Why would you want 12 vacuums? What are you going to do with them? Isn't that a senseless amount of redundant objects to horde? Don't you want room for other things in your shed?

All it takes to lose civilisation is for everyone to think as selfishly as this.

Thank you for the laugh.

But why keep them all? Why not give some away to friends or neighbours, or even sell them?

This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there are avid vacuum collectors.

I had a tool manufacturer read a bad review on one of the big box home improvement stores in the US, they contacted me within a day (the store must have gave them my email address?) and offered to send me my choice of replacement tool, for free, in exchange for taking my review down.

Helps me learn which companies not to trust.

It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.

I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.

anyway, I can imagine some small territory in time where fakespot can accurately deal with the flood. But then..

If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.

This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.

Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.

It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.

One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.

The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.

Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.

I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.

I've seen ads selling fake clothes, real clothes but with a fake store, money exchange scams, and a few others.

Although at least the platform can know if the reviewer actually purchased the product(?)

> Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable

Unless they use affiliate links, which is a great big red flag that the incentives are already stacked against you.

It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.

Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.

And also, apparently, selling your data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612, and particularly move-on's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213945.

I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.

I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.

I wouldn't even do that, unless you can't find it anywhere else. Amazon commingles their returns form 3rd party sellers and Amazon direct. So you might order an item, find out it was actually a broken returned item, and then have Amazon call you a liar.

They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.

I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.

Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI company or the word "without": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes

That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and misconceptions against something that you yourself don't like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't actually like it.

And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported a search that returned three pages of results for one product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last I looked it was still three pages.

Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard towards fraud.

Well that's on Amazon then. They could go the Walmart route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get, Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they all have very strict and extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.

But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.

It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive hustlers.

Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.

Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."

Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."

In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.

One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.

(average aliexpress review on many tech items)

So it really depends where you live.

Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.

I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.

I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as it depends massively on how close you live to one of their distribution centres. I can get most shit from Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.