I was actually surprised when I learned this. The biggest complaint about Amazon had been a lack of curation and all that entails -- foot long brooms that photograph well, brands you've never heard of, cheap things that break quickly, counterfeits, etc. It feels like an online dollar store, even when you're spending thousands.
It doesn't take that much effort to have a human in the loop to pick something for the top thousand or so product categories, and naively that's what I expected when I saw the "Amazon's Choice" seal of approval on these things.
It’s obvious that people will interpret “Amazon’s Choice” in this way. Surely Amazon knew this too. This should be considered false advertising if not outright fraud. Instead it’ll just turn into another episode of “haha those wacky tech companies and their algorithms.”
As mentioned in the article, Amazon does have "Editorial recommendations" that appear for certain queries, which are basically buying guides written by third parties. They can apply titles to products, like "Editors' Choice", "Best Value", "Our Pick", "Top Choice", "Upgrade Pick", "Splurge-worthy", et cetera.
My view of Amazon is already so degraded due to counterfeit and defective products that I wasn’t surprised when reading this article and I have actually been explicitly avoiding the products labeled “Amazon’s Choice.” I’m not joking.
> cheap things that break quickly, counterfeits, etc.
Yes I have seen my fair share of cheap shoddily made things as part of 'Amazon's Choice'. I quickly scroll past them when browsing. There is this myth going around that because it is made in China that it is well made and not shoddy workmanship; yet I once bought several items all from China and one of the items literally exploded and nearly caused a fire (The product was a shoddily made Lithium Ion rechargeable battery). I quickly complained about this after that incident, but as expected - I got no reply and I assume the seller doesn't even speak English as it was some tacky online storefront where the seller liked to describe all their products in broken English.
The other product I bought was a bluetooth speaker (again from China) and the battery in it never held charge. Had to keep charging it every 30mins, even though it was claimed on the item page that it holds power for 6 hours. I would nearly swear the item was second-hand and somebody knackered/exhausted the battery before refurbishing it and selling it as new. People need to consistently debunk the myth that because an item is made in a certain area that it is made well and with decent workmanship. Take for example the current myth that items made in Germany[0] are of better quality than other countries.
It's a myth insofar as there is no direct causation. A high quality product can be manufactured in China, and a low quality product can be manufactured in Germany. However, what isn't a myth is that products manufactured in China are generally of lower quality than those manufactured in first world nations like Germany.
It's perfectly acceptable to use the nation of manufacture as a heuristic in predicting the likely quality of a product.
Barely anything sold on Amazon is not made in China.
What I use to determine what to expect from a product is the quality of the documentation, which is almost always pretty bad (but sometimes better than on Ebay or Aliexpress).
I‘ve never heard of this myth about Chinese products; China still produces tons of counterfeit goods and otherwise shoddy products. How many people actually think China is synonymous with product quality rather than price?
> I've never heard of this myth about Chinese products;
It's not a widely held belief, but there certainly are people out there that believe the myth that China doesn't want a bad reputation for making products, so China will go the extra mile to prove people wrong about their 'shoddy' image and deliver excellent well-made products. Maybe in most cases they do have good craftmanship, but as I said; from my experience I have seen nothing but trouble from Chinese products, especially from Amazon.
The old myth I heard of was that being made in China meant it was poorly manufactured, but really cheap.
Nowadays there's the whole spectrum, you get what you pay for, but if the counterfeit things are priced correctly and not double checked by someone else there's a risk of getting scammed.
I'm surprised. I've always thought that "Amazon's Choice" was paid advertisement and have avoided these suggestions. When I buy something on Amazon, I usually take reviews from elsewhere into account or click on the most negative Amazon reviews to check whether there is a particular problem with the product.
It seems hard to believe that many customers take into account some label that looks like paid advertisement.
You should also consider that the average Amazon user is not the average HN user. Even if it was a paid ad, any sort of endorsement from Amazon would certainly "fool" all the middle aged parents out there who can't be arsed to do extensive research on third party reviews.
Anything a store promotes is an ad. In the very rare cases of mom&pop stores, it could even be because the product is good. In a typical case, it's because the store needs to cycle inventory, the product is bad and therefore doesn't sell well, or the supplier paid for it.
A rule of thumb for urban shopping is to always ignore "helpful" store recommendations, especially unsolicited ones. They have little interest in doing right by you, and every reason to trick you into a purchase that's better for them and worse for you.
I've had that impression as well. It's not anything particular about the look for me, but that I expect any highlighting / positioning on Amazon to be paid for.
Because listing something as Amazon's Choice that isn't actually an estimate of what is best for the customer violates a large swathe of Amazon's leadership principles
> Even if it was a paid ad, any sort of endorsement from Amazon would certainly "fool" all the middle aged parents out there who can't be arsed to do extensive research on third party reviews.
What is surprising that educated people are more aware of marketing/advertising/capitalism?
I only had to see some fake business accounts for large companies(Aldi) acting like real users to put my on high alert for anything on the Internet.
You can generally get some idea of how odd the expectations are by reading them. Although I tend to agree that reviews with 2, 3 and 4 stars are generally more likely to contain useful nuance (and less likely to be paid for by someone) than those at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
I thought it was pretty obvious that it was generated automatically based on how much it depends on the exact keywords you search for.
I think that given a certain set of products, the algorithm actually seems to do a pretty good job of making a recommendation for the best product out of the set based on the ratings or whatever it looks at, but the bigger problem is that if you aren't searching for exactly the right keywords the choice of the best product becomes completely meaningless, and blindly tacking on the "amazon's choice" recommendation obscures the fact that your search is too narrow to provide a meaningful recommendation in the first place. (I'm sure there is some filtering based on ratings but because of how common fake reviews are, if you're looking at niche products they'll almost all have fairly high ratings anyway.)
It's probably better to not provide a recommendation than to recommend a bad product, so maybe they should try to narrow it down to more common categories.
It’s not just that oh, Amazon’s Choice is algorithmically picked from recommendations. It’s that seemingly more often than not, it’s a truly inferior choice to an option next to it in the displayed matrix.
wirecutter is not at all reliable anymore. Nearly all their picks get massive complaints in the comments and do not stand up to fakespot/reviewmeta. I know comments are not really a reliable indicator, people will always complain, but I used the site from the start and there has been a distinct shift once they were bought out.
Are there any browser extensions that stick actual third-party human-determined best-choice labels on things in the Amazon store? Maybe one for Wirecutter recommendations, or Consumer Reports? Maybe a meta extension that aggregates all those recs where you can turn the rec-sources you like on and off in the extension?)
(It’d be nice if Amazon themselves gave you the ability to subscribe to a given reviewer-user’s opinions and have them show up as labels on your search results—but new features like this popping up on the Amazon store seem pretty unlikely, somehow. Has the Amazon store stagnated?)
Initially I thought Amazon Choice meant it was their own product, and figured that they'd want some minimal quality standards associated with their name.
Now that I know that it was an algorithm, I think that years ago it may have indicated quality products, but as the review system and other aspects are thoroughly hacked/gamed, it does the opposite. I've been purposely scrolling past Amazon Choice items for a while now
Actually, I think I am going to drop Amazon Prime. Only money is going to convince Amazon to right their ship.
If you are puzzled by the downvotes, it is because you apparently have overlooked that a few years ago, Buzzfeed hired a bunch of real journalists and spun off BuzzFeed News as a separate, legitimate news organization, which has gone on to win several awards for its reporting (National Magazine Award in the category of Public Interest, two National Press Foundation awards, a Sidney Award, a British Journalism Award, and a George Polk award), and were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting twice, and for the Online Journalism Award twice, and once for the Goldsmith Prize of Investigation Reporting.
Rather, I assumed it was being (rightly) critical that Buzzfeed news spent such a lot of words and effort on a topic that wasn't especially newsworthy. In particular, it was a frustrating read, being padded out by too many examples and testimonials, when the real meat of the article could have been summed up in a sentence: "Amazon Choice recommendations are algorithmic and not very reliable."
(It seems to be trying to tap into the zeitgeist of looking for a critical angle in everything that Amazon does. Which is weak and clickbait-y.)
Honestly, it's a bad (or good?) example of what the internet has made "journalism" into - and I put journalism in quotes here not because I'm knocking Buzzfeed news as being able to sometimes produce good journalism, but because this isn't one of those times.
I'm downmodding your comment. It's very disingenuous to imply that other posters are shilling for Buzzfeed, even if you shield it behind phrases like "Interesting how...".
If you have evidence, then post it. Otherwise don't make such accusations.
Would you please not post unsubstantive comments like this? On HN, if an article is good, it doesn't matter what source it comes from. All major sites publish plenty of bad articles and get plenty of things wrong.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Google I'm Lucky" is determined by an algorithm and not always reliable. That by itself isn't news since it doesn't describe how severe the problem is. I've had that the first hit on Dutch Google for locksmith was a scam. That also doesn't describe how severe the problem is.
A good argument about this problem contains a careful analysis (probably involves some kind of reliable algorithm runs).
As for the lockpicking. The general locks available and in use are mostly security through obscurity these days. Knowledge about how to pick them (or by using a pickgun or '999' key + 'tomahawk') is abundantly available. These locks are meant to slow an attacker down, not stop them. They're a terrible security measure if they're the only layer of defense.
It doesn't take that much effort to have a human in the loop to pick something for the top thousand or so product categories, and naively that's what I expected when I saw the "Amazon's Choice" seal of approval on these things.