Amazon Is a Broken Mess

10 points by travem 1 year ago | 5 comments

al_borland 1 year ago |

I have been trying to move away from Amazon for this exact reason. It’s very difficult to surface products from real brands vs knock offs from companies that won’t exist in a week and have no reason to worry about quality or customer loyalty.

Even when I do land on a real product page, it’s a crap shoot if I get a real epoxy or a fake. If it’s something I care about, I don’t buy from Amazon. If there is an option to buy direct or from a traditional retailer, I do that.

The poor quality items and ever growing haystack in the store had me fall out of love, but then various moves they made on top of that have pushed me away. Removing the ability to add non-Amazon items to a wishlist made me stop using the wishlist feature. When I informed my dad of this, he was so upset he emailed Jeff Bezos. Then, when they announced they were adding ads to Prime video, unless paying an additional monthly fee on top of the yearly fee, I cancelled Prime. I don’t want to feel nickel and dimed while I’m already paying for the premium service.

When sites support ApplePay, I find the buying experience just as smooth, if not more smooth, than Amazon… and I’m not tied to one store. It also means I don’t need to make an account everywhere. This has been good.

Amazon has been headed down the path of enshittification for a while. They could still fix it, but I’m losing hope. My Amazon usage has dropped significantly, and I’m very close to throwing it in the category of a store I use only if desperate. It feels much better to support local stores and smaller legitimate businesses, rather than some kid ordering garbage from AliExpress, having it shipped to an Amazon warehouse, and reselling it for double the price. I have 0 respect for those “businesses” or Amazon they promoted it to the point where finding anything else is difficult or impossible.

TillE 1 year ago |

Platforms are generally required by the DMCA to deal with blatant copyright infringement, but it's slightly ludicrous to expect Amazon to adjudicate patent disputes. That's what the courts are for.

atlgator 1 year ago |

"I frankly find it troubling that you thought it was acceptable"

What kind of unprofessional language is this?

supersour 1 year ago | |

Hey sorry to hijack a comment, I saw your comment elsewhere about the Georgia Tech's MS Computer Science being a waste of time and I was curious to learn a bit more about your experience.

I'm currently considering the online masters but still was curious to your experience if you don't mind. Reply here or an email would be appreciated

atlgator 1 year ago | | |

Sorry for the late reply - What questions do you have? For the record, my undergrad was CompE. I entered GT's MSCS on campus program (before OMCS came out) and was appalled 1) by the reliance group projects, and 2) the low skill of my peers. The caliber of student in MSCS is not great. Most can barely code at all and I got tired of carrying the groups I was in. So after a year in the program I switched over to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Much better program. I was only able to do that because I had a bona fide engineering BS from an accredited school.