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.
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.