.costco.com/s?keyword=pretzels
The general argument against this is that “how can I trust the stores my terminal agent finds?” I much rather trust an objective LLM than these modern marketplaces that remove or simply don’t publish bad reviews, game reviews with programs like Vine, or start selling generic versions of the same popular products third party sellers sell.
It would be nice to drive thru my neighborhood without have to sit behind an Amazon delivery vehicle parked in the middle of the road.